Thailand’s Transformation to C-Government

With the commitment to ASEAN Community integration by 2015 and the continuing advances in information and communication technologies, Thailand has been provided a golden opportunity to not only catch up on current trends and technologies, but also to leap over e-Government and go directly towards Connected Government, or c-Government. In so doing, the government needs to focus on strategic implementation rather than simply developing a conceptual framework of e-Government. This chapter presents the core challenges and co-cultivated roadmap to accelerate connected government and a connected ASEAN. Firstly, there is the Management Challenge in enabling the progression and accelerating the adoption of transformational services; secondly, the Governance Challenge in establishing the comprehensive guiding principles to shape the vision, enterprise structure, committed leadership, coordinated efforts, and strategic action plans; and thirdly, the Foundation Challenge for leveraging the interoperability and establishing a standardized evaluation system with human resources development and joint key performance indices. To overcome these challenges, this chapter proposes proactive strategies and a sustainable roadmap, starting with a SWOT analysis of the lessons learnt in order to understand the current state of e-Government, followed by a clear vision of the future and an action plan for proactively and sustainably implementing c-Government. Input has been gathered not only from the public by e-survey and an IT group of 200 who attended a workshop, but the collective perception of directly concerned CIOs through discussion at a seminar.