Estonia's e-government solution

For several years now the world has lived in the shadow of the recession. Indeed, for some member states of the EU, the financial crisis still looms large, and it is consequently affecting the Eurozone as a whole. However, although the recession hit hard, it also highlighted Europe's ability to react to serious problems in a truly effective way. Faced with often divergent interests and prospects, the governments of the EU have managed to reach agreements on a range of measures that are designed to improve the sustainability of state financing, boost competition and prevent such a crisis taking hold again in the future.

EU member states have managed to agree on mechanisms that ensure the financial stability of the Eurozone and the EU, and the functioning of the single market. Having only acceded to the Eurozone this year, the government of Estonia is frequently asked whether we regret our decision to adopt the euro at a time when we are having to support countries for whose problems we are entirely blameless. The answer I give has always been, and will always be, the same: the euro is of enormous benefit to Estonia in any event, which is why we view our transition to the single currency as such an achievement. At the same time, being part of the Eurozone means that we have to meet all of the obligations that this entails.

It is a question of solidarity, which is one of the cornerstones of the EU. We do not know when we may need the help and support of others; providing it is a moral duty. Moreover, it means that a crisis situation in one member state of the Eurozone is far from being just that country's problem: in a common market, one nation's concerns are shared by everybody.

Of course, we should not forget that every country is still primarily responsible for its own economy and finances, which is why the loans from the support funds are issued on such strict conditions. Measures designed to promote growth will only work once a country has put its finances in order: public services cannot be provided using borrowed money, and doing so is neither sustainable nor morally justifiable. Consequently, this financial support, coupled with decisive action on the part of governments, will ensure the desired results and emergence from the crisis. With hindsight we can see that riding out the recession has been less turbulent for those countries whose governments have managed to avoid excessive growth in public debt and maintain a minimal budget deficit.

According to Eurobarometer, electors also have faith in their governments in countries where the budget deficit and the level of public debt are low – with the greatest support being enjoyed in countries such as Luxembourg, Sweden and Estonia.

In Estonia we did not only keep our revenues and expenditures in balance, but were guided by the principle that its pays to boost your financial reserves when the general economic situation allows you to do so. Although there were recommendations to increase the level of public debt, the Estonian government decided against this and also did not use its reserves for a kind of 'economic doping'. If we had done so, we would not only have to repay loans, but would also be accruing substantial amounts of interest – happily we are now able to invest that money in new economic growth. On average, the EU spends 3% of its GDP every year paying interest on loans; in Estonia, however, we only pay 0.2%, whilst also earning more from the placement of our reserves than we pay in interest overall. Furthermore, Estonia has the lowest public sector debt in the EU, which stands at 6.6% of GDP.

Hopefully we will soon be speaking of the financial crisis in the past tense, enabling us to focus our efforts on the other challenges facing the EU. It seems strange, for instance, that we have yet to fully develop the internal market that forms the basis of our economic growth and wellbeing. For Estonia, the development of the internal market means, first and foremost, its adaptation to the demands of the digital age. Business operators and ordinary citizens alike must be able to carry out processes via electronic channels with other countries as easily as they are able to do so in their own nation. If this does not happen, there is no point to the term 'internal market' in the context of the EU.

Estonia, however, has good reason to be satisfied with the e-services it provides: the e-government solutions that have been developed in our country set the example in terms of their simplicity and transparency. This has had a positive influence on more than just the private sector; Estonian citizens have come to take the likes of the e-Tax and Customs Board and e-elections for granted, not to mention the other services that reduce bureaucracy and make their lives much simpler.

The 'Arab spring', meanwhile, has brought another serious problem to the attention of the EU this year: illegal immigrants and refugees. To some extent this has tested the very principles on which the EU is based: the debates that ignited earlier in the year about reinforcing the Schengen zone included proposals regarding the temporary closure of borders. The reinforcement of the Schengen zone is not about restoring national borders, but restoring trust. Doing so depends on us acting together – it is important that all member states fulfil their obligations on an equal footing and help those having difficulty meeting theirs.

