Fuente : World Bank
http://www.worldbank.org

World Bank Official: E-Governance Failures Abound

/noticias.info/ Many electronic governance projects used by governments to provide services to its citizens and businesses are failing globally due to poor planning, political interference and bureaucratic bungling, Robert Schware, the World Bank's Lead Information Technology Specialist, said Friday at a seminar on e-governance in the south Indian technology hub of Bangalore, The Associated Press (11/5) reports.



About 85 percent of all such projects in developing countries have failed in some respect, Schware said. Of those, 35 percent failed completely. Only 15 percent can be fully seen as successful. The statistics in the United States and Europe are just as grim. In some countries, politicians speed up e-governance projects just before elections to win votes, but end up harming the projects, he said.



Uganda spent $22 million on e-voting technology, which did not perform well when elections were held in 2001. In the United Kingdom, an online university project cost $23.5 million, but attracted only 900 students. In India, there are about 200 pilot projects for online services, but nearly half of them were designed in such a way that they only work for a handful of the country's more than one-billion people, Schware said.



Agence France Presse (11/5) reports the World Bank funds many e-government projects worldwide such as developing e-trade facilitation systems, e-procurement pilots and one-stop government gateways. The Press Trust of India (11/5) adds that the World Bank is currently completing a study of national e-strategies across a group of 40 regionally representative countries with a view to mapping common policy focus areas and interventions across countries. "There is consensus in the strategies that e-government can provide realistic and immediate benefits in terms of improved government productivity, effectiveness and cost savings," he said.



The Business Standard (India, 11/6) adds that the examination of failed initiatives, Schware said, explodes the common myth of technological determinism, that technology alone will ensure success. In fact, technology is just a tool to improve process delivery. Instead of understanding that, governments are still focusing on automating existing processes and services. Several projects are no more than a new facade for old and frequently inefficient government processes. In fact they are electronic versions of the stack of pamphlets littered around government offices. Thus, more often than not, much hyped e-governance projects are doomed, he said.



When a government decides to scale up a project, it should evolve ways to assess failure, risk management and regularly benchmark progress against international peers. Besides, the World Bank advocates a structured monitoring and evaluation system with a strong focus on outputs and indicators for a project's success, he added. This is clearly missing, according to the provisional findings of the World Bank study on 40 regionally representative countries' national e-strategies, he added.



Failures often occur because departments work in isolation, project time scales are set based on election cycle and there is no clearly articulated top down approach setting out policy and strategy, he said. Such deficiencies combined with a lack of political will often escalate cost. One common occurrence, he said, was the splurging of resources in a bid to reduce the time frame.



However government's should learn to salvage something out of failures. While one is the experience gained, another is the strong hardware infrastructure rolled out for the project. This can be re-used for a fine-tuned version or for future projects, he said. The future though is not too bleak for e-governance. New communication platforms like broadband will open up possibilities for interactive multimedia that can build in the right ingredients for success.


08/11/2004 notas_de_prensa_archivo