egov Asia 2006 Conference Report

Introduction

In Asia, there is growing recognition that eGovernment can lead to reduced

levels of corruption, more efficient government, greater citizen access to
government services and information, and an improved relationship between
government and business. While some Asian governments have been quick
to embrace eGovernment, most are still not fully aware of its potential, and
many eGovernment initiatives are constrained by lack of funds, bureaucratic
resistance, or lack of political support. Some countries are already topping
the international charts of e-Governance; some have just begun their
journey, while there are a few others who are yet to step into the e-
Governance arena. Despite these challenges, interest in eGovernment
continues to gain momentum as governments seek to become more
economically competitive, and citizens and businesses demand greater
accountability and improved access to services and information. egov Asia
2006 conference highlighted e-Government trends and strategies in Asia
bringing forth the challenges and opportunities specific to Asian region. Along
with exhibition, it was a forum to showcase best practices, innovative
technologies and ICT solutions.

The Event

The conference was held from 26th April ’06 through 28th April ’06 at
Bangkok, Thailand, hosted by Centre for Science, Development and Media
Studies (CSDMS), India, in association with Ministry of Information and
Communication Technology (MoICT) and Ministry of Education, Royal Thai
Government, co-hosted by Danish Technological Institute. The conference
was spread over 3 days, with 9 plenary sessions, 6 parallel sessions and 2
workshops. The issues pertaining to multiple aspects of e-Government were
deliberated, discussed and debated by the speakers as well as the audience.

The conference was supported by USAID (Indo-USAID Fire (D) Project),

UNDP, Asia e-Learning Network, British Council, CompTIA, NOLP-Thailand,
CDAC-India, Commission on Higher Education-Thailand, International
Academy of CIO-Thailand, NECTEC, EPFL- Switzerland, SIFT, Software Park-
Thailand, SIPA, Telecentre.org, SEAMEO and University of Washington. The
institutional partners included National University of Singapore, University of
Malaya, Universiti Teknologi Mara- Malaysia and Rangsit University. There
was a good participation by private sector companies as sponsors and
exhibitors of the conference. These included NIIT, NORHTEC, Brainstream,
Gilat, Learnet, IMPACT, NEWGEN, NORTEL, Riverbed, SAP, Sybase and Thai
Rural Network (TRN).
Participation

The conference saw the participation of more than 450 delegates,

representing various key policy makers from government departments,
multilateral and bilateral agencies, academic institutions, non-governmental
organisations and the IT industry. From the government sector, there was a
representation of Permanent Secretary- Thailand, Deputy Permanent
Secretary- MoICT Thailand, Director General- MIE Prefecture Government-
Japan, Director- National Compterisation Agency- Korea, IT Secretary and
State Secretary- India.

From the world of academia, the participant institutions were: Mahidol

University-Thailand, Manchester University- UK, IIT-Ahmedabad-India, King
Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi-Thailand, Universiti Teknologi
MARA- Malaysia, Sungkyunkwan University-South Korea, Peking University-
China, Arab Academy for Science and Technology- Egypt, Institute of Rural
Management-India, Sylhet University-Bangladesh, University of Engineering
and Technology-Pakistan, Jadavpur University-India, Al-Barkaat Institute of
Management-India, Vivekanand Education Society’s Institute of Technology-
India, Forum for Information Technology-Nepal and University of Kelaniya-
Sri Lanka.

The delegates from non-governmental organizations and private companies

who participated in the conference as speakers included UNESCO, UNDP-
APDIP, UNCRD, Asia Foundation, USAID, Development Gateway, Intel, Nortel
Networks, Riverbed Technology, CISCO systems, Sybase, Newgen, NIIT,
Wipro, Infotech, Sun Microsystems, Gilat and EPFL.

Proceedings

Inauguration: The three-day conference was inaugurated by Suchai

Charoenratana, Minister of ICT, Ministry of Information and Communication
Technology, Royal Thai Government, Thailand and Chaturon Chaisang,
Minister of Education, Ministry of Education, Royal Thai Government,
Thailand. It was first time in the history of Thailand that two ministers graced
a conference, thus, highlighting the importance accorded to the event and
the commitment towards e-Government by the Thailand government.

