E-Governance Initiative in USA

E GOVERNANCE CASE STUDY (BSCCSIT/BCA/MASTERS)

Introduction

The President of the United States, Mr. George W. Bush had issued President's Management Agenda (PMA) for E-Government in the US in 2001. This document laid down clearly the policy, challenges, strategies, direction and future implementation plan along with pas achievements in e-governance activity in the US, The details of 24 cross agency e-government initiatives and other related efforts also are given in the documents. An e-government task force was also set up to review these 24 initiatives.

Recognizing clearly the vital importance of e-governance initiatives, the Agenda in July 2001 aimed at making better use of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) investments to eliminate the massive but wasteful federal*  government expenditure running into billions of dollars, reduce governments paper work burden on citizens and business, and improve government responses time to citizens from weeks to minutes, Very important, a key goal was set to reduce the time taken by citizens to three click on the internet' to access any government information or service. The agenda identifies internet' to access any government information or service. The agenda identifies three governing principles of e-government:

• Citizen centric, instead of government centric

• Result oriented, instead of procedure oriented

• Market based, instead of regulation based.

Agendas for E-Governance 

The Federal Enterprise Architecture for E-Governance 

The agenda for e-governance brought out the need for Federal Enterprise  

Architecture (FEA) – a comprehensive view of what government organizations does, how does it do and how IT supports it. The FEA is business focused framework that provide the office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is the agency responsible for FEA and the Federal Agencies with a methodology to monitor, analyze and control federal investments is IT. The FEA enable horizontal (Cross Federal) and vertical (Federal, State and Local government) collaboration and communications with respect to IT investments.

Implementation of President's Management Agenda

The e-governance initiative will enable implementation of various parts of Presents Management Agenda (PMA):

Budget and performance integration, strategic management of human resources, competitive procurement of services and bidding, and improved financial performance. E-payroll, e-training, (e-learning), e-clearance, and e-procurement. 

Performance Measurement in E-Governance Implementations 

A quarterly scoreboard is used to monitor the performance of various federal agencies engaged in e-governance implementation in their respective departmental activities, Standard requirements require the federal agencies to fulfill at least three of the following criteria:

1. Integration of citizen's one-stop service delivery through Fistgov.gov and also call centers or service centers.

2. Minimization of burden on business by re-using data previously collected or using XML to receive transmission and data

3. Inter governmental deployment of e-grants or geospatial outsourcing

4. Achieving productivity, improvements by implementing Customers Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Change Management (SCM), Knowledge Management (KM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). 

A federal Agency will be given "Green' Score if it meets all the above standards for success. "Yellow" score will be given if the agency had partially achieved this and "red" will be given if there exist significant gaps between the goals set and ground reality in the agency.

A number of agencies have shown improvement from red to yellow such as Department of Education, Department of Energy, and Department of External Affairs. NSF (National Science Foundation) upgrading itself from yellow to green.

Subsequently, 'Green' was given to a number of agencies such as Department of Housing and Urban Development, Development of Interior.

Department of Justice, Department of Agriculture, Department of Labor, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, NSP, and Social Security Administration.

E-Government Projects, Portfolios or Categories 

The e-government projects are organized into portfolio or categories as defined by the customers requirements served. The following categories and described in items of their goals  

Government to Citizens (G2C)

The objectives of (G2C) category of services is to provide one stop online access to governmental information and services to individual citizens. In this the citizens are expected to access and obtain any information in second as agents days and weeks. For examples Govbenefits.gov portal provides instantaneous access to citizens regarding information about all government program and service through a single web site within three clicks. 

Government to Business (G2B)

The objective of (G2B) portfolio or category of services is to provide on stop access to business community on information pertaining to all government procedures, and rules, and regulations pertaining to them. The previous practice was making business submit multipole forms of data multiple timers to different government agencies. The objective is to provide a single window interface with the government, including all departments.

