Challenges and Issues in 1

8/9/2019 Challenges and Issues in 1

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Challenges and Issues in e-Government Project

Assessment

Government of Pakistan has felt it necessary to create a rational framework for assessing e-

Governance projects on various dimensions. E-government is still in its infancy all over the

world. The e-governance is electronic delivery of government services to the people whereas

the potential for e- governance is beyond electronic delivery, which is explained in detail inthis research paper. Government can improve the system as well as economic conditions of

our country, by focusing on e-governance. Nowadays, the wealth of a nation is not judged by

its physical assets. It is determined by the technological gaps between the 'haves' and the

'have-nots'. We can say that the e-governance would be the first step toward modernizes

governmental administrative structures. The challenge of transformation and the increasing

need to modernize administrative practices and management systems has become a major

goal to Governments Worldwide. This is more so in the last one-decade and especially the

last four years in Pakistan. The paper puts across the key issues and challenges in assessing e-

Gov projects and proposes a model which has been piloted in one of the assessment studies at

the national level in Pakistan.

KeywordsE-Government, assessment, framework, stakeholders, best practices, results, enablers.

Why e-Gov Project Assessment in Pakistan? To assess to what extent an e-Governance project is Delivering value to its

stakeholders.

To build the trust and confidence of stakeholders.

To create a bench mark for future projects.

To learn key determinants from successful and failed projects.

To provide guidelines for shaping future e-governance projects.

Objectives of an Assessment Framework:To assess whether and to what extent a given e-Governance project has the characteristics of

a good e-governance project delivering "Value" to stakeholders.

To guide in funding of e-governance projects at various stages of their life-cycle (newly

Starting, roll-out, scaling up, replication).

An assessment exercise involves a tedious process, in terms of capacity, time, and resources;

if the intention is to assess an e-Gov project thoroughly. E-Gov projects

Involve a number of stakeholders, whose expectations from the project needs to be

Addressed.There are three kinds of situations that require evaluation in e-Gov. One is the

Environment; second is evaluating the performance of an e-Gov programmer or project;

And third is the overall impact of e-Gov on general government functioning, economic

Development and citizen servicing.

The broad objectives are:

Identify and evaluate the costs and benefits of e-governance projects among the

intended stake holders, with key focus on costs.

Assess the impact of the project on transparency, accountability and corruption within

the scope of system.

Identify the gaps in implementation, explore the strategies deployed for overcoming thegaps or challenges, and provide suggestions for a sustainable impact.


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This model summarizes the reasons behind success and failure of e-government projects.

Left-pointing items encourage failure; right-pointing items encourage success. The factors

are explained in more detail in the tables below.

Internal political desire has been defined as a drive from key government official

including relevant ministers for reform and for achievement of e-government goals.

Overall vision and strategy stands for the overall vision and master plan for goodgovernance and for e-government, identifying the target and viewing IT as the means

not the end, and integrating IT with broader reform objectives

Dominance of politics/ Self interest: the change agents who will take the project

forward may have self interest and/or politically dominant situation favorable to the

project initiative.

Strong change management which includes but not limited to leadership with a

project champion, use of incentives to create commitment to and ownership of e-

government project, and stakeholder involvement to build support and minimize

resistance.

Effective project management includes defining clear responsibilities, having goodplanning and consideration of risk, good monitoring and control system putting in

place, good organization of resources, and well-managed partnerships between public

agencies, and public-private joint initiatives.

Competencies among the officials involve with this project is the issues of the

capacity and knowledge level among the government officials about e-government

concepts and practices.

Adequate technological infrastructure includes computerization system, telecom

policies, ICT policies etc. Other factor, being the last, was given to list any factor that

respondents believe important but not presented as option.

Absences of success factors are presented as the reasons for failure of e-government

projects in Pakistan. For example, lack of internal political desire was the first optionas the failure factor.

Moreover, number and pattern of options specified as the failure factors were same as

success factor including others as the last option. Assumption here were factor which

may contribute for success may not be the main reason for failure due to its absence.

For example, political desire along may not be enough to successfully implement e-

government. However, lack of political desire may work as a high barrier to

implement e-government.


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Constraints/Challenges:

Human resource loads . Human resource issues have also been a constraint to Pakistanprogress because of the massive HR requirements the project imposes. Lack of staff/skills and thedifficulties of hiring short-term staff have led to some delays.

Equipment shortage: Shortage of equipment (i.e. computers, scanners, sensors and otherrelated accessories) has also been a major constraint in deriving maximum benefit from this

exercise and in meeting timescales.

