Need for Unified E-Governance Framework in Pakistan

Introduction

Pakistan is a country who's public institutions websites' primary contents are photo and message of the chairman, high-level pictorial org chart, phone numbers that never respond, and a few dead links that never respond.

Pakistan desperately needs a single uniform e-governance technology stack and infrastructure put in place at provincial and federal government levels. Such a unified framework will help in collaboration, will be easier to manage, secure, and cost-effective.

Having disparate systems doing the same thing across different departments and levels of government would be worse nightmare that should be avoided through upfront planning and foresight.

E-Governance framework would enable all functional/non-functional areas of government and society with modern IT systems and infrastructure which is further complemented by security, reliability, availability. Data science, business intelligence, and AI layers built on top of available data will further improve decision making.

Numerous futile efforts at reforming civil services of Pakistan almost always turn into structural reforms that address power structure and perks of service groups rather than true reforms of the system itself through e-governance and innovation for better delivery, visibility and efficiency.

Information Security

As a country, we are in a desperate situation, with our civil servants using foreign servers for email and other services for information storage and exchange. T

There is no concept of information security within our civil service or our security establishment. There are no digital security standards, SOP's, check and balances. 

There is no information security and digital infrastructure for governance. There will be a lot of resistance and a lot of resources will be required, but this is more important than BRT because it would result in 360-degree transformation of civil services and society. We need strong political will and capacity to do it on a war footing.

Data Availability for Decision Making

Reliable data is not available for decision making. The government often does not have any clue about wheat and sugar stocks, fuel stocks, and supply/demand situations. Timely decisions are not made due to poor data availability and quality.

Govt department don't have complete employee records as a result pensioners have to wait for years after retirement to get their pension and have to personally collect all of their employment related data from different departments and locations where they had to serve in their 40 years of professional life.

There are thousands of ghost employees in every government department, many more employees have fake degrees, there are many deserving employees who never get well-deserved postings, pay rises, or promotions because there is no HR system in place that can track employees performance, their contributions etc.

Key elements of E-Government Infrastructure

There are many elements of e-government including physical infrastructure and software services. E-Government infrastructure will be largely organized as a government cloud with many key components having their own clouds. All of these clouds will be centrally managed to ensure consistency, reliability, security and cost effectiveness.

Some of the cloud-based services that are desperately needed are:-

• Interactive websites providing relevant services e.g. accepting applications, sharing relevant data in secured fashion with specific persons
• Health Cloud with Patient Monitoring and other Systems
• Education Cloud with E-Learning and other Systems
• Accounting and Finance Systems
• ERP Systems
• Fleet Tracking Systems
• Human Resource Systems
• Essential services(Email, Word Processing, Excel, Storage, Presentation, Databases)
• Data Science and Business Intelligence layer for creating visibility and intelligence
• E-Services Portal and Mobile Applications for Public Service
• Data Centers with Security, Scalability, and Reliability

Need for Health Services Cloud

Our recent experience with the COVID19 crisis has shown us, the importance of health and education clouds. We are tracking COVID19 on war footing, but we need to track all emerging health issues on a day to day basis, and be able to plan ahead for addressing those issues. Typhoid and Dengue fever are such issues, but we also need information databases covering Cancer and other health and well being issues.

We are introducing health insurance, but we don’t have any data on the health of individuals, the success of treatments being given, the effectiveness of treatment strategies and medicines etc. This means that our health insurance program is bound to fail due to unnecessary and excess cost and health fraud.

Health cloud will help us improve our health services by ensuring right treatment strategies are applied, because complete patient history will be available to the doctors on click of a button. Similarly, the government will be aware of health issues, and interventions that it needs to make in a timely manner to address these.

Need for Educational Services Cloud

Most of the leading private schools were able to transform their education to online platforms delivering online lectures, online assignment submission, online quizzes and lively interaction between students, teachers and even parents. It was a big challenge for students, parents and schools but they did it because there was will from schools, and support from students and parents.

Government-run educational system lacked the will, and did not even get started despite having 1000x more teachers, students and a much higher budget.

Why have we not made much Progress on E-Governance, apart from some limited initiatives of PITB?

Key issue here is a lack of unified vision and support from civil service and government. Bureaucracy does not want to lose the grip they have on the system because they hold all the information. The level of resistance to such initiatives can be judged from the fact that in many cases, PITB and other agencies involved in implementing such initiatives have been threatened to stop them from doing their work.

Let's imagine, that it is possible for ministers, chief minister and prime minister to find out about wheat stocks, sugar stocks, its production, its storage with a click of a button. Get that verified and make decisions on it without getting bogged down and then getting wrong or incomplete information. 

Our past experience with ID card and passport offices has proven that it is not possible to reform the existing system from inside due to all the resistance. We have to create an independent E-Governance secretariat and give them the challenge to start creating all the new systems we need and start putting them in place. 

Once new E-Governance systems are fully working we start closing down old systems and re-assign their workforce in new systems under new management structures. This transformation has to be facilitated with competitive training and assessment. Those who can’t clear the training and meet criteria have to be reassigned to new roles where they fit better.