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Excerpts from a presentation by Marios Chatzidimitriou to appear as part of the e-Learning Africa Conference 2007
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“We need a simple cheap solution that works anywhere, eliminating the need for Public Authorities to perform costly adoption feasibility studies, or building costly infrastructure to deploy it on.”
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Public sector in Europe had the luck to receive huge amounts of funding from different sources (direct funds from European Commission Programmes, Structural Funds, National Community Support Framework Programmes, etc.). However this plethora of resources did not result into successful project implementations. The treatment to this was also not the best: people simply increased the budgets in their projects while similar or even bigger scale suboptimalities emerged.
Africa cannot afford this type of behaviour simply because there is a lack of funding resources. Therefore, there is a great interest in the adoption and deployment of low-cost solutions. Be them in the area of e-Government, e-Health, e-School, the common denominator seems to be: how can we achieve more (outcomes, results, impact, change, etc.) with less (resources, budgets, etc.).
This is not utopic - it only needs the existence of a strong political imperative and a critical mass of experiences and skills of the people that shall implement this.
Know-how has not been treated as an important factor in many EU members - and especially for their public sector organisations, employees were not empowered or motivated to increase their knowledge capital and foster the acquisition of new skills.
This era seems now to come to an end: more and more interest is attracted by public entities in supplying their employees with increased skills and capacities. For sure, this is treated as a new market, capable to supply various actors such as companies, academic or research institutions, etc. with 'new' money.
Drawing again our examples from Europe, we can see that this does not necessarilly help at all: employees are exposed to a set of information and content sources, without necessarilly getting an idea of how they can employ them in their own environment. Moreover, the deployment of the acquired skills is not regarded as a success indicator - usually the impact of an eLearning project is usually correlated with the amount of hours allocated to it or - even worse … - the covered topics.
Low cost budgeting procedures, easy to plan, program and implement methodologies using the Internet and the direct linkage to adoption and deployment will be the leitmotiv for the next years.
In this picture, the following has to be taken into account:
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To produce a study on the principles of such low-cost eLearning procedures and practices in the Government sector, including potential, benefits, barriers, key success factors etc. |
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To study existing process models for eLearning as well as processes in the participating public authorities |
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To derive organisational process re-engineering models as well as process adaptations and improvements in order to accommodate the existing as well as the future needs of Government authorities |
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To produce a roadmap and a set of guidelines for public authorities wishing to introduce eLearning initiatives in various levels (small-scale, big-scale, vertical or horizontal, pilot, etc.) |
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Having in mind the above, we aim to implement a low cost generic e-Government solution. Our main idea is for an eGov product and service suite that can be purchased and used with low cost (something similar to the 100 dollar laptop). The successful realisation of our vision, depends not only on marketing a cheap product, but also on ensuring that the process of its adaptation by the potential customer will stay on affortable levels.
To create a product that will reach the market, we need to provide a fully functional solution. Our priority is simply to have something that works, and not a sophisticated solution that will stay in papers.
We need a simple cheap solution that works anywhere, eliminating the need for Public Authorities to perform costly adoption feasibility studies, or building costly infrastructure to deploy it on.
Our proposal includes an overall framework that will provide clear guidelines and recommendations for adapting the e-Government solution. This framework includes:
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A description of government principles, its benefits and barriers |
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A roadmap and guidelines for public authorities at all levels wishing to realize e-government |
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This framework will be accompanied by a flexible modular architecture designed for our low-cost solution.
This will be an open architecture, aimed to cover all aspects needed for a full software solution, implementing them as modules and providing standard interfaces for integrating them. Our approach should be able to integrate with existing back office having minimum requirements, to support the low-cost vision.
In cases where a Public Authority has insuffisient backoffice infrastructure, our framework will be used as a guide to build an environment on which to deploy our platform. In any case, our eGov product suite will provide a solution simple to deploy, use and maintain for any Public Authority with minimal effort.
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| Who is Marios?
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