33% e-gov projects total failures: WB

A recent World Bank assessment of developing countries' e-governance efforts has revealed that 33 per cent of them are total failures, about 50 per cent partial failures and merely some 15 per cent have been termed as total success. The study went on to say that optimism alone does not breed success.

Robert Schware, lead informatics specialist, The World Bank, said at the CII seminar on e-governance, organised as part of the Bangalore IT.Com, that these statistics holds good for India too.

He added that the states and the Centre should be choosy and scale up just the right projects through institutional support. Of the 200 plus projects in vogue now in the country, he guessed that only about 110 have the potential to meet with some success.

Examination of failed initiatives, he said, explodes the common myth of technological determinism, that technology alone will ensure success.

In fact, technology is just a tool to improve process delivery. Instead of understanding that, governments are still focussing on automating existing processes and services.

Several projects are no more than a new facade for old and frequently inefficient government processes. In fact they are electronic versions of the stack of pamplets littered around government offices. Thus, more often than not, much hyped e-governance projects are doomed, he said.

When a government decides to scale up a project, it should evolve ways to assess failure, risk management and regularly benchmark progress against international peers.

Besides, the World Bank advocates a structured monitoring and evaluation system with a strong focus on outputs and indicators for a project's success, he added. This is clearly missing, according to the provisional findings of a World Bank study on 40 regionally representative countries' national e-strategies, he added.

Failures often occur because departments work in isolation, project time scales are set based on election cycle and there is no clearly articulated top down approach setting out policy and strategy, he said.

Such deficiencies combined with a lack of political will often escalate cost. One common occurrence, he said, was the splurging of resources in a bid to reduce the time frame.

For instance, Ireland threw away $63 million for an ambitious e-voting mechanism which yielded very little. The catch there was that the Irish authorities wanted the system up and running in six months, he added.

However government's should learn to salvage something out of failures. While one is the experience gained, another is the strong hardware infrastructure rolled out for the project.

This can be re-used for a fine-tuned version or for future projects, he said. The future though is not too bleak for e-governance. New communication platforms like broadband will open up possibilities for interactive multimedia that can build in the right ingredients for success.