NO SET TIME
The timeline associated with how long it would take for the E-Government Master Plan to be up and running and the amount of phases involved in the entire process would depend on how well the initial phase goes.
Human Resource Development Specialist at the Ministry of Labour, Social Security and Human Resource Development, Orville Lynch told The Barbados Advocate that ultimately it is a five-year plan and the first phase should actually have been implemented years ago, but due to a lack of resources, they were unable to go ahead with it then.
“Phase two would be dependent on how phase one goes. But the E-Government plan is really a five-year development plan so the phases would run according to how smooth you get the first one, because this first part should have been done years ago, but resources were not available to do it. Now we have the resources to implement it and we will do phase one and see how that runs before we start phase two. We hope that if phase one goes well, which is an 18-month period, then by 2018, 2019, we can begin to see another phase rolling out.”
He said that phase one will be about infrastructure while phase two will be about testing this infrastructure to see if it works.
“Phase one is more infrastructural stuff. So phase two will be more – testing it, putting it together – to see if it is running and seeing what the process is before the final workload, which is the actual customers using this kind of stuff. You don’t get to that phase until you actually put the system in place, you know, test them – do different kinds of tests – to see if they are working and then do the final phase. I have not seen the final document yet. It was supposed to be sent to me to see the design and what is in the phases, but generally speaking that is how we would normally do E-Government systems that are implemented in any country.”
This is because the success of the system cannot be measured unless the end users are satisfied and this is when you know that it is efficient, said Lynch.
“Phase two will most likely be what we call the roll out, where customers like you and I begin to use the system because the system is only as good as when the final customer is using – it is at the point when you know that the system is working. So that is what will be phase three or the final phase because I say phase three, but it may be four phases or three phases or two phases, but that final phase will be the one where the customer is using it and we are getting the feedback from the customers to see how well this is working.”