The Hindu Business Line : World Bank reviewing e-gov projects

A preliminary finding of the report shows that globally governments have given very little emphasis to putting in place a monitoring and evaluation strategy of their e-governance projects.

Delivering the keynote address at the `Seminar on E-Governance, from successful pilot to sustainable implementation,' Bangalore IT.Com, Mr Robert Schware, Lead Informatics Specialist, World Bank, noted that most governments evaluated the success factors of e-governance projects but the failure was not analysed. "We found that only 15 per cent of e-governance projects are complete successes while 33 per cent of projects are failures," he said.

Urging the Central and State Governments in India to evaluate failures, Mr Schware noted that failed e-governance projects not only resulted in loss of money but reduction in credibility (of the Government).

Citing the example of the e-voting project undertaken by the Government of Ireland, the World Bank expert remarked that the "project was a failure with $62 million wasted in testing the equipment and the project not being implemented."

A CapGemini Ernst &Young study revealed that few countries have been able to translate e-governance projects into successful ventures.

Some of them are India's initiative for food distribution and e-network of schools, Australia's for provision of income-taxes to citizens, Canada's for the implementation of software for collection of citizens' addresses and any change thereof and Denmark's with the Government having digitised 72 per cent of its services online.

Mr Shankar Annaswamy, Managing Director, IBM India, stressed the importance of adoption of open standards, incorporating business processes in e-governance, use of new technology such as pervasive computing and broadband and providing online security.

"It is important that Governments ensure online security since citizens provide personal data and a compromise of such confidential data can be disastrous," Mr Annaswamy remarked.