Government portal to be improved further

I.T. Minister Austin Gatt yesterday said the excellent results obtained by Malta in retaining its leading EU ranking in the quality of its e-Government services were not attained by coincidence or because other EU member states did not have the capacity to provide excellent e-Government.

"The results are the natural outcome of seven years of hard work that is the pride of all those who contributed to it," Dr Gatt said. "Seven years ago the government established four policy principles that, though seen unlikely by some then, have now yielded the optimum outcome we were hoping for."

Dr Gatt was commenting on a European Commission report which showed Malta to be the second best member state among the EU 27 in the provision of e-Government services through its IT infrastructure.

Dr Gatt said Government invested in sophistication rather than providing downloadable forms online as an easy excuse for online public services. Government also developed centrally the technological platform on which all services could be built, providing a unique payment gateway, electronic identity and other common infrastructural elements for all services, rather than allowing the waste and duplication of developing a different underlying infrastructure for each service.

"From early on in the project, the government outsourced the development of its online services to Maltese IT SMEs that proved up to the job and rewarded many times over the trust the government had placed in them.

"Last but not least, e-Government, which up to recently was considered as secondary by the Opposition, was central to Government's political agenda," Dr Gatt said.

Though this year's EU report gives Malta good cause to celebrate, the challenge of remaining on top will require us to reinvent our eGovernment and anticipate developments as indeed we have done over the past few years, the minister said.

"In the coming days we will be launching a new online environment for public services to improve on www.gov.mt that in any case scored 98 per cent in this year's rankings. We will also have a more sophisticated electronic identity infrastructure that will be able to issue digital certificates to users of sensitive public services such as fiscal, health or similar services.

"A new ICT strategy will be launched to drive the national ICT programme forward right up to the beginning of the next decade and that in the eGovernment field will aim to ensure that all administrative services are provided online in a personalised environment," Dr Gatt said.