Digitalising government system seen as key

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By PETER ESILA
PAPUA New Guinea’s Integrated Government Information System (IGIS) is perhaps the country’s foundation to the path of a digitalised government system, an official says.
Flierl Shongol, deputy secretary of policy in the department of Communication and Information, said that yesterday after a meeting on digital government in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) region as part of the Telecommunication and Information working group meeting in Port Moresby.
“Papua New Guinea (PNG)should start preparing to go into the digital government (or e-government).”
Shongol said phase one of IGIS to network connectivity in all government departments in the National Capital District and the national data centre was delivered but there were still challenges of policies and legal framework to guide the operations of IGIS.
IGIS is aimed at integrating government departments and agencies to work in a more coordinated manner, thus increasing efficiency in the public service delivery and utilising technology effectively to serve the people.
“The government is still committed and there is a directive from the chief secretary’s office to establish a coordination mechanism at the higher level, at the ministerial level to actually drive the IGIS,” Shongol
said.
“Even though we have delivered the phase one, we still need to do a lot in terms of the maintenance of those services and upgrading those services because technology is evolving, it is changing.
“What we have now is a system that is outdated, we need IT specialists in the public sector to drive this system forward.
“If we can have all those captured in a policy in a clear strategy, we can be guided to implement IGIS in a timely manner, so we don’t have a blurry vision of where we want to go.”
Shongol said PNG there were hopes to learn from more digitalised government systems like Singapore and other economies from the Apec region.
He said some government information and even personal information recorded in systems like social media – Facebook and National Identity System (NID) are examples of data not protected by the government.