Publications

Increased Information Communication Technology (ICT) adoption by government has enabled significant changes in the way governments conduct their business and the way nations are governed. Electronic Governance is opening up many opportunities to create and deliver concrete public value to the citizens. Perceiving opportunities for accelerating development, improving efficiencies and effectiveness in government combined with transparency and inclusiveness in governance, developing nations are increasingly investing in electronic governance. These countries particularly consider electronic governance as a strategic tool in achieving their national development and the United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

This report provides a profile of the development of electronic governance in Maldives highlighting the development path, planned initiatives, and analysis of the program's future prospects. It concludes with some recommendations for addressing identified implementation challenges in the short-term.

The Strategic Alignment Toolkit aims to provide a clear and rigorous process for Organization-Technology alignment at the strategic level. Its purpose is to assist public sector organizations and governments in aligning their various organizational transformation initiatives with counterpart technology-related initiatives.

The toolkit briefly introduces the context and background for strategic alignment and presents the pro-posed methodology though a practical process which can be adopted and adapted across the whole of government or within specific public sector enterprises. It describes all major activities involved in strategic alignment of organizations and governments, including assessing and aligning the respective domains to achieve the objectives of: (i) technology support for organizational strategies and goals and (ii) enabling technology-driven organizational goals and strategies. The activities in this toolkit can be used to examine the congruence or gap between organizational business strategies and their technology strategies, giving valuable insights into planning and project implementation.

A case study is also presented which clearly demonstrates how the toolkit can be used to align Public Sector Reform (PAR) programs - organizational strategy, with Electronic Government (EGOV) programs - technology strategy, at the central level. The case study establishes the application of this toolkit in aligning the Public Administration Reform program and the Electronic Government program of the Macao SAR Government.

 There is increasing evidence that e-Government can effectively support major transformation objectives of developing countries. However, an effective e-Government program requires a coherent set of policies and strategies to guide the development of the necessary regulatory frameworks, organizational and technical infrastructures, and information systems. One of the challenges in developing such policies and strategies is the absence of detailed information on the readiness of the various levels of government for e-government. Based on the results of the analysis of existing e-government readiness assessment instruments, this report presents a component-based e-Government assessment framework that enables a compositional process for developing e-government readiness instruments suitable for specific assessment context. Assessment context is defined by information such as purpose of assessment (e.g. planning or benchmarking), level of government involved (local, provincial or central) and desired scope (whether detailed or not) of assessment. We demonstrate the use of the framework by specifying concrete information requirements for assessing e-government readiness in Maldives (agency and local government levels) and then specify a possible composition scenario of components from two existing instruments to satisfy these information requirements.

Macao SAR (MSAR) has continued to develop its ICT infrastructure in terms of telecommunication services, particularly in the area mobile and internet services, making the city one of the top twenty cities in the world in terms of International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) Digital Opportunity Index. The MSAR Government has also adopted a series of ICT-friendly policies to promote the development of ICT including the transformation of the Office for Information Technology Development and Telecommunication Regulation (GDTTI) into a fully-fledged government agency – Bureau for Telecommunication Regulation (DSRT), and establishment of the Science and Technology Development Fund, Productivity and Technology Transfer Center, and the Macao-Zhuhai trans-border industrial park. In addition, major IT initiatives particularly in the area of strategic IT application in government (including the e-Macao initiative) have been adopted.

Despite this progress, Macao is yet to adequately leverage its existing ICT capability, and develop and exploit other ICT-related opportunities, particularly in the context of its socio-economic and political needs and priorities – diversification of the economy, development of environmentally-sound socio-economic initiatives, and human capacity building to meet local needs and enable global competitiveness of Macao citizens.

Apart from the e-Government Development plan launched in 2005 by the MSAR Government, there is yet no comprehensive ICT strategy to support the socio-economic, political and environmental development strategies of the SAR and the emerging individual IT strategies for specific agencies of the government.

