Affiliations: Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India. E-mail:
velamala.ranga@gmail.com
Abstract: Most governments around the world started their e-Government
initiatives with a focus on providing information and services to the citizen
while service delivery platforms remained separate and parallel across various
government agencies (UN, 2008). Many researchers have noted that past
evaluation studies have not used a common framework or methodology by the
public sector in developing countries. To achieve this, the government needs to
ensure the use of a common platform across different initiatives, as this may
help integrate different functionalities (Horizontal and Vertical) to avoid
duplicities. Hence there is an urgent need to develop a frame work for a
Unified Digital Government (UGD) which will be a single view of the Government,
Employees, Citizens and Business. The objective of this paper is to study the
current scenario and need for common and core applications for e-Government and
proposed a framework for a UGD. It will be an integrated solution architecture
covering all functional areas and activities of the government. This is a
hybrid frame work to bring all services under a single roof. The First approach
is Centralized: In this approach all common (unified) applications such as,
Document management, Knowledge management File, management, Human Resource
Management (G2E), Grievance management etc will be a single entity by all
departments so that can eliminate to collect the same information by different
departments in different ways and identify them differently. The Second
approach is Decentralized: In this approach Core (Departmental specific)
applications such as Land Registration, Building Plans, Vehicle registration,
Criminal and Crime information etc, this approach is not only gave the
government department's autonomy but also accelerated the enabling of services
by the respective departments. This frame work was compared and analyzed
through a extensive case study in E-Governance initiatives of various State
Governments and Central government of India and discussed on key findings and
observations followed by recommendations and conclusions. This paper explores
how to improve access to government Common and Core services through better use
of the ICT at any government level such as National, State and Local.
Keywords: Digital government, E-Government, collaboration, common services, core services, integration