eGovernance & Change Management

eGovernance is the current buzzword in the Indian Govt sector, both at the center and the state. This is definitely a welcome step by the Govt to leverage technology in reaching out to the mass. Definitive projects are launched in the field of education, healthcare and other sectors. The thrust is on inclusion of rural section in social sectoral programs. This is outside the ongoing endeavor in automating routine citizen centric services like Passport, Ration Card, Driving License, Birth & Death certificate etc.

The govt has showed its seriousness in eGovernance through outlaying a whopping 3% of its annual budget towards spend outlook with a simple objective of rendering faster and better service to all citizens across the country in a transparent manner with clear accountability.

The Indian IT service industry is rightly poised to help the Government in achieving this dream with its talent and global experience of two decades. The experience in project management, application development, implementation, hosting, support and operation will come handy. At the same time, telecom connectivity is a catalyst through its reach and technology.

Hence, from the implementation perspective, each of these eGovernance projects will be a success though challenged in terms of schedule and budget. While the challenges may be behemoth, it will not fail in terms of the outcomes.

The challenges envisaged will be two fold: - Readiness of Govt departments in process innovation and - Readiness of Govt staff in accepting and respecting eGovernance implementation.

The service improvement can only come if the way things are done in department floors are questioned and better way of doing the things are thought through. Mere automation of current manual process is not going to help. Hence the bureaucrats need to fasten their belts. They have a major role to play apart from tendering and contracting IT projects. They need to be involved in a bottom up approach in defining the process, bringing in improvement and/or innovation while controlling the projects in a top-down approach on the outcome, risk, budget and schedule.

The second challenge is quite a huge one. Currently the staff in the Govt departments are mostly not computer savvy. Rather there is a general arm length attitude towards the computers. It is not the lower division or upper division clerks but the senior officers who avoid computers in their normal office work like reading or writing email, opening document etc. They depend on their secretaries or deputies to do these tasks. All Govt departments still follow note-sheet based communication with diary dispatch records rather than electronic ones. These same officers and staff are an integral part of each eGovernance project as they will be the ones who will be the users of electronic system for executing services.

While the Govt and Industry is busy in identifying the projects, a major Change Management program needs to be launched in parallel as the stakes are too high.