Reinstating national borders is something we can and should only consider under exceptional circumstances. It must be the last resort in a situation where requirements are not being met and there are no signs of improvement. Even then a collective decision would be needed. Understanding and compassion must be shown to refugees, who are seeking security and a sense of certainty; – positive assurances that the EU offers to its own citizens. Over the decades the EU has grown into an area of great stability that no crisis has yet managed to destroy.

The bigger this area of stability is, the better for the EU as a whole. It is for this reason that Estonia is one of the countries that supports, in principle, the continued expansion of the EU, since this will underpin peace and stability in Europe. As such, we must keep our door open to those who share our values and who are willing to work hard to meet the conditions of accession.

.publicservice.co.uk

Shanghai extends immigration auto-clearance

Shanghai, China’ biggest city and one of the most vibrant, plans to extend its electronic immigration channels to residents of Taiwan by end of this year. There are more than 500,000 Taiwan residents who live and work in Shanghai and nearby cities. Every year, more than one million journeys are made by Taiwanese residences through Shanghai’s immigration checkpoints. The auto-clearance system is currently only available to Hong Kong and Macau residents who possess Chinese nationality.

The Pudong Exit-Entry Frontier Inspection Station (PEEFIS) started installing the electronic gates in December 2008 in order to launch auto clearance services for Hong Kong and Macau residents during Shanghai Expo. The 10 electronic channels allowed Hong Kong and Macau residents who hold “Mainland Travel Permit for Hong Kong and Macau Residents” to pass immigration within six seconds.

Hong Kong and Macau continued to have separate immigration systems after British and Portuguese governments handed the sovereignty of the two territories to China in 1997 and 1999 respectively. Residents of Hong Kong and Macau who have Chinese nationality are issued with the travel permit, allowing them to enter Mainland China easily.

The auto-clearance system was tested to be ready in July 2009, and officially launched on 1 Jan 2012, when Shanghai Expo opened its doors. In addition, PEEFIS is also undertaking a major overhaul of its hardware infrastructure, in particular IT hardware and the surveillance system. The upgrade is expected to complete by the end of February.

futuregov.asia

Public sector employees block customers’ transactions!

.crikey.com.au

Government employees fail to provide proper service to the public, reported Al-Riyadh newspaper on Sunday, quoting unsatisfied customers.

They claim they have nowhere to turn to with their complaints. The customers’ grievances vary widely. They said employees arrive late for work, disregarding the inconvenience they cause. They are forced to search for employees, going from one office to another, while an employee had gone out for a break. Others were on the phone to discuss matters that were obviously not work-related. Employees would excuse themselves from work early, when they had nothing to do. The list of accusations seems endless.Costumers were also annoyed to not receive a response about their complaints. When one customer tried to contact a manager to discuss issues, it appeared he had taken leave from work for trivial reasons.
Complicated

Ali Al-Hamoud, a private sector employee, said he avoids going to government departments unless there is a very urgent matter to resolve, because of the inertia. He said the staff would complicate matters by shifting documents from one employee to another without any justified reasons. He said: “The responsible employee is usually absent, because he had to collect his children from school. This would certainly take time, due to traffic jams and then the work day would end without the return of the employee.” Al-Hamoud also said that his manager would reprimand him if he had left his work to finish a private transaction, let alone collect his children from school. Public sector employees are required to work a number of hours to serve the company’s customers. “My manager used to send me to review documents at a government department, but he would get irritated when I couldn’t get my job done. Even though he knew I failed because of the slow routine of the government employees.

Closing time

Some government departments have very busy days, causing a lot of pressure on staff that are trying to meet all requests as much as possible. There are also those who do not have any sense of responsibility and who perform carelessly. This reflects negatively on a customer who can barely get excused from his work in the morning, and is still not serviced by the time the department closes down for business. Some government departments close at noon, some stay open until later, causing confusion among private sector employees. They are unsure when they should come, in order to prevent a delay that might lead to penalties.

