E-Government in Malaysia: Its implementation so far and citizen's adoption strategies.

E-Government or Electronic Government is defined as the use of information technology in public sector as a medium of delivering information and services. It is to provide citizens and organizations with more convenient access to government information and public services to citizens. It is an efficient and effective way of conducting government business transaction with citizens and business and within governments themselves. Through the adoption of e-government, government objectives can be achieved by integrating the processing and communication technology. Furthermore, government processes can also be improved through the adoption of e-government delivery of services to Malaysia people. It seeks to improve the convenience, accessibility and quality of interactions with citizens and businesses as well as, improving the speed and quality of policy development, coordination and enforcement by improving the flow of information and processes within government in connecting citizens and building interactions with and within the society.

The E-Government was launched in Malaysia to lead the country into the Information Age. It will improve the government internal operations and the Malaysia so far has implemented systems such as Electronic Services System (E-services), Human Resource Management Information System (HRIMS), E-Syariah and myGovernment Portal, which serve the purpose of providing government information and services to the citizens. For example, the myGovernment (My-Gov) portal acts as a one-stop source of Malaysian government information and services to the citizens. Recently, it has won Global ICT Awards at the World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT) 2008, held at Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre (KLCC). Some of successful applications of e-government are:

• Electronic Labor Exchange (ELX) (http://www.elx.gov.my/) which is a one stop-centre for labor market information, as supervised by the Ministry of Human Resource (MOHR) has matched 75,000 potential employees with employers since 2005. It enables employers and potential employees to communicate. The purpose is to create an effective job matching process and to ensure man power's utilization is optimized. Over the years, many Malaysians have started to use ELX to search for jobs.


• Online renewal of driving licenses


• E-Filing or Electronic filing of income tax forms.


• Voter’s information


• Details for government tenders

The adoption of e-government has brought a lot more convenient to Malaysia citizens. This is because most of the transactions can be done at a single click, at any time infact people no longer need to queue up to perform certain government transaction such as filing the income tax form. Eventhough, e-government is still unpopular among the citizens but sooner people will realize its importance.

Learn more about e-government: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Government

Credit:
http://www.american.edu/initeb/ym6974a/egovernment.html