E-Government in Malaysia : Its implementation so far and citizen’s adoption strategies

The implementation of Electronic Government (e-government) started since the initiation of Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) in 1996 by the Malaysia Government. It was launched to lead the country into the Information Age. E-government is the use of IT and e-commerce to provide access to government information and delivery of public services to citizens and business partners and enable the government to become more responsive to the needs of its citizens. For example, www.malaysia.gov.my is the myGovernment Portal which acts as the one-stop source of Malaysian government information and services for the citizens.

There are seven pilot projects of the Electronic Government Flagship Application are as follows:

1. Project Monitoring System (SPP II)

2. Human Resource Management Information System (HRMIS)

3. Generic Office Environment (GOE)

4. Electronic Procurement (EP)

5. Electronic Services (E-Services)

6. Electronic Labour Exchange (ELX)

7. E-Syariah

Besides, e-Filing is an application on filling and filing income tax returns electronically via the internet, which is an alternative to the usual manual from submission. E-government also includes Renewal of road tax online.

MyEG Services Berhad is a company that provides electronic link between the government and the public. With just a minimal fee by the service provider, it is available exclusively from Motortakaful.

Citizen’s Adoption Strategies
The challenge of implementation of e-government in Malaysia is the new technological challenge. Malaysians are concerned about the security of doing transaction over the internet and this resulted in low usage of e-government services due to several problems using E-government.

Firstly, E-government is not very user-friendly especially to the senior citizens who are not expert in technology materials which make them hard to perform the E-Government service. Besides that, there are few complaints about the responds given by the E-Government which is not very effective and is incomparable with some private institutions. Moreover, a lot of them is encountering hacking problem which their personal data was stolen.

In order to solve the problems above, firstly, the government should distribute a user guide to those senior citizens so that they can refer to the user guide when they encounter problems by using E-Government application. Secondly, the government should encourage their family members to teach the senior citizen in their family on how to use operate the system. Thirdly, the government should improve the effectiveness on the respond given to the user by making references from other source. Lastly, the government should strengthen the security so that the hackers are not able to hack into the consumers' personal data. In short, implementing good strategies must be addressed carefully. Otherwise, e-government will remain misleading.

Related link:

www.malaysia.gov.my

www.myeg.com.my

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