Next Level for e-governance

Of late, the government
has made massive investment in IT to make things more convenient for
its citizens as well as to enhance the efficiency of governance. In a
country of billion plus people, the amount of information that these
systems are generating and processing is huge. But beyond the
immediate use, this huge collected information is not being used.
Even today it takes immense amount of time to get any meaningful
insight. While on the ground, the situation has changed for better in
many places, we do not have an idea on what is happening. The
preparation of answers to the MPs questions in Parliament still takes
as much time as it used to take 10 years back. RTI queries also take
enormous time. Imagine using BI for the world's largest democracy,
where citizens live in extremes and of course the most dominant
population being the middle class who mostly are affected by the
government decisions and from the way it functions. Using BI for the
governance of the nation is something the private players are looking
at. With the popularity of Right to Information (RTI) Act, the
government has to take the responsibility of providing information to
the citizens regarding the functioning of the government offices and
the status of their appeal for a service from the government. And with
the central government backing up the UID project-Aadhar, the
application of BI would play an important role.

INDIAN E-GOVERNANCE-HAS
IT REACHED THE STAGE OF MATURITY?

Gartner had come up with a
4 phase e-governance model. The hierarchy starts from information,
followed by the stage of interaction. The third phase is the stage of
transaction and the final stage calls for transformation. The first
phase of providing information means having a presence on the web and
delivering relevant information to the external public. The external
public are namely the business interest groups
and the citizens willing to seek information. The second phase of
interaction is a stage where the government interacts with the
citizens and the business interest groups. In this stage, citizens
can interact with the government officials using emails, search
engines for coming across some documents. In the third phase,
technology becomes more intricate but the value sought by the public
is higher. And finally, there comes the stage of transformation in
which all the information systems are integrated and the public can
avail services at 1 virtual counter.

It seems that after the
RTI Act has gained popularity across all the states, the respective
State Information
Commisions are taking the queries by citizens very seriously.
Dataquest had sent some queries to
the Orissa Information Commission (OIC) about the status of RTI
applications in the state and the kind of technology deployed at the
government offices across the state. We are still receiving responses
from all the districts of Orissa. This gives us an impression that
the Indian governance is at the second stage of this e-governance
model formulated by Gartner.

Though it is hard to
believe that government is taking up the deployment of IT solutions
seriously and more surprising is the fact that it is quite prompt in
putting its plans into actions. The government offices in the state
and the center, the public sector undertakings are modernizing their
infrastructure with all desirable technologies at place and from here
they would step up to the next level where they would like to use BI
tools to derive all relevant information. By bringing in more analysis,
they could
predict the trends in the future and take apt decisions.

HOW CAN BI HELP INDIAN
EGOVERNANCE?

BI can be applied where
there is tremendous information. The data has to be accurate so that
some meaning could be derived out of it through BI. UIDAI has been
trying to link with government projects like Mahatma Gandhi National
Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA), Rashtriya Swasthya Bima
Yojna (RSBY), and Public Distribution System (PDS). This means that
there will be a huge enrollment and the presence of a vast database
would call for the need for BI. If one has to seek the details of the
beneficiaries under a particular scheme, BI would ensure that maximum
number of beneficiaries are covered and the time and effort taken to
procure these information is greatly
reduced. “The government is very vast. We can segregate them to
PSUs, defence, central government, state government, and
municipalities. A lot of government units have already started using
BI tools and they are looking at BI through various requirements,”
says Maneesh Sharma, head, business analytics and technology, SAP
India. Sharma says, “The biggest challenge of any BI project is the
availability of information and the accuracy of the data. Most of the
departments are facing these 2 challenges.”

Arvind Agarwal, head of
the center of excellence for analytics and DW/BI, Birlasoft, strongly
feels that data cleansing and data validation is very important for
BI. “DW/BI will force you to put the processes and datapoints in
place. It will also ensure that it creates some data bonding and
brings in ownership and accountability into the system,” says
Agarwal. BI and analytics can serve upto a great extent in terms of
spotting out the trends at present and in the future. Since the
government is initiating a lot of
e-governance projects and digitizing its offices, they will have to
take BI and analytics very seriously. “Most of the governments have
got huge amount of budget spends. To track record those budgets which
is going to be for citizen services, they would need lot of tracking
about the budgets and whether they are properly utilized or not,”
says Sanjay Mehta, CEO, MAIA Intelligence.

THE STEP AHEAD

With the growth of
internet across the country and the replacement of conventional
infrastructure to a digitized one, government will have to take the
next step forward. Citizens are becoming more participatory in the
political process of the nation and if required, people are also
using their RTI Act to ask for an account of their money used in
creating public infrastructure. People are willing to become more
rich in information and this will pester the government to move to
the next level- using BI tools to cull out
the important and required information and to spot out the possible
trends in future through analytics.