Chasing the G2C Dreams on Cloud

The increasing mobile penetration and emergence of cloud as a computing platform offers governments across the world an immense opportunity to adopt these platforms for providing public services and improving overall governance. Most advanced nations have already invested and implemented technology solutions that aid governance and improve citizen-government interactions.

For example, US GSA-General Services Administration has moved some of its services to the cloud along with adopting Google for email. The recent announcement by Amazon of creating a compute platform for enabling the US federal agencies to move workloads to cloud is an example of public/private partnership in enabling a safe, low-cost, and agile platform for government compute purposes. All this will ultimately enable governance.

Slow Rate of Adoption

When it comes to emerging economies, governments have been slow to adopt these platforms for enabling governance and for improving citizen-government interactions. There are some examples of success but by and large the impact is not huge enough yet. The authors argue for such investments to be made by these governments to hasten development.

Most of these emerging economies rank low in human development index and also in the transparency international index of governance.

Corruption and political instability being the scourge of development in these countries. It has been observed that in such situations technology disruptions tended to have a positive impact for citizens and there should be a strong legislative push for technology led governance.

Mobile has revolutionized the Indian market post policy changes by government which enabled private players to embrace wireless technologies and spread communication to the farthest reaches.

Such progressive policy frameworks coupled with adoption of technology disruptions benefited the large sections of the society.

Similar is the case with Brazil, China, and other emerging economies whose governments aligned their policies to the changing technology landscape leading to all round improvement in communication. The number of internet and mobile users will further increase as the cost of mobile internet access reduces and telecom operators expand their networks in these markets. Below depiction shows mobiles as preferred medium of consuming information and communication demand.

A BCG study also indicated that the estimated internet penetration in emerging economies will grow at 9-15% CAGR till 2015. In India, for example, cloud computing is projected to grow from $50 mn industry in 2009 to $15 bn industry by 2013. Other parts of the world are following the same growth trajectory.

This convergence in growth of internet and mobile penetration coupled with emergence of cloud as a pervasive computing platform provides opportunity for governments to use these disruptions as a medium for achieving their social and development goals. A recent trend that has been observed in the developing world is the use of social networks like Facebook and Twitter to reach the fellow citizens by both governments and common man.

The Challenges

Quality public service to citizens has been an intractable problem in these economies with archaic policies, multiple bureaucratic approvals, and manual workflows slowing the process. With the increasing penetration of internet, pervasive mobile computing, and emergence of cloud computing as platforms for service delivery, governments have an opportunity to transform the way services are delivered to citizens by legislating progressive policies which utilize the above disruptions.

In emerging economies with stable democratic governments (Brazil, India, Indonesia, etc) and with reasonable penetration of ICT investments it is possible to hasten the process of all-round development using cloud and other related disruptions.

While significant investments have been made in ICT by the Federal and state governments to reach out citizens, there has at best been moderate success in some areas, the primary reasons being:

• Weak implementation of e-governance in these economies

• Single window for services is not available. There is little or no integration between online services of various government departments

• Small proportions of services are available online. Only simple services offered (utility payments, etc)

• Performance issues have been observed even with moderately successful initiatives implying that the underlying Infrastructure is not scalable

Progressive legislation and investments in ICT are required for increasing the proportion of services being provided online to make G2C more effective. A single window for all services can then become a reality. Also, higher work-loads due to increasing penetration of internet and expanding populations demand that governments look at cloud as the platform to provide G2C services to all citizens.

It is said that one of the most critical road block for offering G2C over cloud is security and identification. However with the advent of initiatives like SSN, UID (Unique Identification) for all citizens, the challenge of authenticating citizens requesting services will be greatly simplified.

The Factors Responsible

Some of the factors that have historically hindered the social and economic development of these economies are lack of information pertaining to end beneficiaries of the developmental programs, leakage of government funds due to inefficiencies in tracking, and managing funds/information. Governments are recognizing that these inefficiencies are detrimental and leading to citizens not benefitting from government development programs.

It is believed that an integrated cloud based IT roadmap for G2C is the need of the day for governments in emerging economies to hasten economic and social development.

The authors recommend an institutionalized approach for public services to be delivered on cloud. Such cloud services are to be regulated by an independent IT body that formulates government's IT strategy that constitutes:

• Identification of appropriate platforms for G2C on cloud

• Governance of platforms (security, availability, etc)

• Identification and deployment of secure delivery platforms like mobiles, ATMs, post offices, rural kiosks, etc.

• Ensuring quality of services

• Develop a comprehensive catalogue of services to be provided on G2C on cloud

• Coordinating with multiple government departments for moving services to G2C on cloud and to provide a single window for services

• The authors strongly recommend the adoption of G2C on cloud with the right policy framework backed by strong execution. This will result in

• Governments delivering on their developmental goals

• Ensuring that benefits are reaching to intended beneficiaries

• Providing citizens multiple channels to access government services

• Extend computing technology into remote areas and provide opportunities for healthcare, education, and economic development and transparency in governance

The authors foresee the following interactions happeing through G2C in the evolving stages and moving towards a more mature and full-fledged single window citizen services

It is believed that the G2C maturity will be a reality in the next 10 years in most, if not all emerging economies and will evolve from being information only services to single window service for all government interactions. To this end, governments in emerging economies need to ramp up their investments in internet infrastructure.

This G2C on cloud will lead to a strong e-governance regime leading to the much sought after social and economic changes in these economies.