E-Government comments - what say you?

Technology: Enabler or a solution in and of itself?

A couple of days ago, we received a comment in our posting on e-government, from ole. Ole suggested that one factor contributing to the failings of Brunei's e-government initiatives lies with the selection of the change agents or project leaders, i.e. they are all from an IT background. In the worlds of ole:

".... it is a big disaster to let the IT community leading the e-government initiatives in Brunei (such as ITSSD and the EGSPEC). Not only it is a bottom-up approach; IT people don't normally focus on national policy objectives but more on the 'hardware' side of e-government. They always miss the human side of IT innovation. This explains why we have no G2C or G2B after 8 years of e-government".

We're glad that ole has posed this question on Debating Brunei. After all, this site was set up with this goal in mind: to spark discussion and debate about issues that arise from our country's economic, political and social development. We also firmly believe that our maturity as a country is measured by our ability (especially our government) to allow open discussion and debate without devolving into finger-pointing & shouting matches that are more akin to territorial marking behaviour than civilised discourse between intelligent and informed stakeholders of this country's future (off on a tangent,we know, but we wanted to emphasise the goal of Debating Brunei).

Now back to ole's question. We believe that ole's brought up an important issue that we should discuss and analyse. Has the government, in their zeal to push the e-government initiative forward, somehow forgotten about the human element in IT and e-government? To a degree, we believe that ole is right to suggest that sometimes IT professionals may not be able to look at the e-government issue from a national policy perspective - in reality, however, we must also accept that most IT professionals aren't exactly trained to think in national policy terms.

Sometimes, technology is somehow given so much attention that instead of technology being seen as a means to an end - an enabler of change, so to speak - it is seen as an end in itself. That is, technology somehow is adopted for the sake of technology without allowing it to enable the human element to push for development and improvements in our system. A perfect example of this is our national identity smart card. Designed with a smart chip that is suppose to carry all our personal details (we'll research into this in more detail in due course), Brunei's national identity card has become nothing more than an expensive, glorified and somewhat misguided exercise. Adoption of technology in this instance, have done nothing to contribute to any improvements in our government systems and processes, because the human element in the e-government equation have not been followed through with sufficient commitment and resources to enable the technology to push for real change.

Perhaps there are IT professionals out there who disagree with ole's and our assessment. Or perhaps the solution to the question posed is not as simple as we think. Whatever differences in opinion there may be on this issue, perhaps we could spark up a discourse on this issue, and through Debating Brunei, come up with some meaningful answers to the issue at hand.

Well, the floor's all yours......