e-Government for Citizens pt.1

Electronic government or e-Government is defined as the use of Information Communication Technology (ICT), particularly Web-based Internet application as a means to deliver government operations and services to citizens, businesses, and other entities.

For the citizens, e-government can offer a huge range of information and services including public policy information, government online forms and services, employment and business opportunities, government information, license registration or renewal, payment of bills or fines, submission of comments or complaints to government officials etc.

So, this means that the important to making e-Government work is not only the technology by itself but the citizens out there who do not or cannot access to computers and /or Internet. This is due to the gap between citizens' attributes including age, income, education, households, business, gender and geographic areas at different socioeconomic levels with regard to both their opportunities to access ICT and their use of the Internet for a wide variety of activities.

Who are the citizens? It depands on how you classify them according to which perspective you are looking at. Ordinary citizens, however, are only part of the network of citizens that a government faces. These other citizens are government civil services, businessess, volunteers, students, and other individuals such as job seeker, fully housewife, pensioner, fisherman, farmer, etc.

There is a special e-Government abbreviation to capture these involvement and interactions with the government for all groups of citiziens as follows:

-> G2B refers to Government-to-Business communication (as businesses people)
-> G2C refers to Government-to-Citizens communication (as citizen individuals)
-> G2E refers to Government-to-Employees communication (as government employees)
-> G2G refers to Government-to-Government communication (as government officers)


In the context of Brunei e-Government initiative, which aims to establish electronic governance and services to best serve the nation, there is a strong indication that Brunei has a serious intention of achieving a knowledge-based economy with state-of-the-art ICT development. The e-Government vision is to be an e-smart government in line with a 21st century.