The United States and Canada have been at the forefront of the e-government revolution. According to the latest Accenture annual e-government maturity report issued on April 6, 2005, for the fifth consecutive year, Canada ranked first out of the 22 surveyed countries, followed by the United States, Denmark, Singapore, and Australia. This videoconference in the Global Dialogue series, sponsored by the Bank’s E-Development Thematic Group and held on June 15, 2005, at the Bank headquarters in Washington, DC, examined the potential benefits and pitfalls of transferring the U.S. and Canadian experiences to the Bank’s client countries—particularly the design and implementation of national e-government strategies, interoperability and governance frameworks, and integrated architectures. Participants joined the event via videoconference from Brazil, Guatemala, Macedonia, Mexico, Sri Lanka, and Uganda.
Introductory remarks were provided by Robert Valantin, Cochair of the Bank’s E-Development Thematic Group and moderator of this event, and Rakesh Asthana, Director of Corporate Information Services within the Bank’s Information Solutions Group (ISG). Mark Forman, former Administrator of E-Government and Information Technology for the U.S. government, and Shauneen Furlong, former Executive Director of Government Online (Canada), made presentations that focused on the experiences of their respective governments in the implementation of e-government projects, and their relevance to the developing countries. Forman underlined that e-government is all about restructuring the organization, simplifying government, and reducing transaction costs. Every e-government project must be citizen-centered and have measurable impact, he said, no matter whether the impact comes in the form of service improvements, monetized profits, or policy gains. Furlong added that a well-targeted e-government project may bring out the unrealized innovative potentials of civil servants, though there are often high unexpected costs of providing a secure channel for citizen interaction.
Representatives from countries connected via videoconference provided their own perspectives on e-government, including Lalith Weeratunga, Secretary to the Prime Minister (Sri Lanka); Godfrey Kibuuka, Commissioner for Communications at the Ministry of Works, Housing and Communications (Uganda); Patricia Pessi, E-Government Coordinator of the Ministry of Planning (Brazil); Jani Makraduli, President of the Committee for Information Technology (Macedonia); and Alejandro Ludlow, Head of National and International Digital Sharing of the E-Mexico National System.
Robert Schware, Lead Informatics Specialist in the Bank’s Global Information and Communication Technologies Department, and Deepak Bhatia, Manager of the ISG E-Government Practice Unit, offered Bank perspectives and debated the applicability of U.S. and Canadian experiences. In the closing section, a rich dialogue emerged as members of the audience in Washington and in countries connected via videoconference asked questions of the two presenters and of each other.
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