People deserve excellent services from Governments: Lalith Weeratunga

Secretary to the Prime Minister Amarasekera, Secretary to the Ministry of Defence and Urban Development Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, Secretary to the Ministry of Telecommunication and IT Gunasekera, other Ministry Secretaries, ICTA Chairman Professor Epasinghe, FutureGov Asia Managing Director Mohit Sagar, officers and representatives of the sponsors of this conference, Government delegates from our neighbouring SAARC countries, guests from other parts of the world and friends, this is the first occasion that Sri Lanka is holding a FutureGov SAARC Summit, and the third in a series of FutureGov Conferences.

I was present on the two previous occasions of FutureGov Conferences in 2008 and 2010 as well. I have seen the event’s remarkable ability to create an effective forum for governance. It provides an ideal forum for experts, practitioners and private sector service providers for exchanging views on new developments in the public sectors in Sri Lanka and in the region.

IT’s contribution for bringing about peace

Many distinguished personalities are present here today. I wish to recognise all of them and express my happiness to see the Secretary Defence in particular, as he has used IT in all his activities and modernised our armed forces to create what we now see as a peaceful Sri Lanka.

Well, Sri Lanka’s own achievements in the ICT sector have seen leaps and bounds with innovations in how the Government delivers citizen services, increased investor confidence and necessary infrastructure gradually taking shape.

Sri Lanka as centre for delivering IT

For many years that the war was on, Sri Lanka had to struggle to achieve its true potential in the world stage in many sectors – ICT is one such area. Now in peacetime Sri Lanka, we are gaining global recognition as a centre for delivering IT as well as an emerging Knowledge Services Industry.

Today, more than 300 IT and BPO companies operate in Sri Lanka serviced by a workforce of over 60,000 and generating US$ 400 m in exports.

Wealth of opportunity for ICT investment in Sri Lanka

For a small country reviving after a recently-concluded war, Sri Lanka presents a wealth of opportunity for ICT investment, which makes it all the more realistic to attain the goal of over US$ 1 billion in revenue by 2016.

An example of this potential is highlighted in the Global Services Location Index – published by AT Kearney, and reputed as one of the world’s leading barometers on the relative attractiveness of countries as services locations.

The indexing is based on the fundamentals of three categories: financial attractiveness, peoples’ skills and availability, and business environment. Sri Lanka is positioned at 21 out of 50 countries, which is considered a remarkable feat for a small country in the midst of giants such as China, India, Egypt and Mexico.

Sri Lanka’s NRI

Sri Lanka’s Network Readiness Index (NRI) ranking published by the World Economic Forum has also improved from the 86th position out of 122 countries in 2006/07 to the 66th out of 138 countries in 2010/2011.

Several e-Government initiatives have resulted in enhanced delivery of public services on-line, with overall 15,000 Government officials having being trained and skilled in ICT. Also, 10,000 citizens have been trained under ICTA’s e-literacy project.

I am also aware that in 2005 Sri Lanka had the ICT literacy rate of just under five per cent and today we are certainly close to about 40 per cent. President Mahinda Rajapaksa is keen to see the entire public service equipped with IT skills.

 Sri Lanka’s unique position in knowledge services industry

We enjoy a unique position in the knowledge services industry, particularly in financial and accounting outsourcing due to a strong talent base. Sri Lankans form the second highest number of Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in the world, with a considerable number of graduates and undergraduates with US qualifications as Certified Public Accountants, CTAs.

Sri Lanka a safe and low-risk market

Post-war, Sri Lanka is now regarded as one of the safest, lowest-risk emerging markets. This is amply evidenced by the increasing number of international visitors to Sri Lanka and the booming tourism industry since the end of the terrorist conflict.

In fact, Sri Lanka has been cited in the National Geographic Traveller in 2011 as among the top six places to visit in the world.

IT park with 100,000 job opportunities

In four to five years time, Sri Lanka will have a new 250 acre information technology park in the South, in Suriyawewa, in Hambantota, that is, in the island’s south. It will provide job opportunities for an ICT sector workforce of nearly 100,000. It will have a number of custom-made facilities including next generation telecom infrastructure.

Hambantota already has an international port. And early next year it will also be the form for Sri Lanka’s second international airport thus supplying vital physical connectivity to the world.

Benefits of Sri Lanka’s e-Government policy

Sri Lanka’s current e-Government policy has enabled citizens to gain access to a wide range of services. Let me just list some of these, which I think, you have already seen, but nevertheless I would talk about it in brief:

Increased affordable access to ICT for citizens across the country through 633 Nenasalas, the rural tele-centres. Nenasala is Sri Lanka’s brand for rural IT centres.

Civil Registration (Birth, Marriage and Death certificates, etc.) – availability of documents within minutes.

