Human capital development in e-Citizens

IN DEVELOPING the Government-to-Business (G2B) and Government-to-Citizen (G2C) components of its e-Government, Brunei should not and need not reinvent the wheel. As Brunei's neighbours have made significant leaps in their e-Government initiatives, the country would be best served if it deployed its resources to innovate and adapt on existing best practices learned from other countries rather than building unnecessarily from the ground up. Brunei's G2C e-Government initiative in particular, could benefit from collaboration with Singapore, Taiwan and Korea. For example, Singapore's eCitizen portal (www.ecitizen.gov.sg) would be a good model government of outreach into the community driven by ICT, while Taiwan and Korea have their own respective e-citizen service portals.

These sites integrate all online government services provided by individual ministries, and to develop the portal as the oft-mentioned "One-Stop Shop" for e-Government services.

Closer to home, the Department of Economic Planning and Development has fulfilled the G2C and G2B role to a commendable degree by providing quarterly reports on CPI, GDP, External Trade, as well as Economic Bulletins and Labour Force Surveys. These data are especially useful and important not only for investments into Brunei from a foreign source, but it also allows policy makers in the government to make key decisions based on up-to-date economic data.

Other government departments must take heed of the best practices found within the Brunei government itself and ensure and adopt such practices, allowing their data to be published in a timely fashion in order for policy makers to access as close to real time data and information as possible.

In order to achieve this, it is crucial that Brunei needs to refocus on developing the right human capital to fulfill this capacity — first identifying the skill pool necessarily to set up an efficient collection and publication of data, then embarking on human capital development projects to ensure the right skills are developed to meet the operational needs of the e-service, for example statisticians, web design and development, ICT professionals and management professionals who are able to ensure successful data collection and publication through an effectively managed central portal.

Another issue that should be highlighted is that Brunei's e-Government agenda may be focusing too much on hardware and software solutions and not enough on the human capital aspect. It is important that Brunei's e-Government agenda ensure it pays as much attention to the human element in e-Government and that Brunei's e-Government systems such as TAFIS and HRMS not be seen as an end in itself, but as a means by which to enable change. Otherwise, Brunei's investment in hardware solutions such as the PMOnet's $25 million centralised data centre announced in 2004 could be classified as a poor investment decision. In addition, while the introduction of TAFIS has helped in streamlining the process of payments and financial procedures for the government, the process of disbursement of funds and repayments to government contractors for finished projects still depend primarily on the human element of decision-making. To date, this still remains an issue, with scattered media reports of slow payments by various ministries on completed projects.

If the decision making process is not efficient and disbursements of funds are not as fast they should be to keep the economy's "cash flow" as healthy as can be, the net effect could be detrimental to Brunei's e-Government goals, and consequently Brunei's economic development goals.

Other goals and objectives remain in sight but significantly more work needs to be done. The e-Government National Centre under the Prime Minister's Office, set up in April of this year, with its primary mandate to boost ICT human capital development in the civil service, will need to ensure it is clear on its objectives and fully utilise its allocated budget to invest in plans and projects that will create the most value for the e-Government initiative. Investment in technology must not take a front seat at the expense of investment in human capital, as it is the former which will become obsolete faster than the latter. If financial and capital investments are seen as a yardstick for e-Government development, it would be hard pressed to deny that Brunei would most likely be ranked, in relative terms, one of the highest in the region.

Perhaps the one important defining factor in how Brunei's e-Government initiative will turn out is how these capital investments are handled: will they be pumped into creating truly value-adding capital, such as development of people with the right skill pool and competencies and marrying these skills with the right optimal technological tool, or will Brunei's investment be centred more on technological hardware and software solutions, which is regarded as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end?

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