Bangkok Post, Thailand, Arnat Leemakdej Column.

Byline: Arnat Leemakdej

Dec. 7--Funding e-government programmes, as we began discussing last week, is something that governments cannot do alone. They need to join with vendors who have expertise in information technology.

Based on the experiences of US agencies, a Gartner Group report called "E-Government Funding: A Call for Change" identified four funding models. The first two -- convenience fees and transaction fees -- failed to assure sustainability due to the uncertain revenue flow. The report suggests that the other two models -- known as hybrid and innovative -- are more promising. These models mainly require fixed, guaranteed fund, from the government to ensure continuous development, partially sponsored by transaction fees or other performance-based incentives.

I consider that some projects implemented by the Thai government, such as the Health and Interior ministries' shared citizen database, to be on the right track in this regard.

The Gartner report also has four main recommendations about the roles of the government in successful project implementation:

Allocate e-government budgets: Everybody loves e-government but no one wants to pay for it. Therefore, it is necessary to have the key decision-makers involved at the outset, to set the targets the project needs to achieve and to allocate the budget.

Invest in the model: The focus on self-funded models (convenience and transaction fees) has diminished the value of e-government implementation, left many projects financially vulnerable, and made many agencies beholden to the vendor partner. Choosing either the hybrid or any variant of the innovative model promotes business re-engineering, back-end integration and the value of e-government services long after the vendor contract is completed.