Public Sector Innovation

“First let’s agree there is no single successful formula for e-governance success. It’s an art to vision the whole picture and ability to create it. And there are no shortcuts but to create ground for your each step”

Afghanistan government started its first initiatives toward e-governance implementation in year 2003 by producing the very first Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Policy which mainly focuses on aligning ICT sector to achieve e-Governance goals. In result establishing a small e-Governance Unit in year 2005 currently active as e-Governance Directorate. Back then government was newly established therefore there was lack of local experts with relevant experience. Hence everything was relied upon foreign experts which costed a lot so there was always pressure of lack of budget to keep them and pressure of time on experts that prevented them to collect and analyze detail information. In other words to fully understand the Afghanistan context, identify approaches that might create a stable ground to move toward implementation of e-governance. But sometimes it looks like we ended up implementing e-governance projects without creating “stable” ground for it first.

Initially MCIT had several achievements for creating necessary organizational changes, strategic and technical documents, IT infrastructure of government organizations, enabling platforms and also several other ministries created successful systems and applications. But later these successful initiatives soon became isolated islands. Our experiences through this period of time taught us that these initiatives are not successful e-governance projects. We moved to the “E” part quite soon without focusing on “governance”.

Unfortunately, after years of efforts the challenges and obstacles are same or even increased. And after utilizing international human resources and millions of dollars Afghanistan government is not able to provide a single e-service till date. That e-service where a customer don’t need to: wait for hours and stand in long queues to write an application, get more than ten signatures on single page, follow up the same application for next few weeks or months, remind and request the employee every time to process your work, be unsure what is going on with your application, follow up the single application in several government organizations that is in different locations, be treated unfairly, or be upset and many more.

“E-governance goal is not creating IT systems and infrastructure, but use IT as a tool for providing public services to customers. Unfortunately in Afghanistan “e-governance term” is used as a tool for conceptualizing and creating IT projects.”                                                                                                 

Let’s dream the Possible Future of e-Governance in Afghanistan!

The president and his office supports MCIT to focus on ICT sector and expand it, eliminates parallel e-governance bodies and authorities, establishes e-governance authority and closely supervises and supports the authority.

The e-governance authority main aim is to align and empower IT and e-Governance strategic goals and relevant resources of all government organizations in national level. Create awareness and mentality in policy level and among people, and focus on creating customer oriented public services. For this purpose government need strong ICT sector that might be created, empowered and lead by MCIT.

“E-Governance is more about enabling the government to use IT as a tool for providing public e-services. If the government is not enabled first, it might not be ready to use IT as a tool; and also enabling people to use e-services if people are not enabled, it might not be e-gov service at all!”

E-Governance Authority Strategic Plan Overview:

Phase 1: Document current public services provision experience and administrative procedures.
Detail:
The government service provision starts exactly when the customer (people) start thinking about acquiring the public service, it’s not when they physically contact the government agency or submit the filled application.
Possible Challenges:
The government current public services provision experience, administrative procedures and challenges are not documented or not documented accurately. No collaboration and coordination within government agencies for improving public services provision.

Phase 2: Simplify public services provision.
Detail:
The simplification of public services might not mean utilization of IT but this phase is part of the plan to prepare and enable government to use IT as a tool in future, prioritize and initiate necessary changes to government organizational structures, resources, legal framework and so on to move toward customer oriented public services provision.
Possible Challenges:
Lack of government authorities and policymaker’s awareness and interest for the importance of customer oriented public service provision, most organization don’t know their role and responsibility to contribute in this movement thus feeling lack of ownership and creating resistance by not changing, lack of capable human resources.

Phase 3: re-simplify and bring public services provision under single roof.
Detail:
In this phase we know our challenges and obstacles in public services simplification thus we need to create solutions and further finalize the simplification process keeping in mind to bring public services under single roof, the single roof management might not simplify or provide public services but manage and provide facilitation to government organizations that are providing public services under single roof and improve customer experience inside the single roof. The government main aim for establishing single roof is low cost and customer oriented public services.
Possible Challenges:
Misconception of government organization regarding public services simplification and single roof, lack of required resources, expertise and accountability.

Phase 4: Creating public e-services.
Detail:
In this stage government already have required legal framework, IT infrastructure, enabling platforms, standards and technical resources to create, manage and maintain sustainable public e-services, the government internal administrative procedures, reporting and financial system is digitized, the private ICT sector is mature, reliable and capable enough to have sustainable partnership with government organizations to create public e-services, people have awareness and access to low cost internet and technological tools across the country and can easily access public services through different channels online, mobile or single roof…
Possible Challenges:
Lack of support and interest from authorities and policymakers to digitize public services, lack of required legal framework and IT resources in government organization, lack of literacy and equal access to low cost internet and technological tools to acquire public services.

Phase 5: Maintenance and further simplification of e-services.
Detail:
Our experiences through this journey might enable us to identify further challenges, obstacles and mistakes which we might need to solve as continuous effort. The main aim is to enable government organizations to identify their challenges in service provision, provide solutions to these challenges in a collective manner, neither challenges nor solutions can be owned by single entity.
Possible Challenges:
Lack of defined roles and responsibilities among government organizations, budget to maintain sustainable IT resources and qualified IT experts, and capable ICT private sector.

“Any problem that prevents the government from implementing e-governance is the main problem, and unfortunately we can’t ignore these problems.”