One of the most popular interventions by the Government to reach the public is the internationally acclaimed GIC 1919, a call centre which is operational 12 hours on a seven-day basis. It currently responds to 5,500 calls daily from people making queries in Sinhala, Tamil or English. Over the last six years it has handled nearly eight million telephone calls. About 290 Government institutes feed and update information to the centre regularly with the assistance of the Chief Innovation Officers (CIOs) who are themselves public officers.

The e-Society Programme of the ICTA, you have already heard about it, has successfully implemented over 200 ICT based projects across the country. These projects have delivered to the door step of rural communities a host of valuable services – crop price information delivered to farmers via their mobiles; we saw that mobile phone is a device that we have to look out for much use in the near future; coordinates for fishing locations delivered to fisherman via their mobiles; text-to-Braille software which opens up the internet and e mail up for the visually impaired; e learning software that makes learning fun for kids, etc.

Private sector participation

There are also many instances where the private sector has come forward to join forces with the Government to reach the citizens. One such recent initiative is the online, e-learning tool ‘Web Patashala’ programme where the State Trading Corporation (STC) and Etisalat are collaborating to bring a radical change to facilitate educational needs of our children.

For the first time in the country, students and teachers can access educational material in the national syllabus from their homes. This will circumvent certain problems such as scarcity of teachers and educational material in some rural schools. It also allows students to study on their own by providing them with access to lessons and content that goes beyond that of the school syllabi. With text materials and study guides, this innovation will act as a strong supplement to school lessons at a much more affordable cost that tuition.

Sri Lanka’s first women’s rural BPO in Jaffna

A few months ago, ICTA collaborated with an NGO, the Foundation for Advancing Rural Opportunities to establish the first women’s rural BPO in the country in the Jaffna District in the Northern Province which had been affected by the war.

ICT penetrating every aspect of life

Today’s summit has brought ICT governance experts, practitioners and service providers from across the globe to engage in dialogue learning from one another. I understand that the Conference today and tomorrow will feature exhaustive discussions on themes such as mobile Government, information security, cloud computing, citizen engagement, etc.

Compared to about a decade ago, we are now feeling that ICT is penetrating every aspect of our lives: as citizens, how we receive services; as Government officers, how we deliver them; as policy makers, how we are inspired by it. There cannot be any Government in the world today that does not embrace technology for it sees technology’s potency to deliver effectively; “do more with less,” and satisfy the people.

Transformational Government to mitigate flaws in e-Government

Even with Government technology interventions to provide better citizen services, the needs of the citizens nevertheless continue to grow, together with the demand that they be met with greater efficiency. Hence, Governments have to equip themselves to meet these needs – not incrementally, but rapidly. Governments must not only “do things better” but they also need to “do things differently”. This requires radical transformations, which brings me to dwell briefly on the concept of Transformational Government.

Transformational Government

Transformational Government, if I may quote, is “the use of computer-based ICTs to enable radical improvement to the delivery of public services. The term is commonly used to describe a Government reform strategy which aims to avoid the limitations which have come to be seen as associated with a traditional e-Government strategy”. We already experienced this.

The concept of Transformational Government is a response to observations that even despite Governments investing on ICT to increase quality of public services and reduce costs, there are still poor outcomes when e-Government programmes are partially delivered or at times when they fail.

Almost every Government nowadays, even economically least developed countries, are “e-Governments” – with websites, e-services and e-Government strategies. It is obvious that something needs to go beyond e-Government to bring benefits to the people.

Long years ago, when we did not have computers and when we did not have the benefits of using ICT the delivery was quite physical. But today we have come to the heights of e-Government and I think it is important that we transcend boundaries and go beyond the limitations that have been imposed on us and turn the Government into transformational Government.

Even developed countries such as the UK, Canada and Australia have all recently adopted strategies to shift decisively away from “e-Government” towards a much more radical focus on transforming the whole relationship between the public sector and users of public services. After all Governments are for the people and they are elected by the people.

The focus is on the process of transformation: how a Government can build a new way of working which enables it rapidly and efficiently to adapt to changing citizen needs and emerging political and market priorities. In the words of one of the earliest Governments in UK to commit to a transformational approach: ‘…the vision is not just about transforming Government through technology. It is also about making Government transformational through the use of technology.’

Easily adaptable outcomes to transform Governments to serve people better

Well, let me now conclude by wishing this conference all success and I sincerely hope the very distinguished panellists here, the very distinguished speakers, governance experts, ICT experts, business experts, that they come together to bring outcomes that could be easily adapted, that could be made use of in a very short time. And this will help countries like Sri Lanka that has just come out of a very debilitating war that crippled us for 30 years.

I think Sri Lanka’s position is unique, having defeated terrorism but we are still a country that needs a lot of transformational Governmental activity. I am sure the brains here today, the expertise here today, will come together to give us some outcomes that can be used not only here in Sri Lanka but also throughout the region, may be through the SAARC pavilion and may be beyond to think anew and transform our Governments to serve our people better. People deserve excellent services from Governments and there is no way that we can deviate from that position.

Thank you very much and all the very best to you.

           –Pix By Upul Abayasakara-