E-Governance: Reforming Government through Efficient Office Automation

Government of India has approved the ‘Digital India’ programme with the vision to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. The Digital India initiative aims to provide thrust to nine pillars identified as growth areas. These pillars include – broadband highways, everywhere mobile connectivity, public internet access program, e-Governance, e-Kranti, information for all, electronics manufacturing, IT for Jobs, and early harvest programs.

e-Governance Pillar: Reforming Government through Technology has the vision for automation of workflows inside government departments and agencies to enable efficient government processes and also to allow visibility of these processes to the citizens. In order to fulfil the Digital India Vision, Central/State government departments require Business Process Re-engineering using IT to improve transactions which are most critical for transformation across government and therefore needs to be implemented by all ministries and central/state government departments.

Process Transformation focus for e-Governance

The program is fairly extensive with a number of elements, smaller proposals and programs that will be rolled out gradually. If the government can follow up on its proposals, it may significantly change the lives of people in the state/country. Office Administrative processes as given below are some of those activities which should be given paramount importance from the office automation perspective for achieving the objectives of Digital India initiative:

• DAK/File Management
• Office Note Management
• RTI Management
• Committee & Meeting Management
• Legislative Query Management
• Court Case Management etc.

For instance, in government departments, decision making is largely dependent on the processing of DAKs/Files which need to be processed/approved through multiple departmental officials for commenting. Apart from this, government departments also have committee meeting process which runs through various stages wherein initially the committee gets formed, then multi level approval is done. Once the meeting is done, then complete Minutes of meeting and respective actionable items get assigned. If we look at it from a higher perspective, all such services such as File/DAK Management, RTI Management, Committee & Meeting Management, Legislative Query Management have certain workflows which needs to be processed in a time bound manner while adhering to the regulatory compliances.

Winds of change

Government agencies across the world have realized the importance of adopting technologies like Enterprise Content Management & Business Process Management for automation of Process Centric applications or Office Administrative processes. State Government departments should also consider implementing these technologies in order to accomplish the goal of ‘Digital India’ in its true sense, while adhering to the Government guidelines such as Manual of Office Procedures defined by Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances.
Transforming India into a digital hub comes with some serious obstacles – the need for right infrastructure and technology platform being the foremost, without which ‘Digital India’ will be just another ambitious programme of the Indian government. So central/state government departments should use the latest technology and framework developed for office automation, as much as possible and make the ‘Digital India’ dream come true.