Electronic services are catching up as more and more people discover the convenience of procuring the goods and services they need from the comfort of their home at any time of the day. Electronic banking and e-commerce are achieving significant growth as service providers invest in making their online service more secure and easy to use.
One notable exception in the success story is the take-up of e-government services by the majority of people who actually need these services.
E-government refers to “the utilisations of information technology and communication to improve on the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery in the public sector”.
According to research by the Malta Information Technology Agency, Malta ranks first across the EU for both the availability and usability of e-government services. It says just over a quarter of Maltese people use e-government services and more than half admit they prefer traditional face-to-face services. One must be careful not to interpret this latter statement as resistance to change or a conservative attitude by a large section of Maltese society.
MITA’s executive chairman, Tony Sultana, was right in stating that “our services lose credibility if they are cumbersome to use”. After all, electronic services are not meant to be used only by young technology-mad consumers but by the majority of the population who may have vastly varying degrees of IT aptitude.
The MITA report goes further and actually contains some of the solutions that are needed to ensure the government and the public reap the full benefit of the vast investment that has been made in ICT in the last several years. “Lack of uniformity and pleasant aesthetics across e-government services” has been identified as one of the causes of the public’s reluctance to use these services.
Many who have tried to use the mygov.mt website agree that the branding of this site leaves much to be desired. Branding is not just about the aesthetics, colours or animation that one usually finds so attractive on websites. It is also about user-friendliness, ease of navigation, response speed and search functionality.
Consumers have been used to the user-friendly features that they find on e-commerce and electronic banking websites. They rightly expect that such features should also be included on government websites. Put simply, the government website is boring and not all that easy to navigate.
Education also plays a part in making the use of e-government services popular. As in most cases where a change in the cultural mindset of our society is needed, schools are the best workshops to start moulding a new mentality. From a very young age students love to use computers for entertainment and hopefully also for education. From an early age students can be taught to manage their time better by not having to queue to get services that they can obtain much more efficiently through e-government websites.
Training older people is more challenging but it can be achieved. The secret of success is to make these ICT services as simple as possible. Sometimes obsessive procedures to enhance security kill the joy of using the computer to procure a service. From time to time security protocols need to be revised to ensure they are not too cumbersome for users.
An efficient e-government process would help both business and the public to obtain services with as little delay as possible and jazzing up the e-government website is long overdue.