The 100 € e-Gov portal is an initiative that is lead by ALTEC Research, as part of work carried out in the European IST Project OneStopGov (http://www.onestopgov-project.org).
It follows the logic of the 100 $ laptop and builds on experiences and lessons of the latter to improve the situation in the addressed field.
More specifically we promote the idea of a truly low cost and generic e-Government solution that will be open for download as an integrated product and service suite that can be purchased and used for free or with an extreme low cost (similar to the 100 dollar laptop) so that some basic costs for running the promotional campaign can be subsidised.
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 deployment parties will stay on affortable levels.
Motivation and background for our idea
What is the notion of wealth in a society? Or in a country? Or in a company and any other form of an organization? An increasing number of people give more emphasis to the immaterial (‘intangible’) assets and not to the physical ones. Knowledge is considered as the steam engine for growth.
However, in many cases we tend to think that growth in a less developed (according to the principles of development of our Western society according to which North American and North European countries and economies are well developed) country or in a problem region follows different paths and may be described with different curves than in developed ones.
The Net has already exhibited its potential and its power to revolutionize this reality – it is only a matter of time and good intentions to see this new positive reality taking place at a global level.
Our central thesis is that growth in less favoured areas and countries on the planet and in what we generally in vain characterise as second, third or fourth world, can support growth in the first world –new markets shall unfold their potential and the best way for the first world to conclude its financial invasion and its economic expansionism is by means of exploiting the mistakes that have been made.
Most example cases of suboptimalities faced in the new and emerging markets that had as center of gravity technology-driven developments related to two general classes:
|
| • |
They were either related to greed,
|
| • |
Or they were related to some mistaken understanding of the market dynamics.
|
|
Greed is, besides a human quality (or rather disquality), a symptom that shows up in the form of companies wanting to impose their own solutions as de-facto standards in order to monopolise a market. These type of delusions are driving to problems – not only the companies that they operate them but the entire society.
It is not a novelty to recognize what all stakeholders in the ICT industry are acknowledging, i.e. that increasingly sophisticated e-Government infrastructures and – most importantly – e-Government services will cause dramatic changes in the corporate services and the governments during the following years, and that e-Government standards and service-oriented applications shall be the catalysts (see for example the Economist Foresight 2020 report on "Economic, industry and corporate trends: A report from the Economist Intelligence Unit" which was sponsored by Cisco Systems, copyright by Economist Intelligence Unit, 2006).
However, what is becoming more and more a serious shortcoming in several sectors and aspects of e-Government is the lack of consistent strategies that would concurrently facilitate investments from the side of the various stakeholders for promoting consensus building, through specific actions.
This brings at the surface the practical problem of how to manage any spill over effects that might seriously diminish the growth potential for this still-in-its-infancy market. Furthermore, it is still recognised that any E- Government technical platforms built upon open standards can greatly ease progress towards the growth and prosperity of the people and the countries, by ensuring the necessary levels of integration and interoperability are in place for truly ‘joined-up’ and cross-border e-Government.
Europe has to admit that we all now are able to demonstrate that we have collected enough evidence which proves that many (scarce) resources were being continuously wasted reinventing systems and developing ‘silo’ technologies which are not interoperable between government agencies or with private sector partners. The business bottom line for the above situation is that a plethora of apospasmatic solutions has bred, that provides all the necessary conditions of diseconomies of scale in the addressed field of e-Government, and with solutions that are de facto handicapped to not enable multiplicative uptake.
We don’t debate against the pros of profit making – the concern is where exactly the profit comes from. It is not unethical to cash in on an innovation – and enjoy high margins of profitability. For this, the pharmaceutical industry is able to show many relevant cases. However, and in the case of e-Government infrastructures and
|
| • |
Either solutions that are designed in some golden-ivory corporate tower and which shall not have any micro chance of success when employed at a broader level and in environments outside the golden-ivory tower environment
|
| • |
Or solutions that build on the particularities and idiosyncrasies of the target environment, and for which respect is paid both in the cultural aspects and values of the environment they will be applied.
|
|
The world is not offering to the sales people or developers and programmers one single country – it needs more than an addition in a corporate organisation chart, a brand new corporate label or a new business unit to address it.
But the mistake is not new: it is old. People are tempted to try sell exactly the same E-system that has been developed for a company in the banking sector in England in a Greek regional authority, or a Moldavian Ministry. And, even worse, they try to sell the same E-system that might have been developed for a big German multi-national company in a cluster of small and medium-sized regional authorities in the Eastern part of the same country. The bottom line is still the same: no respect for the customer as long as we sell our system, our technology or our service. Even if the customer shall go bankrupt tomorrow and we shall not receive any payment from them, we are happy.
In the following sections we present our idea about a low-cost 100€ e-Gov portal. We believe that it provides several points that can help the discussion in the area of widening the use of e-Government systems at a global or macro level while also respecting the micro-environments of the various deployment authorities.
|
|
|
|
|
