RIYADH, 28 May — Last month, Deputy Commerce Minister Dr. Fawaz Al-Alami highlighted the Kingdom’s efforts to establish e-government initiatives. The four-day Saudi e-Commerce Conference in Riyadh that followed stressed why this should happen. The future of the developing relationship between the government and Saudi citizens, claimed the conference, rested firmly on building the necessary Internet infrastructure and the enactment of legislation to streamline civil service technology to ensure the effective and efficient public services of the future.
“The gradual though radical changes taking place in the Saudi private sector should be mirrored by government services,” said Al-Alami, “for in this is the key to true diversification for a Saudi economy of the modern online world.”
To put this into perspective, conference speakers from other countries demonstrated to the Saudi audience their own nations’ varying success levels with e-government, and spoke extensively on the issues and complexities they had faced. Malaysia in particular has seen a substantial movement toward electronic government providing its citizens with a new, efficient interface with which to communicate with government services. Central to Malaysia’s experiment has been the success with which the government has utilized the private sector in e-government initiatives. For e-government to succeed, skills practiced in the private sector, which are not yet apparent in public services, need to move across to the civil services it was claimed.
This critical point was then developed by Eduardo Lemos, a speaker from the global management, consultancy and outsourcing firm, Accenture. Lemos advised that Saudi Arabia, in planning the radicalization of its economy and public services, should examine why countries had met with various levels of success and identify critical factors that had made e-government a viable opportunity. He pinpointed 25 countries with current e-government initiatives and classified them according to their success rates and levels of development.
Lemos was clear about the way forward: “Only by analysis can a strategy be drawn up, as we can then identify common traits and steps that developing countries and Saudi Arabia can commit to,” he said. “It is not too late to start e-government initiatives — the barriers to success are low and success stories from the developed and developing world can be easily absorbed and used as a launch pad. The analysis and the resulting action would provide the bridging of the gap between political rhetoric and true e-government realization.”
In his analysis, the case studies focused on a broad cross-section of countries involved in e-government. They ranged across the political and economic spectrum, from the US and European countries, to developing nations who were actively supporting their economies’ growth with Internet experiments, including Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa. Lemos showed how the leading e-government countries, currently Canada, the US, and Singapore, offered a high number of mature services online with significant citizen response, while other nations offered low levels of online support for their citizens but had the potential to develop a cross-agency web presence for their government. He pointed out that success for any country’s e-government initiatives did not rely on its level of economic development.
“Both developed and developing nations have the same opportunities,” he explained. “Developing nations are just as able to create a full-service online government as the developed world.” Having the infrastructure is only a part of the solution. “Far more importantly,” he continued, “successful experimenters have ensured that the right administrative foundations, communication programs, and support agencies were in place with a high-level results-orientated accountability. For this to happen the skills practiced in the public sector need to be expanded, developed and empowered by the private sector.”
Lemos felt that the key to opening up the public sector to these influences was outsourcing. He demonstrated that many government agencies across the world have developed either through outsourcing, or contracting the private sector to provide new services currently not offered by the agency or by wholly replacing government provided services with a more streamlined version offered privately.
“The entrepreneurial approach, that generates business success, should work in the public sector too,” he said. “This way innovation becomes a real power in public services and it is an opportunity available to both technologically advanced nations and the developing world.”
Lemos believes that if Saudi Arabia is keen to move into electronic government, then it must take onboard the private sector as a partner.
“Examples from around the world show that failure to create an appropriate and dedicated structure will mean e-government will be doomed to failure or to a slow drawn-out process of implementation,” he said.
Lemos emphasized that businessmen’s involvement is important to successful e-government, since successful businesses know what their customers want. E-government should be based on the same knowledge — knowing what your citizen wants to do. The services provided should benefit the citizen and not just the government.
This is something the Saudi government is beginning to understand. Keen to involve the home-grown private sector in all areas of the economy, the government is now aware that its own services may need to be upgraded with private sector support or operations. A consultative council with senior business figures from across the Kingdom is to be set up to facilitate this activity.
“Although we cannot say that the solution to transforming your economy and government is outsourcing, Accenture’s study shows it has some considerable part to play in successful e-government programs,” said Lemos.
“Saudi Arabia must face the challenge of developing and diversifying its economy, then keeping up with changes in the modern world. One of the main radical innovative approaches to this challenge is opening up public services to private sector initiatives, and even to competition.”