By Kapil Mohan Garg, Research Fellow, Institute of Management Technology (IMT), India

Web: www.im.edu
Email: kapil@imt.ac.in

Kapil Mohan Garg is Research Fellow at IMT, India. Presently, He is having more than 7 research papers to his credit. His research interest includes E-Governance, Networking, Wireless and Mobile Communication.

Nikhil Agarwal, Assistant Professor, Institute of Management Technology (IMT), India

Email: nikhil@imt.ac.in

Nikhil Agarwal is Assistant Professor of Information Systems at IMT, India. He has more than 15 research papers to his credit. His research interests are in the field of E-Governance, E-Commerce and Networking.

Arun Mohan Sherry, Professor, Institute of Management Technology (IMT), India

Email: sherry@imt.ac.in

Arun Mohan Sherry is Professor of Computer Science at IMT, India. He has a teaching experience of more than 12 years. He has more than 20 research papers to his credit. Prof. Sherry is member of several IT task forces with the Government of India. His research interests are in the field of Networking, Mobile Communications and Genetic Algorithm.

Quality is always the result of high intension, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution. It is never an accident. It represents the wise choice of many alternatives, the cumulative experience of many masters of craftsmanship. (William A. Foster)

The essence of E-Governance, as the new evolving form of governance, is clearly evident with the emergence of pro-active knowledge societies. The Governments will have no choice to constantly improvise to bring in greater efficiency, accountability and transparency in their functioning. The truth rests on the pragmatic ground that web services are slower and complicated wheel of distributed infrastructure laced by low bandwidth which is the most serious impediment to scalability of web based services. To develop and induce excellence in web services and to achieve bravura governance for creating the self-service environment in citizen-centric governance, the requirement is to employ web services that are the ultimate unification of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) [Geoffrey S. Kirkman, Carlos A. Osorio & Jeffrey D. Sachs, 2002], web databases, distributed systems and an iterative tool to quantify the Quality of Services (QoS).

The study of this paper focuses on to imply the best business practices to improve the quality of web based value added services. The central idea is that if it can be measured how many defects are there in the system, one can systematically figure out how to eliminate the defects. One such tool is Six Sigma approach, which is carried out as projects. The most common method is DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) where in the project and the process to be improved is defined and the performance is measured. The data is analyzed, and then the bottlenecks and problems are identified. After analysis, improvement program is defined and defects are removed. After DMAIC circle, it is time to define a new project. In addition, to achieve zero wait time in handling requests & queries on web, authors propose a distributed model to utilize the available web database resources to its optimum stratum. The workouts of this model defines how automation and comprehensive data tracking are the key means work and has set the stage for optimum utilization of computing resources for handling traffics.

Key Words: E-Governance, ICT's, Six Sigma, Web Databases, Distributed Model.

Organizations are incessantly looking for means to stimulate innovation and creativity, within and across work groups, functions and geographical boundaries. One of the ways to achieve this is through tacit knowledge exchanges in the form of sharing and transfer of knowledge by means of narratives, storytelling, reminders, best practices etc. At the same time, organizations are turning more towards information technology and seek ways of leveraging their investments in Information and Communication Technologies, Web technologies, in particular, to foster knowledge exchanges between individuals and work groups. The Web may be applied in new, innovative ways to draw dispersed community members together virtually and in particular, to promote tacit knowledge exchanges.

