The eGov Forum, part of the eGov Global Exchange 2013, themed Engaging Citizens, Co-creating the Future, will be held on 17 June 2013 concurrently with the annual infocomm Media Business Exchange (imbX), Asia’s largest infocomm and media event. The event will welcome more than 500 attendees, including ICT Ministers from the region, senior public sector officers, business leaders and experts from global bodies that benchmark e-Government performances.

The one-day forum will include presentations, panel discussions and knowledge exchanges by international e-Government experts from the public and private sector. Three of the speakers provide iN.SG with a preview of their upcoming presentations:

"In the current world, there is a massive amount of information widely available and it is impossible for the government to digest all of it singlehandedly. The ubiquity of technology and the Internet has changed the way government seeks information and interact with citizens. Social media has also enabled insightful discussions and debates to take place without being bounded by location and time. Our citizens are increasingly informed and sophisticated, and the government needs to harness the knowledge and skill sets of our citizens to find effective solutions collaboratively. The pervasiveness of technology has also moulded a generation of digital natives who have interacted with technology since young and have a different set of aspirations and expectations. Against the widening demographic spectrum and evolving technological landscape, it is crucial for the government to leverage both traditional and digital platforms to reach out and engage our citizens.

A new ethos has taken shape, arising from an evolving mindset change – that the government need not always necessarily have the best answers and solutions to address all the needs of the people. The government is currently extending its focus beyond efficient and effective e-government practices, to an approach of facilitating collaborative service creation, and building participatory relationships with citizens and businesses in e-government initiatives."

- Mr James Kang, Assistant Chief Executive, Government Chief Information Office, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, on why it is crucial for the government to reach out and interact with the citizens to enhance its effectiveness.

"Governments around the world are facing a set of major trends that they must adapt and respond to – rising citizen expectations, falling trust in government, stagnant public sector productivity and constrained financial resources amongst others. At the McKinsey Center for Government we have observed four areas where governments are innovating by using technology to improve their performance in response to these trends.

First, governments are using technology to gather more comprehensive data and use this data to inform better decision-making. The UK Cabinet Office is, for instance, using randomised control trials and the resulting behavioural data to design interventions designed to increase rates of tax payment.

Second, governments are using technology to more deeply engage and empower citizens than ever before. This ranges from use of technology in deliberative polling to the 311 mobile apps offered in many US states that connect citizens more closely to the services they need and engage them in their provision.

Third, governments are recognising the need to build deep capabilities in critical technology areas. The cyber-security challenge, for instance, is not just a technical challenge but also a managerial issue. Further, governments are increasingly viewing cyber-security as an education-to-employment issue when it comes to the supply of graduates with the required skills over the next 5 – 10 years.

Finally, governments are using technology to respond in innovative ways to the changing relationship between public, private and social sectors. The US Challenge.gov platform, for instance, is changing the way Agencies think about procurement – taking a crowdsourcing approach that is both results-orientated and encourages private investment.

I hope that attendees will come away with a sense of the pervasiveness of the impact of technology on government effectiveness, beyond the issues people typically think of when we talk about e-Government. I also hope that the presentation will convey the ability of technology to allow governments to both better serve their citizens and do so more efficiently."

- Ms Diana Farrell, Global Leader, McKinsey Center for Government, McKinsey & Company, on how technology can drive more effective government and transform the delivery of public services.

"We need to make services simple and straightforward so that as many people as possible can use them. When we set out our strategy, the Government provided more than 650 transactional services serving about 1 billion users per year – but there were only a handful where a large majority of people who could use the online option, did so. Half didn't offer a digital option at all, and apart from a handful of services, if there was a digital option, few people used it because it was not sufficiently fast or convenient. This was clearly inefficient. For some government services, the average cost of a digital transaction is almost 20 times lower than the cost of a telephone transaction, about 30 times lower than the cost of postal transactions and about 50 times lower than a face-to-face transaction.

It's a simple fact that the British population is overwhelmingly online now. They are comfortable carrying out online transactions digitally, and Government needs to keep up and meet the needs of the user. That is our starting point. Of course, a happy by-product of this approach is that it saves huge sums of money for the taxpayer and dramatically reduces the cost of Government. It's hard to see how we will ever go back, so yes, I think e-Governemnt will shape the future."

- Mr Mike Bracken, Executive Director, Government Digital Service, Cabinet Office, United Kingdom, on how vital e-Government is to shaping the future of public service delivery.