The Department of Information and Communication technology (ICT) is digitizing the public service for efficient and effective delivery of government services.
Acting Deputy Secretary of the newly approved Digital Government Wing, Russell Woruba said currently there is a general state of distrust in Public Services because it takes longer to get services across to citizens.
Woruba, “The department has been restructured so that we can have policies in place that will build back the trust so that people can restore confidence back in government. We exist as a department to instill trust back in the State so that people can trust our development pathway and if all our staff can see that, the collaboration will be great.”
He said the Department of ICT is digitizing trust and want to be the first point of all verified government information.
“Data is a key asset in the digital economy; however, your data must be safe and thus the Department of Information and Communications Technology under the Digital Transformation Policy main mandate is to keep your data safe”.
“The mandate had been given to the department to build, govern and implement a secured data exchange that allows government, businesses and other state agencies to share data in a trusted framework,” said Woruba.
He added that this would make it easier for people to access government services more efficiently and effectively especially when it comes to opening a bank account or applying for a passport or applying for NID cards.
“We are already talking to State agencies such as PNG Investment Promotion Authority and Internal Revenue Commission on secure data sharing and are working with them to create a trust framework system to make it easier for our people to do business,” he said.
Woruba said once the data is shared, citizen’s information is stored in systems that links to all other services that helps you to apply or to lodge in without filling up again the required forms and thus the privacy of our citizens are held in trust and must be protected at all cost.
“The Department is working with the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise and other development partners in drafting the policies and strategy so that we protect citizens.
“The Department is also working on moving shared Government services from the main cloud and localising it with the infrastructure that we are building to allow secure exchange of data. This will result in having a secured shared government information within our own space and will result in the reduction of costs as the traffic is localised through the Internet Exchange Point,” said Woruba.