About using Knowledge Management as an approach for finding appropriate information in a work situation in Knowledge Intensive Industry is the ability to find appropriate information in a work situation is a Knowledge Intensive activity that is relevant to Knowledge Management. Modern Knowledge Management increasingly adopts knowledge sharing approaches, such as communities of practice, commercial information technology that is to support knowledge management tends to draw on Electronic Service for knowledge management [Nikhil Agarwal & A.M Sherry, 2001]. Just as organizations try to match or exceed the price and features of their competitors' products, so governments try to match or exceed the quality and accessibility of their electronic services compared to other governments. IT and public sector reform are intricately intertwined, as new technologies are now beginning to change the way public administration is being run. E-governance results in the formation of new relationships, and includes the organizations and private sector along with citizens and other levels of government [Mohan Sawhney, 2001]

E-governance expands beyond internal government operations to include electronic service delivery to the public and the subsequent interaction between the citizen and the government. Based on a content analysis of a random Internet survey of worldwide websites devoted to e-governance (sponsored by national governments, state/provincial governments, municipal governments, think tanks, and commercial vendors), a divergent themes emerged that in order to succeed, E-Governance must utilize the proper technology. In the process of exploring the changing nature of government, in relation to the implementation of new information and communication technologies in government, following rudimentary definitions reveals the concepts being dealt with in this paper.

E-Government constitutes the way public sector institutions use technology to apply public administration principles and conduct the business of government. This is government using new tools to enhance the delivery of existing services. E-Governance is the movement of governments online to electronically deliver their services and programs, provide government information, and interact with the citizen. This is the formation of new relationships, and includes the private sector along with citizens and other levels of government.

As a multipart of the application of technology and quality opus tools to government, e-government falls beneath a large technological umbrella that includes:

·         The automation of government systems and the online delivery of government services;

·         The application of electronic capabilities and practices to governmental environments, to reduce costs and client fraud and to increase efficiency;

·         The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to facilitate the conduct of business and foster economic growth;

·         Innovative Quality tool like six sigma to contemplate and foster the prerequisite of incessant improvement in web based Value Added Services;

·         The widespread adoption of network-based technologies and databases and migration of government to the Internet environment;

Thus for the success of E-Governance, the three distinct inevitable predilections surfacing are:

1.       Spot on maneuver of design technology that fits human needs and preferences.

2.       Deployment of quality measures over web based services with an emphasis on creativity and iterative improvement.

3.       Instinctive and comprehensive data tracking measures to give zero wait time to citizens.

This section looks how emerging technologies can drive the E-Government and E-Governance. An assessment is made as to how the applications of the technology can assist in the coming transformation to an interactive society. Governance by electronic means occurs where policies and programs are designed, developed, and delivered using electronic networks. The application of network technology to internal government operations has just been as dramatic as the public offerings. Many governments have adopted a Common Look and Feel (CL&F) set of standards for all of their Internet publications and web pages.

Besides the latest editions of browsers, and the latest network technology to support broadband, government employees who create content for a government website or post and update that website content, must compose and submit their work using HTML/XML Editors. These resemble word processors, but they store the content in either HTML or XML (or both). This makes these documents instantly "web-readable". Broadband is important for isolated regions. There are multiple reasons for this, like, the ability to communicate freely is rapidly becoming a competitive factor for companies; access to the Internet is becoming important to citizens; and education, entertainment and health care are examples of areas that can benefit enormously from an underlying (broadband) information technology (IT) infrastructure. In addition, the Editor automatically records such "meta-data" about the document such as author, type of document, date composed, format features, etc. [Geoffrey S. Kirkman, Carlos A. Osorio & Jeffrey D. Sachs, 2002]

It is the HTML/XML code used to store these documents that makes electronic sharing and collaboration so much more productive. Recently the World Wide Web Consortium has developed an enhancement to XML that can control document content. This enhancement is called the Resource Description Framework (RDF), and it can code the semantic elements in documents.

Although technologies are necessary enabling tools, e-governance is primarily about the quality, quantity, and cost of electronic service delivery, both within the government and to the public. Despite all the management hype, quality is NOT free. In a sense, it is the most expensive thing that is provided and utilized. It is often, perhaps usually true that quality would not cost any more (or at least much more) tangible resources. But it does require attention to detail or design. That attention is actually one of the scarcest human resources around.