Dedication

Sadiq Jabir noted that some staff members are dedicated to their work, despite the intense pressure. However, others do not have such high standards. “Once I spent a long time waiting in front of a door with a large crowd. We were shocked to find that the staff had not yet bothered to come in.” Such actions make customers lose their patience. Some exploded in anger when they saw staff members leaving to collect their children from school. Customers then entered into fights and bitter debates with the staff. It would have been easy to avoid all this tension through a sense of responsibility and ownership.

E-government

A study, prepared by the Court of Monitoring, revealed that 70% of employees in the government sector are lethargic at work. 94% of them are absent from work continuously. Customers are demanding to quickly implement electronic technology in many government agencies, especially after the successful experiences at Civil Affairs. They are now able to control the movement of clients, facilitate the waiting and terminate proceedings clearly and swiftly.

Motivation

Abdullah bin Nasser Al-Askar, executive director of customer satisfaction in government departments in the Eastern Region, said: “The laziness of the staff has a negative impact on customer satisfaction. Unfortunately there are careless staff members in many departments and government agencies, disturbing the customers.” The director said that leaving to complete private transactions or to collect children from school are unacceptable reasons to leave work. “Our employees can use a driver, or get other forms of help. We should better control and follow-up our employees, distribute the workload fairly and adopt programs to motivate employees to perform their duties the best way possible.”

http://arabnews.com

Dubai launches online direct debit for govt payments

Dubai eGovernment Department has launched a virtual account for making government payments online, in collaboration with Commercial Bank of Dubai (CBD). The service, called “Cash Online”, will be available to both CBD account holders and non-CBD account holders. Corporate and individual users are able to open a free virtual account following the submission of required official documents. The account is linked to Dubai eGovernment’s ePay portal such that payments for government services could be directly made from customer’s account with five of the major banks in United Arab Emirates. No minimum balance is required for the virtual account. 

Ahmed Bin Humaidan, Director General of Dubai eGovernment, says that the government seeks “to ease the life of customers with Dubai government entities as much as possible”, and “to provide innovative electronic channels of easy access anywhere and at any time.” 

Last year, the government ePay portal collected a total amount of AED3.3 billion (US$898 million) through credit card payments, and usage of direct debit services rose by 10 fold, from 54,538 transactions in 2010 to 522,815 transactions in 2011.

.futuregov.asia

Faster progress needed on cyber-security, says adviser

Dame Pauline Neville-Jones is the government’s special representative to business on cyber-security. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Getty Images

Ministers need to speed up work on cyber-security because the public and a vast swathe of business have yet to appreciate the threats posed by online crime, a government adviser has said. Dame Pauline Neville-Jones said the strategy was heading in the right direction but needed a push to raise awareness because people were still doing "silly things". "I think the direction is right but the speed is not nearly enough … it needs much more momentum behind this," said Neville-Jones.

She suggested the need for some advertising that would stick in everyone's minds, like the "clunk-click" campaign to encourage people to wear seatbelts. The government could not do the work by itself, she said, but it did need to take a proper lead. "People are entitled to look to government to take a lead and impress upon people the importance of this.

It has a responsibility to strengthen its own systems, and … it needs to strengthen rather modest police capability. "I do think that the Cabinet Office, which is in the lead on this, needs to plot some metrics, have a timetable of various stages that need to be achieved, and audit the progress."
Neville-Jones is a former security minister who is now the government's special representative to business on cyber-security. In a speech for the Global Strategy Forum thinktank, she said people were struggling to understand the threats confronting them, and not nearly enough businesses take the issue seriously. The government had to be prepared to use the "bully pulpit" to raise consciousness and understanding, she said.

"There is a vast swathe of corporates who have valuable intellectual property, much more valuable than they understand, which is inadequately protected," she said.