P li i l i bili


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when the next regime takes over, it immediately stops the project more on political than on

cost/benefit grounds.

Who should do the Assessment in Pakistan?

There is a general consensus on a third-party assessment in order to get an unbiased view.

However, the basic problem is that the outside agency is not able to devote the required timein order to really get the assessment viewpoint.

An external agency should do the assessment in order toget an unbiased view. This agency isprimarily dependent on the project owners for all the project related information. The issue is,

why not develop a self assessmentFramework? In fact, by providing a self-assessment toolthe project owners shall be in a better position to assess the projects on an on-going basis.

Moreover they have the assessment indicators and attributes as yardstick for assessing the

projects right from the project conceptualization phase; thereby developing efficient and

holistic e-Gov projects.

The Need for Assessment Frameworks:

Replication of similar kinds of projects has to be undertaken across the country, it calls for a

greater need for the assessment frameworks that help one to learn the factors resulting in the

success or a failure of a project. This also provides for a feedback to the stakeholders

involved in the project regarding the health of the project

Assessment exercise involves a tedious process if the intention is to assess an e-Government

project thoroughly, meeting the desired objectives, like: the success as defined by the extent

to which it achieved the purpose it was designed, whether the project is replicable or not,

among others. This is because each of the e-Government projects involves a number of

stakeholders from whose perspectives the project needs to be looked at, and further itinvolves a number of parameters and attributes which adds to the amount of effort required in

order to make for a reasonably comprehensive assessment.

Challenges and Issues in Project Assessment in Pakistan:The different dimensions and perspectives of e-Gov project assessment:

Service users point of view, in terms of

Cost of availing the Govt. service

Time for delivery of service

Convenience of availing the service

Compliance of RTI Act

Transparency in Govt. functioning

Government point of view, in terms of

ROI

Immediate impact on service users

Internal efficiency process reforms

Impact on internal employees

Sustainability

Long term overall impact

Funding Agency point of view, in terms of

ROI

Business model

Immediate impact on service users Public Private Partner (if it is a PPP model), in terms of

Business model - ROI


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Academics - in terms of understanding the patterns and see the intricate details

of assessment

Who is interested to learn from assessment?One of the major objectives of assessment is to learn and develop on the weak areas.

However, in reality the assessment results are taken merely to showcase if the project is

found to be a good one. It is observed that if the project has not been assessed as a good

project, no one looks into the report for improvements in the project. If we have a self-assessment framework, which will be done out of self interest, the project owners will

always strive to understand and strengthen the weak areas of the project.

What is the learning from assessment studies?Assessments should identify Best Practices. This must be a key objective of assessment and

focus should be on identifying the best practices w.r.t. different aspects of e-Gov project e.g.

Business model, PPP model, Change Management strategy, technology architecture, Service

levels, etc. Presently, the assessments study the models and practices being adopted in the

specific projects and do not have an objective to bring out the best practices from them.

What should be the periodicity of assessments?Different components of assessment can be assessed only after a certain period of

deployment of the e-Gov project. A complete assessment on all components cannot be

carried out altogether at the same time. Actually, one set of assessment as checklist would be

recommended just before the project is being implemented. Subsequently, assessment could

be done on yearly basis. This could be considered an extension to the yearly audit process,

and include it as a regular feature of work at office. Since assessment provides critical inputs

to the project owners for improvement, it can also act as a stakeholder need assessment tool.

Constraints driving assessment and assessment exercises:

Time

Lack of comprehensive assessment framework:

Non-availability of base-line data

Lack of high visibility for assessment reports

Funds required for holistic assessment

MODELS and techniques: Simple Factor Rating

Design-Reality Gap Assessment

To support such a framework the need arises for a categorization of thevarious risk factors that surround e-Government projects. This part of thepaper shall introduce the main risk factors areas that will be consideredfor extracting risk elements to be used in the risk assessment process.Experience from the electronic commerce/business domain and therelevant literature show that some have attempted to classify risks in allsorts of high-level categories according to the nature of the risks. To namea few, Tchankova (2002) proposed seven different classes of risks,

namely: i) physical, ii) social, iii) political, iv) operational, v) economic, vi)legal, and vii) cognitive environment. Additionally, Liebermann (2002)distinguished five different areas of risk in the eCommerce field, which are
http://www.egov4dev.org/success/techniques/risk_factor.shtmlhttp://www.egov4dev.org/success/techniques/risk_drg.shtmlhttp://www.egov4dev.org/success/techniques/risk_factor.shtmlhttp://www.egov4dev.org/success/techniques/risk_drg.shtml


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following main classification of potential risks influencing an organizationare identified: i) political, ii) economic, iii) social, and iv) technological.

