The worldwide revolution in Internet is changing our lives in terms of the way we work, learn and interact. These changes naturally should reflect the way government functions in terms of the organization of the government, its relationship with its citizens, institutions and businesses and cooperation with other governments. Also, the increasing generalization of technology access by citizen and organizations brings expectations and demands on government. At the same time, governments are also proactive in this domain and are planning new ways of interacting, improving services, optimizing processes and revitalizing democracy by spending amount on IT. It aims to deliver more interactive services to citizens and businesses through E-Governance. For this, cloud computing may lead to significant cost savings. It entails use over the Internet of computing hardware and software infrastructure and applications that are remotely hosted.
Governments are continuing to invest though slowly in realizing the potential benefits of the Information Technology to provide e-services.
E-services are delivering cost-effective services, which can drive the growth of the economy and government productivity. Cloud computing provides a new service consumption and delivery model inspired by Consumer Internet Services. Cloud computing drives down costs and accelerates cost reduction benefit. Cloud is making rapid inroads.
E-Governance with cloud computing offers integration management with automated problem resolution, manages security end to end, and helps budget based on actual usage of data. At a global level, Cloud architectures can benefit government to reduce duplicate efforts and increase effective utilization of resources. This in turn helps the government going green, reducing pollution and effective waste management. Enterprises and Small and Medium businesses are already reaping the benefits of cloud by using the pay-as-you-use service model, its massive scalability and ready availability. Since government requires a massive infrastructure it is important for government to use cloud computing on long term basis.
A unified e-government infrastructure, based on cloud and SOA architectures is required, that paves the way for interagency information sharing and workflow and is enabling the delivery of seamless services to the public. Cloud architectures allow rapid deployment of turn key test environments with little or no customization. The white paper elucidates the benefits of cloud in rolling out E-Governance services. It also describes EGovernance general requirements, while delving more into the challenges of E-Governance and listing out the benefits of cloud computing architectures for the same.
Ensuring legal framework and institutional setups are required to create and promote the ideal environment of e-services. Independent E-Government initiatives from different departments, threatened to make services level worse due to lack of interagency unity and not because all organizations would proceed at the same pace. Proper planning, execution, training and good management could reduce overall costs to a great extent and help in more efficient utilizations of tax payers’ money.
Baby steps are already made in providing E-Governance services, and it is time for E-Governance to take an elephant leap.
Some of the Benefits that constituents and government departments can achieve quickly:
- Improved relationships between citizens and local government
- Increased citizen access to services
- Improved IT operational efficiencies
- Enhanced quality of life
- Achieve ambitious, urgent Time and Cost savings goals
- Boost service quality with greater efficiencies
- Give departments and citizens control over their functions and needs
- Prepare for new and better services expansion
- Align Local Government and Government Agencies
- Align Public Safety and National Security Agencies
- Improve Services through Emergency Response Agencies
- Integrated information and collaborative efforts by Fire, Police and Emergency Agencies