Another very problematic issue concerns just exactly what "quality" is actually supposed to be. Two Types of Quality, Customer Quality - The features that customers want and Engineered Quality - The problems customers do not want, are the good consideration criteria for developing the products or services [decisioneering.com]. Whatever qualities the customer wants in what is being offered (no more and no less), combines to produce the definition of quality. As Aristotle said, 'It is the audience that determines the success of the play, not the actors'.

But despite the initial appeal of this claim, it is not that straight-forward. The public may accept, even demand very inferior goods or services on many occasions. Their preferences may be governed by stereotypes, prejudices, short-sightedness, or a blinkered view. Secondly, there are contradictions and inconsistencies in what the public demands. People express a desire for fewer taxes, but more services. People want the laws enforced, except in the case of their own traffic violations. Unfairness is heavily criticized, except by those who benefit from it. Thirdly, peoples' demands themselves are often quite changeable. There are demands for less "red tape" and then something unacceptable slips through the cracks and there is a demand for better enforcement [Yoo Soo Hong, 2002].

Better e-government (efficiency and productivity) is not something most people have much information on anyway. They just want to see better outcomes - more effective service for lower unit-cost. Every attribute of a good or service can vary in its composition and performance. Quality is a trade-off between all of these considerations. There is no simple or comprehensive index to measure quality because each aspect of reality is different. Hardness is not the same as smoothness, is not the same as color. Similarly, speed is not the same accuracy, is not the same as expense. The cost of providing each can be measured, compared, and constrained (by setting limits in the budget), and so they should be - but none of this is an adequate substitute for quality. Judgments of quality must be made by the providers and recipients of government services.

Therefore, quality in government change management is another never-ending challenge. The best approach is a pragmatic one - count the costs of quality alternatives, and set the standards at the level the budget requires. This may not be perfect, but funds are not infinite.

As the speed of accessing information over the Internet has improved, the public's patience for delays has declined. In software help directories, the new goal is to provide assistance on a zero wait-time basis [Business Software Alliance, 2001]. No delays if possible - the shortest wait if necessary. This has necessitated the redesign of the entire help function service. No more superfluous verbiage anymore, just the basic message on each particular topic that will allow the user to deal with the problem at hand. To accomplish this, written materials have also been modularized. The quicker a person making an inquiry can come away satisfied, the better the communication function is being performed. One concern with fast responses is that they may be generated "on the fly" and be superficial rather than insightful. That is a real possibility unless the strategy, the policy, and the issue response are worked out in advance. That is why change managers need those skills in "thinking ahead" - a range of possible developments should be anticipated, and a matching set of responses should be developed. These can then be combined or customized as actual situations arise and unfold.

At present, "customer data" is spread over multiple agencies, there are multiple versions of data, it is not synchronized, and there is a mixture of core data and service specific data. Customers are tired of having to visit or call many agencies for related services, having to repeatedly prove who they are, filling in endless forms, and repeating their story at each point of contact. However, they do also want their data kept securely and their privacy respected. By converging ICT's, focus is on to connect and synchronize the telecommunications devices effectively to provide access to data stored over storage area networks. This in turn will synchronize the "customer data" spread over multiple agencies. But due to lack of infrastructure support, financial crisis and limits of technological advancement, many problems, like network traffic congestion, networks bottlenecks, time in the request processing (specially in considerable geographically dispersed locations) or various other tribulations are becoming the road blocks for effective communication. Data-sharing and synchronization promotes efficiency of service delivery - such as allowing a citizen to notify only one point within government of a change of address and that change being passed to all other parts of government that the citizen uses. It also prevents, detects and deters fraud. The amount of information about each citizen held in electronic form by different parts of government could be used much more effectively to substantially reduce fraud. Such data matching would have a significant preventative effect if some of the matching/sharing was carried out before the transactions [Daniel Bernal, David Egts & Stephen Yost]. Data sharing can also benefits in statistical planning, improving ability to predict social changes like populations, medical needs etc.

