How can local governments use ICT to improve the efficiency of service delivery to local citizens and businesses?
Under decentralization, local governments must deliver more services to citizens, often with little or no increase in resources. These governments, and the donors that want to strengthen them, face a dilemma: ICT purportedly helps improve efficiency, reducing costs while improving services. Yet given their extremely limited resources, should local governments and donors invest in ICT? If so, how? Consider a poor rural county of Romania. In the past, Social Services assistance employees had to hand-write information from applicants, and make time-consuming trips to deliver the information to the Country Social Services Center, creating long delays between citizens' applying for and receiving social services assistance. Under a USAID-supported project, the local administration established a computer-based system with Internet connectivity, which, along with training of local government employees, greatly improved the efficiency of the Social Services Administration application process and helped deliver assistance to low-income residents far more quickly, when they needed it most. This week, we would like to identify projects that are trying to improve the efficiency of local government service delivery -- whether specific applications affecting a limited range of services, or a broader range of applications, such as the Citizen Service Centers mentioned by Gary Garriott (in his message of May 5). We hope to learn from GKD Members the steps local governments have taken to use ICT to improve their service delivery, the outcomes of those actions, and "lessons learned" from both successes and problems. Key Questions: 1. Do you know of specific local governments that adopted ICT to improve their efficiency? What approaches have been successful? What 'lessons learned' have emerged from their successes? or failures? 2. What key challenges do local governments face when they aim to use ICT to improve local service delivery? 3. Should local governments try to involve the community in planning and decision-making regarding investments in ICT for improved service delivery? (See Eddi Sakti's message of May 6). 4. Can ICT investments improve efficiency and generate a return-on-investments (e.g., by increasing tax revenue) that enables local governments to cover the costs of operations, maintenance, and upgrades? 5. What are some critical factors to consider in terms of technology options and choices? Are there specific technologies that have proven effective? 6. What benefits, (e.g., easier form filing), should citizens experience from local government adoption of ICT? Which of those benefits are most important to citizens? ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For past messages, see: http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html
