ICTA and DIE do Sri Lanka proud at FutureGov Summit 2012

The ICT Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) won a ‘Best Public Sector Organisation of the Year’ award at the FutureGov Summit 2012 awards ceremony held in Chiang Mai, Thailand last week.

At the same event crowning the three-day summit (held from 17-19 October) at the Shangri La hotel, the Department of Immigration and Emigration (DIE) was the winner in the eGovernment category.

The ‘Public Sector Organisation of the Year’ category, under which ICTA won its award, was considered under sub-sections consisting of five geographical areas, namely, SAARC, North Asia, Oceania, Middle East and ASEAN.

ICTA won the award as the ‘Best Public Sector Organisation of the Year’ under the geographical area of the SAARC region (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka). Similarly four other public sector organisations won awards under the rest of the above-mentioned geographical areas.

Accordingly, the public sector organisations – the Hong Kong Police, the Western Australian Department of Local Government, the Bahrain eGovernment Authority and Indonesia’s Surakarta City Government – won awards as ‘Best Public Sector Organisation of the Year’ respectively in the North Asia, Oceania, Middle East, and the ASEAN (Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam) regions.

The project for which the Sri Lankan Department of Immigration and Emigration won the award was the ‘Visa Online’ project or the Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) project. ICTA played a major role in the ‘Visa Online’ project as well. ICTA’s contribution to the project also included the linking of the Lanka Gate Internet Payment Gateway (IPG) for making online payments.

Representatives of award-winning organisations were present at the award ceremony to receive the awards. ICTA was represented by CEO Reshan Dewapura, Re-engineering Government Programme Director Wasantha Deshapriya, and Senior Re-engineering Government Programme Head (Administration and Operations) D.C. Dissanayake. The Department of Immigration and Emigration was represented by Immigration and Emigration Controller W. A. Chulananda Perera, Controller (Visa) Sarath Kumara, and Controller (IT and Border Control) M. N. Ranasinghe.

The above-mentioned twin victory for Sri Lanka at FutureGov 2012 is the latest instance of the country winning FutureGov Summit awards during the last three years. The two previous awards were for ‘Lanka Gate’ in 2010 and ‘ePensions’ in 2011.

The FutureGov Summit gathers together Asia Pacific’s public sector leaders to discuss the role of technology in enabling service transformation. Hosted by FutureGov magazine, and backed by FutureGov Research, the Summit uniquely brings together top officials from central government, city administration, and hospital management.

The topics that the world Government Organisation top leaders mostly belonging to the Asia Pacific region considered at the three-day summit included the following: Digital inclusion, mobile government, big data, information security and cloud computing.

The FutureGov awards are technology awards given each year to government, education or healthcare organisations to recognise and celebrate the most successful modernisation programmes in the region.

This year, the awards covered 23 different categories, including categories such as e-government, information security, green government and digital inclusion. The panel of judges, which included senior government officials along with experienced FutureGov managers, faced the difficult task of choosing the winners from a list of 93 exceptional finalists.

The ‘online visa’ project referred to above and won by the Department of Emigration and Immigration was introduced in its trial version on 1 October 2011 and became regular procedure with the dawn of 2012.

The Immigration and Emigration Department had introduced the trial version of the Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) facility. The ETA facility became fully operational from 1 January 2012 with its launch by the Department on that date.

Foreign nationals who intend to visit Sri Lanka for Short Stay up to six months must obtain ETA, prior to their arrival from 1 January 2012. The ETA is issued through the on-line system. No passport copies, documents or photographs are required. There is no requirement to endorse the ETA in the passport. Nationals of Maldives and Singapore who visit Sri Lanka for short visits up to 30 days are exempted from ETA as reciprocities.