From an efficiency perspective, it is best to capture data once only and store and share it to allow integration of users across agencies. A single access point can then permit access to related services, enquiries and transactions. Data would be available for repeat transactions, and, ultimately, the same data and experience could be made available across the web. Such data sharing is a key to modernizing government, facilitating seamless e-delivery of government services, promoting quality customer service, reducing duplication, errors and the demand for physical documents. But such data spans over millions of gigabytes web space. Data Services get jammed due to heavy increase in traffic and switches handling the traffic often face the frenzy. All this is not because of the faults or shortcoming in the transmission medium i.e., incapability of medium to transmit amount of data beyond its limits. Instead of, this is due to improper request handling. [Jochen Schiller, 2000] There are many similar problems in which the requests are either not entertained properly by the systems or processing takes time beyond acceptable limits. This is due to ill optimization, nastiest utilization and distribution of system resources in their natural habitat. The problem is global and is inevitable worldwide.

Innovative Value Added Services are becoming a regular requirement to improve various processes. Six Sigma is one such tool which is being considered as benchmark of quality, across speckled industries[Christine B. Tayntor, 2003], based on the paradigm that a process must produce no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. The central idea behind Six Sigma is that if it can be measured how many "defects" are there in a process, one can systematically figure out how to eliminate them and get as close to "zero defects" as possible. In other words, Six Sigma is about abandoning the uncertainty of goals and forecasts. The main goal is continuous improvement. [William E. Lewis, 2000]. Sigma (σ) is character of the Greek alphabet, which is used in mathematical statistics to define standard deviation. The standard deviation indicates how tightly all the various variables are clustered around the mean in a set of data.

The lead up Analysis has been required to benchmark the respective agency's performance against the best one, against the average performer and on an overall basis. This technique understands and measures various crevices existing in the departments when compared with the benchmarks. This analysis is done on all six critical aspects of e-readiness, which are IT and E-Governance preparedness, the process, populace involved in the process, infrastructure, policies and benefits. On the basis, the bottleneck factors as well as the success factors are required to be identified for the various government agencies and departments. From the quantitative analysis, the variables, which are highly correlated with the composite index, have been identified in order that activities in these areas are prioritized. The role of Six Sigma arises to point out the snags in e-readiness frame work in a manner that ensure the snags free communication in wireless and telecommunication networks.

The sigma analysis is thus focused on to analyze and solve the problems related with some challenges like:

·         Inability to identify the parameters that drive uncertainty in process?

·         Trouble explaining the effects of changes in a clear, concise manner without excessive testing costs?

·         Problems optimizing the processes to improve efficiency and reduce waste?

·         Need to maximize the probability of meeting the defect free design?

On the basis of number of "defects" present in a process, one can systematically figure out how to eliminate them and get as close to "zero defects". The Six Sigma - DMAIC simply states that Methodology should be used if an existing product or process does not meet expectations [Frank Vodhanel, 2002]. Similar to total quality and other continuous improvement movements, DMAIC is an iterative process. This means that even when final phase of process (E-Governance) improvement project is completed, the team is not content with the status quo but continues to seek further improvements.

From the public perspective, the challenges for e-governance are to make the electronic products user-friendly, to widen the access to electronic government services and cater the potentially growing demand for governments to be more interactive with the citizenry. Although, it is too early to make any conclusions about the overall nature of e-governance, e-government, and e-democracy as these subjects are in a constant state of definition, redefinition and evolution, the studies set sights on a three-fold framework (Figure 1) classification of ICT's, Six Sigma and a distributed model [Kapil Mohan Garg & A. M. Sherry, 2002] (to optimize the traffic over various Storage Area Networks (SAN)) for an applicable and approachable networked government. This frame work conforms to the United Nations survey, identifying the categories for measuring a country's progress towards e-governance and proposes the Fully Integrated Web Presence (complete integration of all online government services through a one-stop-shop portal). [UNDPEPA - ASPA, 2001]

