The United Nations defines E-government as the use of ICTs to more effectively and efficiently deliver government services to citizens and businesses. Simply put, it is the application of ICT in government operations, to achieve public ends by digital means.
The implementation of e-government, therefore, means ease of use of governmental services for citizens, enhanced governmental service delivery, and improved citizen engagement and trust. It also improves cost effectiveness for government services by decreasing fraud of public utilities and enhancing simplified compliance of governmental laws for citizens.
But when we know e-government serves to offer enhanced portfolio of public services in an efficient and cost-effective way, it has a wide range of objectives including better delivery of public services to people, enhancing business and industry collaborations, citizen empowerment through access to information, and/ or more effective governance.
Its fundamental principle, supported by an effective e-governance institutional framework, improves the internal workings of the public sector by reducing financial costs and transaction times so as to better integrate work flows and processes thereby enabling effective resource utilization across the various public sector agencies.
This often results to government services being less corrupt, more transparent, and promising higher income generation and cost reduction.
The e-Government urge is in Kenya driven by the need for Government to cut costs and improve efficiency, meet citizen expectations and improve citizen relationship and facilitate economic development. Kenya has put in place strategies that include a fully functional Institutional Framework for e-Government
Below are a few reasons why governments should embrace e-governance;
Enhanced transparency – e-government enables the public to be informed about what government is working on and the policies which are enforced by promoting better communications between government and business sectors. This way, it offers transparency and therefore trustworthiness between G2G and B2B. The ripple effects of this can therefore be felt when smaller businesses compete with bigger businesses in say public tendering, thereby creating open and transparent market and by extension, a stronger economy.
On the same breath, the emergence of e-Government offers potential to reshape the public sector and build relationships between citizens and the government through provisioning convenient access to government information and services, to improve the quality of services and provide better opportunities to participate in democratic institutions and processes.
Reduced cost of governing – Governing in the world over is believed to be too costly and expensive but e-government offers effective solutions for this problem. It reduces operation costs by enhancing the effectiveness of spending money by government. The primary benefit here would be replacing and optimizing the Paper Based System while implementing electronic government. That saves lots of time, money and also environment in return due to reducing paper consumption.
Generally, E-government offers more efficiency, enhanced services to better serve citizens, better accessibility of public services, more transparency and accountability of government are the expected advantages of e-government.
Today, people can get information quicker and at any moment of the day in comparison to the past. E-government and its capacity will enhance the availability of such to all people regardless of their place or social level.
E-government is therefore an easy way of use of governmental services for citizens, enhancing governmental service delivery, simplifying compliance of governmental laws for citizens, improving citizen engagement and trust in public, decreasing fraud and improving cost efficiency for the government.
It could also deliver cost savings to people and companies, too. Therefore, it is not surprising that policymakers and executives in the world are looking to embrace e-government, from the most developed to the least developed ones. E-government raises the standards of living and becomes a vital tool for governments and their citizens. E-government is not merely a symptom of the digital revolution, but generates true advantages for governments, citizens, private sector and all other stakeholders of government.
