E-Government in Malaysia: Its Implementation So Far and Citizen's Adoption Strategies

In this advanced technology environment, various countries are implementing of electronic government (E-Government). Malaysia government started this implementation since the initiation of Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) in year 1996 as a way to achieve Vision2020. The e-government initiative launched the country to “Information Age”.

The objectives of implementation of e-government: -

• Improve the convenience, accessibility, and quality of interactions with citizens and businesses.
• Improve the speed and quality of policy development and improve coordination and enforcement.
• Enable the government to be more responsive to the needs of its citizens.
• Improve government operates internally as well as how effectively it delivery services to people in Malaysia.

E-government is one of the seven flagship applications in introduced in MSC. Under this e-government flagship, 7 main projects were identified to be the core of application. There are

• Generic Office Environment (GOE)
• Electronic Procurement (EP)
• Human Resource Management Information System (HRMIS)
• Project Monitoring System (PMS)
• Electronic Services Delivery (eService)
• Electronic Labor Exchange (ELX)

Benefits of implementation: -

1. Improves efficiency. It is because since the use of information technology enables improvement in mass processing tasks and public administration operations.
2. Improves services after adoption of customer-focused approach which is developed based on best understanding of citizen requirement
3. Achieve specific outcomes. Through Internet, stakeholders can share information/ideas and contribute to specify policy outcomes.
4. Contribute to others economic policy objectives by promoting the information society and ICT industry.

Problems of implementation: -

• After a period of rapid expansion, e-government is showed just making a great impact during the early stage of the implementation only.
• New challenges faced in integrating the e-government as they are growing. It is because this implementation requires rapid change in order to suit the advanced technology.
• It will be risky, expensive and difficult if lacking of the technical support from IT professionals.

Example of e-government implementation:-

The example of e-government application that is familiar is e-filing, launched by Inland Revenue Department. Individuals were expected be able to file their taxes online to IRD using MyKey which is a digital signature embedded into an individual’s MyKad. For companies, they are able to digitally sign their C form and submit the document electronically to IRD by using MyKey digital signature. It is convenient to both citizen and officer because no extra paper works for them.

In order to encourage citizen’s adoption, some strategies have been taken by Government:-

• Through advertising on media such as newspaper, television, radio and also online advertising, to promote the availability and usefulness of e-government.
• Provide a clear and direct assessment to the e-government website which lets people easier to handle. Eg.: guideline provided.
• Provide online training. There are some online clip which teach people how to online assessment.

For my opinion, the implementation of e-government services will bring long-term benefits to the public, business and the government itself even though there are still has some limitations in the development of it. In order to ensure the success of e-government implementation, the governments should market their offer, improve citizen’s awareness of the benefits and increase take-up of online services.

For more detailed, visit the following website:

http://www.intanbk.intan.my/psimr/articles/Article1%20-%20Full.pdf

http://www.mscmalaysia.my/