The distributed model is shown in figure II. It will strive out the wireless and telecommunication related problems and will be implemented in applications involving heavy data processing, data mining or the problems related to distributed computing [The Capability Maturity Model, 2000]. The model provides flexibility for further load sharing and making the system transparent as well as easily extendable. In Later stages, the Physical Machine Emulation of this model is Possible, and is desirable for the Scalability and Testing Purposes. The Workouts of this model is defines how comprehensive data tracking over web database are the key means work and has set the stage for optimum utilization of computing resources for handling data traffics in the telecommunication networks. The model can be replicated as a software layer in the systems where the need exists. It can be termed as a methodology for turning the vision of 'zero defects' in data communication over ICT's framework into concrete metrics.

The concept of information rights are being linked with the success of e-government. This gives some credence to the ongoing thinking that e-governance will eventually incorporate some form of e-democracy. The degree to which wide swathes of information are available to the public through websites and other information and communication technologies, the better the public is being served. In order to succeed in government online initiatives, governments need a conceptual framework to guide their efforts. The finding of this paper proposes a three fold framework and focuses on wide range of issues relating to the role of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) and six sigma for socio-economic development. It conforms to the five key elements; Vision and implementation; Citizen-centric - an intentions based approach; Introducing customer relationship management; Volume and complexity; Portals - single interaction points; for successful e-governance, [Dr. Hongren Zhou, 2001]. Thus, the accurate and unadorned coalesce of ICT's, Six Sigma and Distributed Model will ensure the reverie of online Fully Integrated Web Presence of E-Governance into veracity.

1.       Business Software Alliance, 2001, Sixth Annual BSA Global Software Piracy Study, http://www.bsa.org/resources/2001-05-21.55.pdf

2.       Christine B. Tayntor, 2003, 'Six Sigma Software Development', Auerbach Publications.

3.       decisioneering.com, Industry Page - Six Sigma. Available at: http://www. decisioneering.com, Accessed July 10, 2003.

4.       Daniel Bernal, David Egts, & Stephen Yost, "The Use of a Storage Area Network in Multisimulator Visual Simulation Environments", White paper, www.sgi.com/pdfs/3276.pdf

5.       Dr. Hongren Zhou, 2001, Global Perspectives on E-Government, International tracking survey report, http://www.unpan.org/e-government/ZhouE-govUNPAN_files/frame.htm

6.       Frank Vodhanel, 2002, 'Process Control through Automation Lowers Costs ', http://www.newport.com, WDM Solutions.

7.       Geoffrey S. Kirkman, Carlos A. Osorio & Jeffrey D. Sachs, 2002, The Networked Readiness Index: Measuring the Preparedness of Nations for the Networked World, Center for International Development (CID), Harvard University.

8.       Jochen Schiller, 2000, 'Mobile Communications', Pearson Education Asia.

9.       Kapil Mohan Garg & A. M. Sherry, 'Six Sigma Analysis and Distributed Model to Improve the Wireless and Telecommunication Framework', VI Annual Conference of SOM, IIM Kozhikode, 20-22 Dec., 2002.

10.   Mohan Sawhney, 2001, "E-Governance towards the next generation", Kellogg School of Management.

11.   The Capability Maturity Model, 2000, Addison - Wesley, Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, New York.

12.   William E. Lewis, 2000, 'Software Testing and Continuous Quality Improvement', Auerbach.

13.   Yoo Soo Hong, 2002, Narrowing the Digital Gap in the APEC Region, Korea Institute for International Economic Policy.

14.   United Nations Division for Public Economics and Public Administration - American Society for Public Administration, 2001, "Benchmarking E-government: A Global Perspective".

15.   Kapil Mohan Garg, Nikhil Agarwal, A. M Sherry, 2003, "Transcending the Digital Divide: Paving Itinerary for Conducive Digital Economy", ICEB, NUS-Singapore.