Building an effective E-government in the knowledge economy
19 - 09 - 2002

The Government has been implementing comprehensive policies to achieve its vision of transforming itself into a citizen-centered E-government.

Speaking at the Hong Kong International Computer Conference 2002 today (September 19), the Director of Information Technology Services, Mr Alan Wong Chi-kong, said, "Through implementing E-government, we aim to use information technology (IT) to modernise government operations to meet the increasing aspirations of the community."

"The Government will adopt a '3R' approach "Re-prioritisation, Re-organisation and Re-engineering - to review and improve its service delivery and operational efficiency."

"We will transform the delivery of government services in three dimensions: to facilitate a joined-up government; to simplify the government structure and encourage more co-operation and collaboration among departments; and to look for more opportunities of public-private partnership," he said.

Mr Wong noted that currently the Information Technology Services Department (ITSD) was taking active steps to provide IT support services much closer to the business units in bureaux and departments.

He also said that ITSD were assisting bureaux and departments in the establishment of IT Management Units (ITMUs) to ensure that management teams in the Government would appreciate the use of IT and carry out fundamental e-business transformation.

The decentralisation of IT activities to the ITMUs helps bureaux and departments to step up their pace of infusing IT and e-business best practices in their planning and operations.

"We will also adopt an innovative approach to examine opportunities for re-engineering our business processes both within and across bureaux and departments to ensure that the benefits of using IT are fully realised in improving operational efficiency and quality of service," said Mr Wong.

With a view to cultivating a buoyant E-government culture within the Government, the ITSD provides bureaux and departments with information on new technologies and trends on IT development and technical guidelines for commonly used software through its Information Technology Solution Centre.

Enhancements to the Government's IT infrastructure are also being carried out. They include improving the accessibility to computer facilities in the civil service, upgrading the government backbone network for broadband connections and establishment of a common transaction platform for electronic service delivery and transactions to complement the Electronic Service Delivery scheme.

To assist and support bureaux and departments in enhancing their readiness and capability to implement their E-government initiatives, the ITSD operates a wide range of central infrastructure support services and facilities which are built on open and international standards.

Mr Wong said, "Leveraging on the strengths of our infrastructure, we will strive for the exploitation and adoption of enabling technologies such as XML, wireless technologies, smart card technologies, and the next generation of Internet technologies."

"We are also setting up an interoperability framework for bureaux and departments to follow when developing joined-up E-government systems," he said.

The Interoperability Framework contains a collection of technical standards and specifications for system interfaces, infrastructural architectures, data exchange, etc. The framework also provides the necessary reference for the private sector when building computer systems to interact with the government systems.

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