E-Government in Malaysia: A Decade After

E-Government Experience In Malaysia

Following governments of other countries, the Malaysian government has also taken this opportunity in implementing e-Government from the year 1997 to assist in the delivery of information and services. Such services include transactions between Government and Business (G2B), Government and Citizen (G2C), and among different units and levels of government (G2G) (Fang, 2002; Raman, Kaliannan, & Cheng, 2007). The vision of e-Government focuses on effective and efficient delivery of services from the government to the people of Malaysia, thus enabling the government to become more responsive to the needs of its citizens.

The e-Government landscape in Malaysia was initiated by the launch of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) in 1996 by then Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamed (Hicks, 2009; Raman, et al., 2007). The MSC, a 50 kilometer long dedicated corridor stretching from the Kuala Lumpur city center to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, is a long-term strategic initiative (1996-2020) to ensure that the country embraces the ICT revolution as one of the means of achieving its objective of becoming a fully developed nation by the year 2020 (Raman, Kaliannan, & Cheng, 2007). As one of the flagships launched within the MSC in 1997, e-Government began with five projects (Hicks, 2009). Over the years, more projects are being added on. To date, there are eight projects under the e-Government flagship (Kaliannan & Awang, 2008; Masrek, 2009). These projects and their objectives are summarised in Table 1 according to types of government interaction.