This report documents the results of a comprehensive study to develop medium-to-long-term ICT strategies for Macao SAR (e-Macao 2015), to support plausible scenarios for Macao in view of the global and local change factors, in addition to the current government policies. Specifically, it captures: (1) scenarios for the future, developed upon a set of global and local socio-economic and political variables affecting Macao, to define the strategic context for the study; (2) the state of ICT development in Macao; (3) findings from the analysis of ICT strategies of selected economies and states considered leaders in ICT development, with geo-political and economic conditions similar to Macao, specifically Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malta and Singapore; and (4) the recommended ICT strategies. The document also provides guidelines for setting up the necessary governance framework to effectively drive ICT development in Macao, based on the analysis of good practices in different economies taken into account. 

The notion of Electronic Governance as an ICT-enabled transformational paradigm for modern public administration and good governance is well established and accepted by governments - irrespective of development status and region. Presently, there are a number of international benchmark reports on the global e-governance landscape. Understandably, these reports seldom provided detailed picture or analysis on any specific country and regions to enable concrete actions for policy and decision makers. This paper attempts to provide deeper insight into the e-government landscape in Asian region. First, the paper highlights the state of e-governance in Asia – regional competiveness and intra-regional performance. Second, it determines the structure of the existing e-governance divide in the region from two different perspectives, at sub-regional and country levels. Third, the paper investigates the possible impact of e-governance on the quality of governance in terms of: (i) voice and accountability and (ii) government effectiveness in the region. Our results show significant divide between sub-regions, particularly in the area of e-participation. In addition, results also reveal strong positive correlation between e-readiness indices and government effectiveness indicators of countries in the region. However, no relationship could be established between the e-participation indices and the voice and accountability indicators for countries in the region. To address the divide issue and the overall regional capacity in e-governance, we propose concrete strategies partly based on patterns of strategies of leading countries in the region. Finally, to increase intra-regional knowledge sharing and collective actions by Asian countries in e-governance, we suggest the cultivation of Communities of Interests made up of countries of similar development status, challenges and priorities to complement the usual top-down regional and sub-regional actions.

A major issue in organizations including public organizations is how to ensure that investments in Information Technology (IT) optimally deliver the expected value for stakeholders. Since most organizational transformation agenda in the government are articulated and implemented under the Public Administration Reform programs, and IT projects in government are increasingly associated with e-governance initiatives, the need to align reform and e-government programs arises. This paper shows how the Strategic Alignment Model (SAM) may be adapted for aligning public administration reform and e-government strategies. It shows how to partition strategies into domains equivalent to the four classical SAM domains and presents: (i) metrics for evaluating current level of alignment between the reform and e-government program, (ii) a process or sequence of steps to achieve desired alignments between the four domains, (iii) our experience in the application of the process in project involving the alignment of the e-government program and the reform roadmap of a city state in South-East Asia, and (iv) some features of the tool that has been developed to support the alignment process. Finally, the paper highlights our ongoing work in this area.

The availability of information on electronic government readiness is a critical factor in developing effective e-government policies and strategies. Although there are many readiness assessment instruments in the public domain, there are no clear guidelines on how these instruments can be reused as frameworks in carrying out assessment in specific contexts, such as in egovernment planning or implementation. The design of readiness assessment frameworks requires clear specification of the assessment purpose and the design of concrete instruments explicitly based on the information requirements. Usually, these information needs are modular and can be satisfied by any instrument composed from the required set of assessment components. In this paper, we examine the requirements for a readiness assessment framework to support e-government planning and propose an assessment framework consisting of a set of assessment perspectives. Each of these perspectives is mapped to a corresponding set of concrete assessment components (partly derived from other major e-government assessment frameworks) satisfying the information requirements of these perspectives. The componentized framework allows for easy substitution or specialization of specific components to suit different contexts or assessment scenarios. As an example, we show how this framework can be used for developing a readiness assessment instrument to support e-government planning in Maldives.