Human Capital Challenges for Sustainable e-Government

Several countries around the world are attempting to revitalize their public administration and make it more proactive, efficient, transparent and especially more service oriented. To accomplish this transformation, governments are introducing innovations in their organizational structure, practices, capacities, and in the ways they mobilize, deploy and utilize the human capital and information, technological and financial resources for service delivery to citizens. The results of the United Nations e-Government Survey 2008 indicate that governments are moving rapidly forward in e-government development around the world. Amongst all these, the biggest challenge looming in near future for the Governments will be mobilisation, deployment and utilisation of human capital. The Bureau of Labour Statistics and the Department of Commerce of the government of the United States use a classification scheme that includes two main classes of workers: core IT workers and IT related workers. The former consists of four occupations: Computer Scientist, Computer Engineers, Systems Analysts and Computer Programmer. The latter in contrast consists of some 23 occupations which use ICT intensively. The Governments and ICT vendors will require all these 27 categories plus some more in order to sustain current and future e-government initiatives. This paper reviews the growth trends of e-government deployments and hence the projected demands for human capital. Against this backdrop, it reviews the availability and plans for building the required human capital, by ICT industry, educational institutions, and Governments themselves. The review covers global trends and it specifically covers the trends in India. In addition, the paper discusses additional challenges arising out of the need for transformation of governments and rising expectations of citizens. Finally, the paper also discusses the likely human capital challenges for ICT vendors and especially those aspiring to participate in PPP model of e-government implementations.