"They don't even realise it has been stolen. They don't even know they have been the subject of attack. They usually have to be told about it by a third party, most of them do not discover it for themselves. The level of awareness is nothing like it needs to be.

This is a very, very serious state of affairs." She added: "Despite all the scare stories, all the horror stories in the press, people go on doing silly things and careless things. Human nature is a problem." Neville-Jones said she supported the recent decision by Michael Gove, the education secretary, to scrap the teaching of computer science in schools, and said universities needed to design relevant courses that attracted British graduates, "and not just Chinese graduates".

The lessons in school were "no more than jumped up PA studies that are being deserted by children who understand the subject better than their teachers". She said the skills base in this country was "totally inadequate" and that addressing this was "urgent and vital".

Hackers were becoming more sophisticated in the ways they attacked systems, she added, citing the case last year when 2m tonnes of carbon credits were stolen from the EU in the Czech Republic. Neville-Jones said the attack was preceded by a bomb scare that led to back-up computer systems being brought into use. The attack then took place on this back-up system, which was more vulnerable.

guardian.co.uk

New application to enhance e-government accessibility

A new mobile application will be released by the government soon that will cover, at first, the basic interactions with the government, and will eventually include all ‘e-government’ services including those currently provided through Hukoomi and the Ministry of Interior’s Metrash, according to an ictQatar official. ictQatar services delivery manager Mohannad Omar Naim said that new self-service terminals are also to be installed to support these initiatives, providing greater access to government services.

He believes that people need mobility, need to trust their government and need to be included in decisions through social network interaction. People also need to have access to all their government services through a single log-on access point with only one username.

For this vision to become reality, the government should provide accessibility, broadband, and other critical infrastructure. The idea of eGovernment in Qatar started in 2001 with 11 online services, mainly based around residence permits for individuals and businesses. Naim said that people resisted at first, with the government having to beg companies to use their online services.

Now, online systems have become so prevalent that companies and residents are now recommending services to be added. eGovernment is now in a “transformation phase” working towards a new “digital society” with “eparticipation”. Dr Alistair Erskine, chief of Medical Informatics at the Sidra Medical and Research Centre, said that “Qatar does not have a very well developed primary care network. There are significant efforts to do so, but those efforts will take time and they will take a change in the way the population thinks about primary care.”

Erskine said that just as people can now leapfrog credit card payments and go directly to mobile payments, soon patients will be able to skip elements of primary care and bring care directly into the home. Monitoring tools, disease surveillance, weight and other monitoring devices, as well as information portals for patients to learn about and understand their condition are some of the elements that can transform healthcare in Qatar.

Fibre network upgrades to the country’s broadband systems will play an important role in implementing these kinds of healthcare services. According to Erskine, Qatar’s vision for health care calls for a dramatic transformation in the coming years, not just in terms of personalised health care but also in overall health systems management. Flu outbreaks, for example, will be identified before health care providers even report cases, simply by the symptoms being looked up on Google by Internet users. Patients will have better monitoring and interaction from health care providers directly from the home, supported by the “decentralisation and democratisation of health information”. “People will be able to get a chip with their entire genome in less than 24 hours, for less than QR3,600,” Erskine explained.

He said that this breakthrough will allow healthcare professionals to identify patterns in recessive genes amongst the population that were previously unrecognised. Gamification, or making these services more entertaining and engaging, will also improve their success as people will be more likely to use them consistently. Mobile apps are also crucial in helping those with disabilities which is crucial because, as David Banes, CEO of Qatar Assistive Technology Centre (Mada) points out, 70% of people will acquire some disability in their working life. A number of inexpensive apps are transforming the lives of the visually and hearing impaired, whether it is through GPS navigation tools, access to books using kindle or other reading assistants, communication tools for the deaf or product recognition software for the blind.

Banes said that one way the public can help is by donating their second hand iphones and smartphones to Mada, who will provide them as living-assistance tools for those who need them.

gulf-times.com