Brunei in uphill battle to realise e-govt goals since mid-1990s

E-govt targets over last two years are 'over-ambitious' with $751m spent

BRUNEI'S set targets of its e-government plans are "over-ambitious" for the past two years, with the spending of $751.2 million on e-government and services programmes as of September this year, said Government Chief Information Officer and Permanent Secretary at the Prime Minister's Office yesterday.

Out of the 216 projects, 97 have been completed, 56 proposed projects are being prepared, 35 are currently being implemented while the rest are still awaiting tender preparation, invitation, evaluation approval or under contract preparation, Pg Dato Paduka Hj Ismail Pg Hj Mohamed said during the Think Big National Technology Forum.

Since its journey from the mid-1990s, Brunei has struggled to realise its e-government goals in modernising the civil service to meet public service delivery expectations and manage the challenging demands of an efficient and effective public administrations through increased usage of ICT.

There were absences of an overall executive owner and a credible technology authority, a lack of ICT capacity, a deviation from the original roadmap and fragmented implementations which held back the last e-government initiative.

Some of the outcomes from the programme are already in operation, including the Ministry of Finance's Treasury Accounting Financial Information System (Tafis) brought into fruition by BAG Networks, E-Pelita (an electronic version of the government-owned print media), the processing of identity cards and passports, Radio Television Brunei's multimedia platform "RTB City", company registration, the land transport system and e-Customs.

Pg Dato Ismail hinted on what can be expected soon: on-line business registration and the Government Employee Management System (Gems).

Deputy Communications Minister Dato Paduka Hj Yusof Hj Abdul Hamid, said that Brunei had achieved milestones since the 2005 United Nations Global E-Government Readiness Report, where the sultanate was placed 73rd.

However, the UN "E-Government Survey 2008, from e-Government to Connected Governance", placed Brunei in 87th spot, the fifth best out of 11 Southeast Asian countries in terms of e-government readiness.

The Economist Intelligence Unit defines e-readiness as a measure of the quality of a country's ICT infrastructure and ability to leverage digital channels for communication, commerce and government to further economic and social development and measures the extent to which the usage of communications devices and Internet services create efficiencies for businesses and citizens.

Haslina Hj Mohd Taib, chief executive of BAG Networks said: "It (The e-government programme) has to happen. Because there's a lot of expectation from the IT industry for BAG Networks to actually help them grow.

"The difference between this five-year plan and the last five-year plan — is that there is a lot of tension — a lot of pressure points for us to all deliver.

"The new generation will make it (e-government) happen. They will push old people like me to make it happen," she said.

Bruneians within BAG Networks are being trained to operate and maintain what the foreign expertise did for the Tafis system, Haslina said during the forum.

"With the human resource management system (HRMS) and Gems, more than 50 per cent of Bruneians are now helping to implement the system. So, we moved from operation and maintenance, to actually doing the configuration, and the system implementation," she said.