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 Bandar Seri
Begawan – The Government of His Majesty the Sultan and Yang DiPertuan of Brunei Darussalam has a vision to make ICT
as a new growth engine, to enhance human capital development, produce more
local workforce that is willing and able to move forward as well as
leveraging in digital assets.
Minister of Communications, Pehin Dato Seri Setia Awang Haji Abu Bakar bin Hj Apong, said this in his keynote address during the
"Common Government Framework Seminar" organised
by Microsoft at Mutiara Ballroom, Sheraton Utama Hotel, yesterday.
The minister said close collaboration between the private sector
industry players such as Microsoft and the government is critical in
building a sustainable IT ecosystem in Brunei.
He said this is an area, which can be further explored in which
Microsoft for instance can provide and contribute technology, expertise,
dedicated programs, resources, training tools and skills.
Meanwhile, the government, he said, can contribute property
licensing commitment and intellectual property rights enforcement
commitment.
Pehin Awang Haji
Abu Bakar said one of the challenges is the lack
of adequate skills in the workforce to manage the transformation to an
electronic government.
A common framework for interoperability among ministries and
agencies therefore can help resolve these challenges.
A well-structured approach to interoperability can help open up
data and information silos and enable information to be exchanged more
easily and usefully between systems, he said.
A common infrastructure shared by multiple government e-services
can produce benefits in terms of providing a common user identity
management model for all government services; sharing common costs across
the government rather repeating expenditure multiple times by duplicating
identical pieces of core infrastructure for each online service; enabling
innovative joined-up services; providing a single, consistent access path
for government services; accelerating the delivery of e-Government services
by providing reusable common components needed for online service delivery;
scaling to meet the growing demand; and driving the take-up of e-Government
services, the minister added,
He said, today ICT has an increasing pervasive influence in the
government. Harnessing the power of ICT allows the delivery of government
e-services in a seamless and efficient manner.
Provision of government e-services takes many forms and involves
multiple stakeholders. The government can use e-services to interact with
other governments, businesses and citizens.
Another challenge, he said, that governments are facing towards
seamless delivery of e-services is that the systems are generally purchased
on a solution-by-solution basis, and driven by the need to acquire the best
solution for a specific purpose.
The result of this is the creation of a wide range of separate
information and data islands across the government machinery; with no easy
way of unlocking the valuable information assets they collectively contain
to support more useful and productive processes.
This is also true for Brunei as identified by our eGovernment committee and confirmed by the observations
of Brunei Darussalam e-Government Implementation Review of August 2006, he
said.
The minister also applauded Microsoft's initiative in organising the seminar and to share the vision for a
Connected Government Framework.
A successful framework would exploit existing government
investments and provide a means of enabling those existing systems to
participate in a wider ecosystem of information systems.
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