Week 8

Focus on e government worldwide to find the weakness in SA’s SEPO

In 2012, United Nations published a survey containing comparison among different countries’ e government. For the first time, I realize how information technology could bring value to not only enterprise but government as well. Among most of e government all around the world, e government in Republic of Korea is in the leading position. Korea’s government noticed the importance of the development of technology and introduced the advancement of technology in increasing government effectiveness and efficiency. The figure below shows the rank list of e government all around the world.

Republic of Korea

The Government’s main website has developed into an integrated portal where citizens can find almost every service they want, on both national and local level. The main government portal is a gateway to services through multiple channels, by theme and subjects. Citizens can also have a customized channel by inputting their own age, gender and services of interest. Back-office integration across many departments brings together a powerful search engine offering advanced categorizing function, which can list results by websites, services, and news, including at the local level.

A key reason for continued leadership in world e-government progress is significant development and provision of downloadable mobile applications that are available from its national portal.

Netherlands

In the Netherlands, efficiency and citizen inclusion are the objectives of the e-government strategy. Integration of a back-office management system has been undertaken with a belief that citizens should provide information once. E government is building an e-government infrastructure encompassing citizen access to government processes including electronic authentication, uniform identification numbers for both citizens and businesses and electronic personal identification. As part of its broader ICT strategy the focus of e-government in the Netherlands was on improving efficiency of services concomitant with reduction of administrative cost and burden.

United Kingdom

The national portal of the United Kingdom (http://www.direct.gov.uk) provides a fine example through its e-petition page, where citizens have the ability to lodge online petitions on issues for governments to propose to parliament if enough signatures are acquired. The government also provides great transparency by providing the outcomes of previous petitions, showing how many signatures were obtained.

The weakness of SEPO in South Australia

Compared with e governments above, the weakness of SEPO in South Australia could be concluded into the following aspects:

1.       As a portal website, it failed to provide a user-friendly interface. Too much information is showed on every page, which increases the difficulties of finding necessary information.

2.       The definition of “franchise” is unclear. On the website, we could hardly find which franchise I should ask help. To make things worse, users would rather use Google to find that franchise than using this portal website to find that because of complicate instruction every step.

3.       Citizens could not have their own account on the website. We do not need to even mention the possibility of supporting mobile devices. The inconvenience of using this may decrease the number of users to this website.

4.       Limited feedback. Citizens could just provide very simple feedback on the website. The designer of this website could not find detailed suggestion coming from citizens, which will not be helpful to improve the usage of website.

There are still several points of its weakness unlisted. However, one of the most important things for SA government to do, in my opinion, is to simplify its on-line process. They could take Singapore government’s website as a reference. Singapore e government’s website provides a good example of website design based on solution to problems. As for SA government, SEPO appeared to be a collection of information rather than website based on solution, the key weakness of its SEPO.