Call For Closer Ties To Build Sustainable IT Eco-System
By Azaraimy

Bandar Seri Begawan - The Government of His Majesty the Sultan and Yang DiPertuan of Brunei Darussalam has a vision to make ICT as a new growth engine, to enhance human capital development, produce more local workforce that is willing and able to move forward as well as leveraging in digital assets.

Minister of Communications, Pehin Dato Seri Setia Awang Haji Abu Bakar bin Hj Apong, said this in his keynote address during the "Common Government Framework Seminar" organised by Microsoft at Mutiara Ballroom, Sheraton Utama Hotel, yesterday.

The minister said close collaboration between the private sector industry players such as Microsoft and the government is critical in building a sustainable IT ecosystem in Brunei.

He said this is an area, which can be further explored in which Microsoft for instance can provide and contribute technology, expertise, dedicated programs, resources, training tools and skills.

Meanwhile, the government, he said, can contribute property licensing commitment and intellectual property rights enforcement commitment.

Pehin Awang Haji Abu Bakar said one of the challenges is the lack of adequate skills in the workforce to manage the transformation to an electronic government.

A common framework for interoperability among ministries and agencies therefore can help resolve these challenges.

A well-structured approach to interoperability can help open up data and information silos and enable information to be exchanged more easily and usefully between systems, he said.

A common infrastructure shared by multiple government e-services can produce benefits in terms of providing a common user identity management model for all government services; sharing common costs across the government rather repeating expenditure multiple times by duplicating identical pieces of core infrastructure for each online service; enabling innovative joined-up services; providing a single, consistent access path for government services; accelerating the delivery of e-Government services by providing reusable common components needed for online service delivery; scaling to meet the growing demand; and driving the take-up of e-Government services, the minister added,

He said, today ICT has an increasing pervasive influence in the government. Harnessing the power of ICT allows the delivery of government e-services in a seamless and efficient manner.

Provision of government e-services takes many forms and involves multiple stakeholders. The government can use e-services to interact with other governments, businesses and citizens.

Another challenge, he said, that governments are facing towards seamless delivery of e-services is that the systems are generally purchased on a solution-by-solution basis, and driven by the need to acquire the best solution for a specific purpose.

The result of this is the creation of a wide range of separate information and data islands across the government machinery; with no easy way of unlocking the valuable information assets they collectively contain to support more useful and productive processes.

This is also true for Brunei as identified by our eGovernment committee and confirmed by the observations of Brunei Darussalam e-Government Implementation Review of August 2006, he said.

The minister also applauded Microsoft's initiative in organising the seminar and to share the vision for a Connected Government Framework.

A successful framework would exploit existing government investments and provide a means of enabling those existing systems to participate in a wider ecosystem of information systems. -- Courtesy of Borneo Bulletin

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