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indonesian connected new

September 24, 2010 at 8:48 am | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The challenge for many governments today is to provide opportunities for citizens and businesses to actively participate in the global economy. This was the view put by Fairfax Business Media Asia correspondent and Computerworld Malaysia deputy editor, AvantiKumar in his welcome address at the eGovernment Seminar 2010 in Kulala Lumpur. The event was sponsored by CommScope, the Malaysia Software Testing Board (MSTB), Riverbed Technology, HP Malaysia and McAfee.

The first keynote speaker, Delesh Kumar, director of ICT practice Asia Pacific, Frost & Sullivan, expanded on this concept. He noted that in traditional governments, an increase in the value of services was not possible without consolidating the way the back end systems and processes work to bring about the front end of service delivery.

“Many countries have moved from a paper-based government to introduce the concept of the e-government,” Kumar said. “The emerging paradigm maintains that to achieve greater value in service delivery and reduce costs, integration and the redesign of government organisation and processes is a necessity. Genuine cost savings and quality improvements occur only if there is a re-engineering of the internal structures and processes of the administration.”

In fact, Kumar noted that governments should be going beyond merely implementing e-government services but instead be aiming at a concept called the ‘Connected Government’.

Holistic approach

“Connected Government is a holistic approach to how a government operates. It’s about how government agencies work with each other to solve citizens’ problems and not just about providing services to the public,” Kumar said.

Noting that this was vital in today’s highly interconnected world, Kumar said it is not about how services are delivered by governments but how citizens are using technology to approach governments.

“Look at today’s mobile broadband and Twitter generation,” he said. “This is no longer just about e-paper. Governments have to holistically look at how they communicate with citizens so that they can provide them with more personalised services.”

Citizens are not only changing the way they communicate but their level of expectations have also increased, Kumar added.

“Citizens, as consumers, are more informed today because the Internet has changed their expectations,” he explained. “Technologies like Web 2.0 and social networking have made the customer experience critical. Adding to this is that there is a huge Generation-Y segment in Asia, which is used to these expectations.”

As a result, Kumar noted that it becomes imperative to have an intelligent and responsive government, as responsiveness is no longer measured in terms of time taken to revert to requests but how effectively governments are communicating with their people.

“Governments would also need to map out how they want to provide social services with the evolution in technology consumption, as the future is heading towards services on the go with more interactive interfaces,” Kumar said.

Dr Ispran Kandasamy, vice president of sales, enterprise Asia Pacific, CommScope enterprise solutions division, noted that in the last two years, there has been a significant take-up in ICT infrastructure by the government.

“There isn’t much difference between the approach of the private and public sector as far as IT infrastructure is concerned,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s about the quality of service governments offer to citizens and what is the metric for measuring the delivery of these services.”

Intelligent networks

Kandasamy noted one way for governments to ensure top-class quality was to employ intelligent networks (IN).

According to him, among some of the features an intelligent infrastructure solution uses are the discovery of network connectivity from end to end, real time updates of the infrastructure database, physical location and tracking for networked devices, alarms for unauthorised and unscheduled activities, and automation of change and incident management processes.

“When a network is down, everyone knows about it. But how does anybody know when the network is up and to what standard it is performing? For this, you need IN,” Kandasamy explained.

He pointed out that in the past, governments weren’t ready to spend on these kinds of networks but today they are looking at them because the cost of not doing so is too great. Today, it’s not just about return on investments but the total cost of ownership, he added.

While focusing on the quality of the network is important, obtaining faster throughput isn’t just about adding more equipment to increase the bandwidth of the network, said Peter Elsey, director, service provider alliances, Asia Pacific, Riverbed Technology.

Globalisation

“The world has been impacted by globalisation and outsourcing,” Elsey said. “The net result is that IT equipment has proliferated all over the world and it’s harder now to manage than before. Furthermore, there is pressure on IT to do more with less, do more with what you have, and do it in more places.”

Elsey said in the last 10 years, enterprises and governments have been faced with a big problem, namely that applications run slowly across the wide area network (WAN).