In that fashion and for the purposes of this research programmed thispaper proposes the following high level classification of risk factors thatsurround e-Government projects:

FRAMES A Framework for Risk Assessment and Modeling in

Government Services

As explained in the introduction, the Framework for Risk Assessment & Modeling in e-

Government Services aims at the provision of a methodology for efficient qualitative risk

assessment in e-Government services.

Within that context FRAMES provides a way of implementing risk assessment in e-Services.

As such, any e-Government transaction service project is seen (Figure 2) as an STS that

comprises of three main socio-technical subsystems that interconnect four main modules of

the transaction service project. These four main modules are: i) the customers, ii) the e-Service, iii) the organizational level, and iv) the intra-organizational service.

Risk assessment stagesFRAMES adopt from the BS-6079-3 Standard the risk assessment sub-process. Therefore,

the risk assessment process within FRAMES will consist of the following stages

i) context establishment,

ii) risk identification,

iii) risk analysis, and

iv) risk evaluation.

Context Establishment The first stage of FRAMES is responsible for establishing the broad

context within which risk assessment will be done. This stage mainly (but not limited to)

includes knowledge acquisition, which will eventually set the measures of the various risks

impact. The knowledge acquisition stage defines the long term (strategic) goals of the

system/organization, as well as the medium term (organizational) goals and the short term(management) goals. Then the risk assessor has to define the threats to these goals.

F th th t f th t t t bli h t t i t d l i it i


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Risk Identification Here lies the process of identifying the risks, as well as how, what or

why incidents may occur. To achieve risk identification various methods can be used each of

them having their own advantages and disadvantages. FRAMES will employ risk

identification techniques that enable qualitative risk assessment. Some of them may be the

following: i) semi-structured interviews, ii) brainstorming, iii) Nominal Group Technique, iv)

Delphi method, and v) checklists. Of course other suitable qualitative techniques can be used

in FRAMES. Risk Analysis It is a stage, where an estimation of both the probability of theoccurrence of a risk and the magnitude of the consequences of the risk happens.

Risk Evaluation During this process the consequences of the risks are leveled after their

impact/magnitude

Recommendations

Successful e-government projects require resource commitments: This means commitments of money, staff and equipment that must be present to

sustain not merely project implementation, but also ongoing project operation.

Sustainability of projects requires sustainable supply of resources. This applies

equally to the resource of political support. Key stakeholders must support the e-

government project both internally and externally, and must continue to support it

throughout its life.

Where personal data is involved, security and privacy issues must be

addressed : Projects like e.gov are taking on a great responsibility: centralizing a large set of

personal data (about individuals' health, criminal record, etc.), making that data

accessible online, and transferring large amounts of that data via networks. Such

projects must give a high priority to issues of data security and data privacy: setting inplace encryption, passwords, firewalls, and personnel policies that minimize the risk

of data being corrupted or accessed illegally; and setting out a clear policy about

ownership, responsibility, access and use for all data items.

Stakeholder skills and awareness often need rising: In setting up a central e-government facility, care must be taken to attend also to the

skills and awareness of other stakeholders involved. Users within government must be

trained: not just to use the new technologies, but also to understand and manipulate

the data they are accessing. Citizens, too, must understand more about data and more

about ICTs if they are to be true stakeholders in such e-government projects, rather

than merely passive observers.

Concluding RemarksComing up with effective assessment methods for e-Government projects in the presence of

practical constraints is of great importance and is also a need of the hour. We explain various

meta-theoretic considerations that one must keep in mind while thinking of the assessment

methodologies in this paper. Given the challenges and issues for assessment as explained in

this paper, identification of the broad parameters of evaluation must be done with a definite

goal in mind. Our effort is towards locating that definiteness with the idea of what is

achieved or Results and what is done to achieve or Enablers. We feel that this is a

reasonable approach to form a base for comprehensive assessments frameworks in the future.

The Electronic Government phenomenon is gaining momentum at a quick pace Worldwide


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provided a high-level risk factors classification termed STEPS. Furthermore, this article

introduced and described a novel qualitative multi-perspective risk assessment framework for

e-Services in the public administration, which is called FRAMES. Potentially, such risk

assessment framework may find applicability in areas like planning or qualification for

eServices in the public sector.


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Challenges and Issues in 1

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