The benefits of e-governance for municipalities and citizens
Government in a democratic setting is an administration that uses public resources to work for and satisfy the needs of the citizens. Governance entails proper management resources and the citizens for common good. To achieve that, many governments has come up with e-governance system. This e-government system has a whole lot of benefits for the municipalities and the citizens. Some of the benefits of e-governance are as follows:
Inclusive Governance
E-governance helps in building trust between governments and citizens, an essential factor in good governance by using internet-based strategies to involve citizens in the policy process, illustrating government transparency and accountability.
Easy and Quick Implementation
With e-government, paperwork has been made so simple and intuitive. This facilitates sharing of information and ideas between all government agencies and department to build one mega data base. Getting the government decisions and policies across to the citizens is easy as well, since e-government gives every citizen access to information.
High Operational Efficiency
What matters a lot to citizens is the efficiency of the services being provided. The effectiveness of government is measured by the quality of its interactions with citizens. The processing of paperwork in a traditional government system is a difficult task which consumes a lot of resources; time spent on paperwork does not create much value for citizens. This issue becomes even more relevant when we consider the fact that citizens are demanding more from public services. By the establishment of a centralised point of communication through e-government, governments can achieve high operational efficiency.
High Level of Trust on Government
For any government to survive or maintain or keep control of power, such government must win the trust of the majority of the citizens. E-government can always afford that for any government that embraces it. It improves services through better understanding of citizens’ requirements, thus aiming for seamless online services. That it achieves through improving transparency, accuracy and facilitating information transforming between government and citizens.
Reduces Costs of Running a Government
E-government is very cost effective. Let’s take for example that government wants to seek a public opinion on an issue, with e-government system it can take a survey and the opinion very fast at extremely low cost. That also applies when government would want to capture some data. Thanks to a new innovation called cloud solutions, which helps governments realise substantial savings from the previously needed expensive IT infrastructure and its related high maintenance costs.
It is obvious that implementation of e-government not only saves resources, effort and money but it can also extensively increase service quality levels and reducing time spent in government departments.