He added that prior to the widespread availability of WAN optimisation technology, enterprises have had no choice but to spend money on WAN bandwidth and also on much distributed IT infrastructure to address this problem. This, he said, did help to some degree but it also introduced issues relating to IT cost and data security.

Focused on innovation

After the presentation of broader economic issues facing Malaysia by the second keynote speaker, Bobby Varanasi, head of marketing and branding for Outsourcing Malaysia, Nagalingam Kathirgamer, solution architect technology of HP Malaysia enterprise business, spoke of how governments, like large enterprises, need to break the cycle of diverting their resources more towards operations rather than on innovation.

“The cost of data centre operations has absorbed up to 70 per cent of the IT budget leaving little for more strategic or innovative needs,” he said. “Governments, like enterprises, need to reduce the total amount of resources that are focused on operations and maintenance and free up resources for more strategic, innovative tasks.”

Kathirgamer noted that much of today’s traditional data centres are built around an ageing architecture, which impacts organisational structures and processes. He added that the day-to-day symptoms include a lack of standardisation that impedes automation and governance, and as a result, different systems require varied processes to build and manage infrastructure.

The value chain

The third guest keynote speaker, Michiel de Boer, director of consulting Asia, Quint Wellington Redwood, resumed the session after the break and discussed the various examples of e-government implementation worldwide.

“There are many services which e-governments provide,” de Boer said. ”Some of these comprise citizen-centric service, smart cards, permits, electronic records, e-procurement, purchasing, kiosks, e-learning, government grants, e-health and geographical information systems.”

De Boer noted that these services can only work if structure and processes are in place. Therefore, governments today must realise that the most important thing in an e-government implementation is the concept of “value chain management”.

“The value chain comprises information management, technology, content management. Underlying these components is the need to support these pillars. The chain is as strong as the weakest link; thus, all these pillars will only work when the chain is held together completely by the chain of support,” he explains.

De Boer said for example, when a government agency wants to publish some public information for its citizens to consume, there has to be thought put in as to what kind of info to publish, how to update this information, where to link a particular webpage to another. Also important, he added, is that there must be an authority which can make these changes.

“If 10 people have this authority, there will be 10 outcomes, and this is no good,” he said, adding that there must be only one authority that can make the relevant decisions.

Software testing

Amiruddin Jaafar Sidek, director, Malaysia Software Testing Board (MTSB), noted that in today’s advance world, everything works because of software and thus, it becomes imperative that software be tested.

“Imagine that there are defects in software, and that it has been detected earlier through testing. Testing therefore can save lives,” he said.

According to Amiruddin, there is great potential for software testing in Malaysia today. Gone are the days when a programmer doubles up as a software tester, he said.

“There is a demand for software quality assurance and software testing. Thus, we need quality professionals that have the skills to do this. Amiruddin noted that this is one of the main drivers for the setting up of the MTSB in 2006. Backed by the Malaysian government, the MTSB is a voluntary and non-profit organisation that represents the national industry interests and promotes the broad profession of software testing. He added that governments need to take software testing seriously as this forms the foundation for good software implementation and ensures that whatever services it gives to the public is of high quality and perform accordingly.

Alvin Tan, senior strategic account manager, McAfee, rounded up the session by noting that more than 80 per cent of the Global 5000 has no data security in place. “The perfect storm has arrived, but most companies are still not prepared,” he said. “McAfee believes in securing IT through five steps: acceptance, encryption, securing ports, classification and data loss prevention (DLP).”

Tan said that the first step is to ensure that data protection is tightly woven into the business as data can be lost anywhere. Second:deploying encryption in laptops and desktops, so that information within government agencies will be safeguarded. Next: address issues to do with removable media, such as USB ports. Fourth: identify and manage confidential data properly. “This is simple to say but hard to do, but it nevertheless has to be done. To do this, focus on your most critical data by involving the business stakeholders such as human resources or your compliance departments,” Tan said.

Lastly, governments must look at DLP holistically by discovering where the end points of its network can potentially leak data, he noted.