Last night I attended the launch of eGov collaboration between the Fiji Government, the Chinese Government, Information Technology Center (ITC) and the service providers out of China and Singapore. After long winded speeches from the Interim Finance Minister and other speakers, we saw a quick demo of one of the first applications to have gone live. It's a pity that all the speechmakers saw fit to repeat the cliched thoughts on egov and all that it entails. One presented some statistics and what egov meant to him. Overall it was good to see such an event (even if it's launching towards the end of it's lifecycle). Apparently the collaboration worth US$50m was initiated in 2004 by way of a Chinese government concession loan of some sort. It is set to end in 2009. The result of the loan will be about 8-10 egov applications, an egov master plan and a data center currently under construction in Suva.

Pity we didn't see such an event when we started work on the first round of egov apps in 2005. In 2005 two local software houses (one being ours) were given about 6 applications between us. We finished all but one. Most of these systems were non-public facing internal systems. They were however developed on an egov framework developed by Microsoft and Dimension Data out of Australia for the Fiji Government.

As a local IT service provider what I hope to see is the government taking an active role in using local suppliers. This should help develop the IT capacity within the country and allow us to become self sufficient instead of using expensive expatriates or giving whole projects away oversees. On the other hand the high rate of attrition amongts Fiji's IT Professionals to the developed countries in Australia and NZ, sees us lagging way behind in terms of our IT capacity. There's always room however for experienced foreign consultants working in Fiji, but I reckon they should only be helping to develop local expertise. There's no reason why we can't be selling our IT services instead of buying them from elsewhere.