The building of E-government gains momentum
06 - 06 - 2002

It is the vision of the Government to build an E-government that not only improves the quality of government services but also improves efficiency and optimises the use of limited resources.

The remarks were made by the Director of Information Technology Services, Mr Alan Wong Chi-kong, who addressed participants of the Luncheon Meeting of the Hong Kong Management Association's Information Technology Management Club today (June 6).

Mr Wong said, "Our strategy is to transform the Government's internal operations and public service delivery via electronic means in a customer-centric way and in a one-stop-shop approach as far as practicable."

"E-government is an on-going process of government transformation. We will adopt a 3R approach - re-organisation, re-engineering and re-prioritisation - to review and improve the quality of our service delivery and operation efficiency," he added.

To ensure that management teams in the Government appreciate the use of information technology (IT) and carry out fundamental e-business transformation, the Information Technology Services Department (ITSD) is assisting them to establish IT Management Units (ITMUs).

"We believe there is room for bureaux and departments (B/Ds) to assume much greater ownership of IT and blend IT with their core support services," said Mr Wong.

"So far we have already established over 20 ITMUs and we will work with more B/Ds to establish their ITMUs in the next year or two."

The ITSD also operates a wide range of central infrastructure support services to assist B/Ds in enhancing their readiness and capability to develop e-government.

A number of enhancements to the Government's IT infrastructure are being carried out. They include improving the accessibility to computer facilities in the civil service; upgrading to broadband connections to the Government backbone network; and the establishment of a common transaction platform for electronic service delivery and Government-to-Employee/Government-to-Government transactions.

To facilitate seamless integration of government applications, Mr Wong noted that his department was setting up an interoperability framework that contains the technical standards and specifications for system interfaces, infrastructural architectures, data exchange, etc. for B/Ds to adopt when developing joined-up e-government systems.

Since information security is an important element of e-government, ITSD has also developed a comprehensive IT security policy and measures to safeguard information integration and security across and within government systems.

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