The government should re-use data submitted only once for different multiple purpose. This regulates appropriate interpretation of the same data entered in various formats. The deployment of a more effective technology will help streamline the myriad reporting requirements, as well as facilitate a more efficient means for business to interact with the government. Citizens or Business can easily find rules and regulations at www.regulation.gov even without the help of an attorney or a lawyer.

Government to Government (G2G)

The objectives of this portfolio is to enable different wings of the federal government or the State government interact effectively with each other. To achieve this, the objective of the Federal Government is to make it easier for states. So meet the reporting request while prompting the use of performance monitoring. This will definitely result in substantial saving for the State governments. The data delivery will be more accurate and time saving. An example in this direction will be Home Land Security Initiative, a security portal that will improve disaster management process, by simplifying and unifying the interaction between various government agencies as Federal, state and Local administration as well as Local Safely and Security Organizations and Personnel.

Internal Efficiency and Effectiveness (IEE)

The objectives of this portfolio is to modernize and improve the efficiency of internal process of the Federal Government in order to reduce the cost of internal administration of the Federal Government. IEE portfolio focus is to apply the best IT practice and also the bet management practice into the Federal Government operation. This aims at introducing the industry's latest best practices of Supply chain Management, Financial Managements Knowledge Management into the regular government functioning – a highly ambitions aim. However, these techniques, if introduced into the government, can revolutionize the Government functioning, speed and efficiency, eliminate all delays and improve employees satisfaction. This also includes introduction of e-learning techniques into government staff training. The e-training portal www.golearn.gov is capable of providing enhance access to high quality training and competency development for Federal Government employees.

The authentication module will deliver a solution that ensure employees authentication using multiple technologies while, at the same time protecting and respecting, the privacy and security of the users. In order words authentication provides the trust and security required for making e-government initiatives successful.

The following is a table highlighting the features of G2C and G2B:

Table G2C and G2B

Summarized the Features of G2G and IEE

Table: G2G and IEE

Underlines the Features of E-authentication.

Table: E-authentication

E-government accomplishment in USA

The following e-governance projects throw light on the e-governance initiatives in USA:

i. FirstGov.gov. First Gov.gov is an American citizens' getaway to about 200 million pages of information distributed in more than 22,000 Federal and State government web sites. Named as one of the "Top 50 most incredibly useful web sites" in the entire world by Yahoo in 2002, this service is designed to provide government service within three 0clicks. The new "Three clicks" strategy has drawn dramatically large number of hits up to 30 millions.

ii. Volunteer.gov. The site enables American citizens interested in volunteering to work for more than 1,00,000 opening available in government hospital and other Federal organizations.

iii. Recreation.gov. The site provides citizens online access to more than the total 22,000 National parks and Recreation areas of US. 

iv. Gov.Benefits.gov. This site provides access to more than 400 government programs of benefits. It receives about 5,00,000 visitors per month and is listed as a 'Hot site'.

v. IRS free filing. Over 80 million Americans can file their taxes online for free.

vi. Integrated Acquisition Environment (IAE). This site provides information on past performance of contractors and also Federal technical data on acquisition material.

vii. Business.Law.gov. The site is designed to provide small business quick access to legal and regulation information tools of compliance, the ability to perform online transactions and business  related information of the government.

viii. Regulation.gov. The site provides data on all government regulations. This has received 2.6 millions hits in January 2003.

ix. GoLearn.gov. This is the world' most visited e-training initiative site with more than 6 millions hits, with information over 2000 e-training courses, e-books and carrier development resources. This site has more than 45,000 registered users who can receive training at negligible cost.    

x. E-payroll. This is a consolidated payroll from 22 different centers. More than a billion dollars re saved with this site.  

xi. E-clearance. This is an integrated database that will help security clearance process. 99%  of all security clearance are available electronically.

Conclusion

This case study provides a clear but brief view of the IT enablement taking place in the Government of USA. The web based services offered by government of USA to the citizens are detailed in this case study.

REF: E GOVERNANCE BY CSR PRABHU