Speaking on the inauguration of the conference, Dr. Susanne Ornager,

UNESCO Adviser for Communication and Information, Bangkok, Thailand,
said that e-Readiness in Asia “… is not simply a matter of the number of
computer servers, websites, and mobile phones in the country, but also
things such as its citizen’s ability to utilise technology skillfully, the
transparency of its business and legal systems, and the extent to which
governments encourage the use of digital technologies”
Giving the vision statement of the conference R. Chandrashekhar, Additional
Secretary, Ministry of Information Technology, India, stressed on ensuring
universal service availability. “Leveraged appropriately, e-governance can
trigger a new paradigm of ICT-enabled development”. According to him,
imaginatively linking the e-Governance agenda with the governance agenda
and the development agenda of the country holds the key.

Plenary Sessions: Plenary sessions covered variety of topics like e-

Government Strategies in Thailand, Capacity Building of Asia Pacific e-
Government Initiatives, Leadership Reflections in e-Government, Issues and
Implementation in e-Government: Asian Perspectives, e-Government
Applications and Services, Emerging Perspectives in e-Government, Urban e-
Governance Models, Rural e-Governance Models and Cyber Laws and
Security. A diversity of perspectives emerging from a wide range of speakers
across government, private and the development sector made for a good
hearing and a unique learning experience.

There was a joint session by UNCRD and UNDP-APDIP on ‘Capacity building

of Asia Pacific e-Government Initiatives’, followed by open panel
discussion moderated by Professor Subhash Bhatnager from IIM-India and
co-moderated by Lars Bestle from UNDP-APDIP and Devyani Mani from
UNCRD. Summing up the findings and observations from case studies on e-
Governance in Asia Pacific region, Subhash Bhatnagar said that a significant
proportion of population in many countries of Asia Pacific is poor/vulnerable.
He concluded that a significant potential for benefiting poor/vulnerable exists
if e-Governance is designed with the needs of the poor in mind. This could be
achieved by embedding e-Government projects in key development
initiatives.

In the session on ‘Leadership Reflections in e-Government’, Jeongwon

Yoon, Director, National Computerisation Agency, Korea, summed up the e-
Strategic priorities of developed and developing countries. In the developed
world the privacy and security is the priority, while in the developing
Countries, ICT Infrastructure, political leadership funding, human capital and
legal framework are the strategic priorities. San Ng of the Asia Foundation,
USA, talked about the lessons learnt in e-Governance in terms of leadership,
planning, funding, system development, management, capacity building and
sustainability. Gianluca Misuraca, Managing Director, EPFL, informed about
the capacities of e-Leaders in the changing government scenario, the most
important being to be able to design and steer cross-sector partnerships, as
well as managing the outsourcing of processes and the deployment of
interfaces with the civil-society in a user-centric perspective. Steven Furst,
Director-Business Development, SAP, talked about 6 priorities of SAP in e-
Government projects. These include: crime prevention, public area cleaning
and maintenance, education, regeneration of town centers, services for
vulnerable groups, community and youth centers. Chip Cleary, Vice President
NIIT, focused on the new generation of online methods in human capacity
building. He opined that ICT offers us a dramatic ability to accelerate
experience by making an apprenticeship approach scalable.

