e-Government Services in Azerbaijan Current State and Perspectives

e-Government Services in Azerbaijan Current State and Perspectives

In November 04, 2011 round-table meeting devoted to “e-Government Services in Azerbaijan Current State and Perspectives” organized by Multimedia Center took place in International Press Center, Baku, Azerbaijan. Multimedia Center Director Osman Gunduz presented his view and concerns about this important subject. Participants discussed existing problems and barriers before e-government transition. As an outcome of the meeting organizers will prepare proposal to be delivered to government.
Azerbaijan Presidential decree on transition to the e-government services from May 23, 2011 strenthed on the importance of these services for government and public. According to this decree Ministry of Communication and Information Technologies was assigned as responsible party for drawing out policy and strategy of national e-government project. The participants of meeting noticed that despite of the fact that final document had to be prepared by Ministry within 3 months, still there is not any publicly accessible information related to this issue.
One of another possible way, widely implemented by other countries which accomplished successful e-government projects, consist in forming over governmental Working Group consist of members/specialists from all ministries and agencies. They have to work together to prepare recommendations (e-Government Roadmap or Strategy), to indicate redundancy and specify the list of potential e-services according to their value for citizens, improvement of government efficiency and possibility of short term deployment. Software design experts and system architects should develop e-Government Architecture, which consist of Standard Technology Model, Data Architecture and Standards.

Some important issues have to be taken into account in e-Government project:

Main Goals of e-Government Project:

• Simplify the interaction of citizens with government and access to governmental services
• Increase government effectiveness
• Increase government responsiveness to citizens and transparency

Key Objectives of e-Government Project:

• Eliminate layers of government citizens interacting with
• Make possible to access to information and services for citizens, business and government anytime, anywhere
• Simplify business processes, reduce cost and eliminating redundancy
• Streamline government functioning

Key Barriers of e-Government Project:

• Uncertainty in Government Organizational Architecture
• Lack of process-oriented approach (If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing – Edwards Deming)
• Automation of inefficiency (The first rule of any technology is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency – Bill Gates)
• Islands of automation – when ministries or agencies order systems to solve particular problems without concern of the e-services
• Resistance to change (To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often – Winston Churchill)
• Insufficient skills, knowledge and experience
• Insufficient interoperability between ministries and agencies
• Security concern