Arthur Riel, Denisa Popescu and Luisita Guanlao
involve the ministries in creating a holistic vision and incentives for ministries to deploy the e‐Government initiative in a timely fashion. The ability to provide an outside budget for ministries serves as a powerful incentive for government facets to follow the common vision.
There are many measures of success when analyzing management models of eGovernment deployments and their impact on national strategies. The most important measure is the increased efficiency of government as seen by a nation’ s citizens and business entities. The interoperability of government ministries / departments is another important metric that can be examined. While uninteresting in isolation, interoperability is a measure for future success in the eGovernment space. Indicators of IT innovation and management effectiveness, such as data center consolidation can also be useful indicators of IT management arrangements on eGovernment success( Markus et al, 2012). Efficient disbursement of budget is often examined as a metric because it tends to be easier to measure than more qualitative forms of performance indicators. However, movement of money is no guarantee of improved efficiency as seen by the key stakeholders and beneficiaries of an eGovernment deployment, and therefore not particular useful in this context.
2. Centralized management / centralized funding
The first, and arguably the most efficient management model consists of a government structure where the country has a government CIO to whom all IT resources report in a hierarchical structure. The management of the e‐Government initiative is run by a single facet of the government( e. g. Prime Minister’ s Office, President’ s Office, Ministry of Finance) with the other facets taking their lead from the primary lead facet. This model allows for a central point of control to define the strategy and manage its execution. E‐Government initiatives are often slowed down, or even fail, due to the dismal state of core data in most countries( or any large organization). The data requirements for a set of government services is often created and maintained by several ministries. For example, information necessary for an electronic passport application might require birth certificate data from the Ministry of the Interior, a criminal background check from the Ministry of Justice and clearance of tax liens from the Ministry of Finance. The silo‐based structures so prevalent within government ministries make this task arduous at best and nearly impossible at worst. In most cases each Ministry will use a different identification for citizens making cross referencing data very difficult. Having centralized management allows for a rationalization of data entities across the ministries thereby making it much easier to roll out e‐Government services.
By centralizing the funding model, the country CIO can ensure that his or her policies are executed properly by withholding funding from ministries that do not standardize on data, technology stack or any other IT related facet. The IT heads of each ministry operate much like department heads in private organizations, each reporting to and receiving their funding from, the CIO. This optimizes the IT spend and provides a mechanism to ensure that a central strategy is executed uniformly across the organization.
Given all the benefits of a centralized management and funding model one might wonder why we need examine any other models. As efficient as this model is, it is also extremely rare. In fact, the case study for this model is not a pure centralized model, but the closest example of a country with such a model. The reasons are varied but a common thread is the silo‐based nature of government which is exasperated by multiple political parties sharing power concurrently. These parties often have very different visions of country development and their debates can be rigorous. These differences spill over into the national development plan and its associated IT strategy.
Our case study focuses on Moldova where there was a decision to strategize and execute on an e‐Government program(‘ E‐Government to have positive effects for Moldova’, 2010). The Prime Minister centralized the management of the program delivery under his office and created a national CIO, placing the program team under this new central role. The first phase of the project, a $ 22MM project to create a Moldovan government cloud is currently underway. The strategy for rolling out the e‐Government services is to first define and prioritize a list of required services. A subset of high priority services with a common set of underlying data requirements is selected. This underlying data model can then be architected, refined and populated from various ministry databases, data marts and other sources. In this way, heterogeneous data sources can be normalized in a productive manner, with e‐Government services developed on top of the resultant gold data source(‘ Moldova E‐Government Workshop’, 2012).
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