The session, ‘Issues and Implementation in e-Government’, saw the

participation of both public and private sector. Somyot Tanapirunthorn, Vice
President, CAT Telecom, Thailand, representing the public sector, informed
the delegates about the Government Infrastructure Network (GIN) initiative,
which has been introduced, to offer high-speed and secure communication
channels for the government. Peter Moore, Managing Director, Microsoft Asia
Pacific, discussed the common applications of e-Government, role and
constraints to e-Government. He informed the vision statement of Microsoft,
thus: Enable government transformation through technology to deliver
improved outcomes to consumers of government services and realize
superior economic performance. Michael Mudd, Director, Comptia Ltd, Hong
Kong, shared his thoughts on protocols and standards in ICT industry.
According to him procurement policies that limit the available market for ICT
solutions subvert sound internationally recognized economic, trade and IPR
principles. It is the merit-based policies that best serve local citizens and
industry enhancing the development of the local economy and exports. Dr.
Noorani Mohammad Ismail, Faculty of Administrative Science and Policy
Studies, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia, presented the Malasian
perspective of e-Government while S N Tripathi, Secretary IT, Government of
Orissa, India, presented the Indian e-Government perspective. According to
Noorani M. Ismail, sequential implementation of various e-government
services and emergence of single electronic gateway will require
corresponding alignment of human inputs with technological and operational
configurations.

Country and state specific e-Government initiatives were discussed in the

session on ‘e-Government Applications and Services’ by speakers like
Jantima Sirisaengtaksin, Principal Advisor on ICT, Revenue Department,
Thailand, Anurag Rastogi, Government of Haryana, India, Maniam Kalianan,
Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia, Rajinder Kumar Vij, Deputy Inspector
General of Police, Chhattisgarh, India and Sapna Kapoor, National
Informatics Centre, Pune, India.

The final day of the conference had 4 plenary sessions where some of the
eminent key note speakers included Mary O’Kane, Vice-Chair of Board of
Directors, Development Gateway, Mehul Rajpuria, Director, Channel Sales,
Sybase Asia Pacific Partner Countries, Punit Jain, Newgen, India, Mathew
Holden, Asia Pacific Director, SAP, Kanthon Waithayakul, President,
Marketing and Product Development, Telephone Organisation of Thailand,
Teruhiko Yoshimura and Mark Rittenbacher, UNCRD, Japan. The themes
covered in these sessions were: emerging perspectives in e-Government,
rural and urban e-Governance and cyber laws and security. Punit Jain
discussed the role of business process management (BPM) in accelerating the
pace of e-Governance. He listed out some of the advantages of BPM for e-
Government, which are as below:
•Catalyst for transforming government agencies – provides a solution
framework for emerging eGovernance perspectives.
•Automates and simplifies processes
•Removes redundant steps from processes, shorten approval times and
integrate with legacy systems.
•Helps achieve operational efficiencies, reduced errors and lower processing
costs
• Helps government organizations realize the service oriented architecture
(SOA) vision.

Hitesh Vaidya, from Indo-USAID Fire Project, informed the participants about
the National Mission Mode Project (NMMP) on e-Governance in Municipalities
undertaken by the Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India. The
project has benefits for not just for the citizens but also the policy makers
who will get an integrated view of performance of the Municipalities at the
Center and State levels. The paper by Nishan Muthukrishna, Faculty of Law,
National University of Singapore, dwelt on the role of e-Governance in
combating corruption. He took the position that an expanded definition of e-
Governance should be adopted that exceeds the traditional view of e-
Government – focusing on improved service delivery and internal re-
engineering of government – if it is to be used to as a tool for anti-corruption
initiatives. This includes conceptions such as communication with citizens,
their interaction, information provision and consultation.

Parallel Sessions: The second and the third day of the conference had a
series of parallel sessions, covering topics like architecture and framework,
telecommunications and wireless technologies, technology trends, country
case studies on their e-Government experiences and RFID, Smart Cards and
emerging applications.

Speaking in the session on ‘Architecture and Framework’, Ray Teske from

Nortel Networks, presented a new security approach. According to him,
security is a strategic investment because it protects enterprise assets and
revenue stream.
Some notable points of this approach is as follows:
• Security solutions must be application aware (sensitivities to voice,
video, data)
• Network should be secured in a layered defense approach to ensure
end-to-end security
• Network should be secured using standards-based solutions
• Network must be adaptive, able to proactively respond to attacks
• A company’s security plan must encompass all users, processes
and technologies
SR Das, Department of IT, Ministry of Communications and Information
Technology, spoke on capacity building and institutional framework in e-
Governance with respect to the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) of India.
He put forth that with the capacity building plans of the government, NeGP
could be successfully implemented in all the states and Union Territory’s
covering more that 1 billion population. Through this capacity building
measures, India would further strengthen the strong and dynamic democratic
institutions and thereby secure growth and development for all its citizens.
Wanchai Varavithya from the Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand,
presented details about operations, advantages and limitations of the citizen
consultation model for e-Government of Thailand, which is Internet based
collaborative web decision-making system.

