In this volume, we were honored by Dr. Sak Segkhunthod, President and CEO of Electronic Government Agency (Public Organization) or EGA to talk about important role and responsibility of Electronic Government Agency to help revolutionize government working system by applying ICT with every division along with educating people of ICT related knowledge.

The Establishment of Electronic Government (Public Organization)

Dr. Sak: “ICT has been used by Government bodies for over a period of time. However a central body with expertise in ICT is still lacking. EGA is an organization consisting of IT and IT tool experts. They connect, manage, and administrate the system and also build and develop applications for government organizations while government bodies will be users bringing applications to use according to their objectives in order to serve the citizen. For example, Rama Appointment Application allows patients to schedule doctor’s appointment and set up notification prior to doctor’s appointment. Ramathibodi Hospital is the first government hospital who applied the application.”

“These applications can be downloaded and used on smartphone. For me, apart from educating people to have knowledge for agricultural and other investment purposes, it can offer convenience as people can save time from visiting or calling at the

organizations”.

EGA Mission: Developing Hard Infrastructure, Reforming Government Services

Dr. Sak: “EGA was established to leverage all government bodies. Regarding national agenda in moving forward to Digital Era, EGA’s mission is to take responsibility in 2 Digital Economy Frameworks which are

• Hard Infrastructure – includes fiber optic network, Internet gateway, and data center. For data center, currently Thailand has 240 state-owned data centers. Their quality and management are by far less efficient than those managed by private sector. The shift of data center management authority to private sector is for Government to have time to fully serve people. For this, “National Data Center” policy will be reinforced, leveraging country’s data centers for utmost reliability, safety, and confidence, and leading to 24-hour continuous living of citizen in Digital Economy period.

• Service Infrastructure – EGA’s mission is to apply ICT technology as reformation tool every division within governmental organizations. The reformation covers the whole government function to become “Digital Government” including people mindset, not just changing from paper documents to digital ones. In my opinion, IT will not be just fundamental infrastructure but will also cover of Thing (IoT), Wearable Device, and the involvement of people’s lifestyle. For this mission, we aim at making One-Stop Service, reducing paper usage, creating speed, and facilitating approaches of document submission or information request through mobile phone, website, or KIOSK, and even other channels in order to reach people in remote area using smart ID card.”

EGA and People’s Arena, Application that Serves Digital Lifestyle

Dr. Sak: “Considering problems encountered, we found that Government lacked in communication, creating understanding, and making people aware that public sector has many applications they can use for their everyday life. At the moment we promote and educate people on applications we have. For example, we made survey on the demand for public sector’s application, government agency contact, and KIOSK set up in many locations to provide information to people. People can also check

welfare and benefits they have e.g. health insurance, welfare allowance for the disabled, social security right, welfare benefit for the elderly, or even national credit bureaus information. Now the KIOSKs were installed in Bangkok such as G-Point at Central World Department Store, Central Salaya, and in the future to many areas in Thailand for people without smartphones to get accessed to information.”

Open Data Security

Dr. Sak talked about data security, “we use new technology and innovation such as having security code encryption and data management for confidential data by government bodies. The data will also be kept in G-Cloud on government’s data center with many security levels as we think security is as important as service efficiency and both need to be managed and developed together.”