The session ‘Country Case Studies’ had speakers from countries like India,
Nepal, Korea, Australia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Thailand and United Kingdom,
thus providing a global experience sharing. The speakers included Ashis
Sanyal, Director, Department of IT, Ministry of Communications and
Information Technology, Chip Cleary, Vice President, NIIT, Young-Jin Shin,
Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs, Ahmed Imran,
Australian National University and Ghan Shyam Bansal, National Informatics
Centre, Pune-India.

In the session ‘Tele-Communications and Wireless Technologies’,

Conrad Labonte, Director- Wireless Networks Solutions, Nortel, Thailand,
spoke about the Taipei Cyber City Project, which has multiple benefits for e-
Government such as, increased digital reach, intelligent transportation
system, community security, e-Learning, mobile commerce, software and
digital content industry and export success model to overseas. John Meyer,
Director of Sales Support, Gilat, Thailand, talked about the benefits of VSAT
networks, some of which are as follows:
• Fast deployment
• Addresses political/economic/social drives to provide basic
telephony and IP quickly to remote rural areas
• Provides one solution everywhere one goes
• Independence of terrestrial infrastructure
• Easy to expand and install

The ‘Technology Trends’ Session had Dominic Scott from CISCO Systems
Asia Pacific, Hong Kong, speaking about the advantage of service-oriented
network architecture in building a connected Government. According to him,
the new ‘connected government model’ requires the pervasive application of
networked ICT. He, however, stressed that networked ICT will deliver desired
results only when deployed with appropriate design principles and underlying
architectures. Another speaker, Parthasarthy J., from Sun Microsystems,
India, discussed about the Positioning and Navigation System which is
developed using a low cost GPS receiver- Magellan GPS 310 Receiver, that
has several advantage like identifying user position precisely, navigating
from point to point, steering to destination, to act as a city guide software
and to identify nearby important places, tourist attractions by computing
user’s current location.

In another technical session on ‘RFID, Smart Cards and Emerging

Applications’, RFID cluster of Thailand, e-Syariah Website of Malaysia and
application of RFID in Smart Cards in Thailand were discussed by Shahril
Eashak Ismail, Universiti Teknologi Mara, Malaysia, Apinetr Unakul, Director-
Research, King Mongkul’s Institute of Technology, Thailand and Surachai
Srisarcam, Vice-Governor of Sisaket, Thailand.

Exhibition and Workshops

Through the exhibition, the conference provided an opportunity for updating

on new advancements, solutions and services in the field of e-Governance.
The event had different exhibitors from the government and industry, who
showcased a wide range of products, services and initiatives in the domain of
e-Government. These included Brainstream, GIS Development, IMPACT,
Learnet, Ministry of ICT and Ministry of Education- Royal Thai Government,
NECTEC, NEWGEN, NIIT, NORHTEC, NORTEL, SEAMEO, SIPA, SITF, Software
Park, Sybase and UNDP.

There were two workshops that provided an opportunity for delegates to

interact and share with each other their viewpoints and experiences in
various aspects of e-Government. The workshop ‘Public Health
Information System: Roadmap for Thailand’, was organized in
collaboration with the Thai Health Promotion Foundation. The workshop
aimed at creating awareness about the linkages between Public Health
Information System and e-Government and its benefits for the masses. The
other workshop ‘Open Source versus Open Standards’, organized by
National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (NECTEC) aimed to
create understanding about the importance of open standards and to
promote the use of open standards in Thailand.

Conclusion

The egov Asia 2006 conference truly provided a knowledge-sharing platform

and a forum for policymakers, practitioners, industry leaders and
academicians of Asia-Pacific nations to carry forward the e-Government
vision of the region and consolidate them into actionable program, through
collaborative learning and partnerships.