Putting people at the center
Stephen Braim, Director of Government Programs at IBM Asia Pacific, suggested defining e-government as a technology-enabled transformation of government services. This should be based on the needs of the customers and not on the convenience of the administration. The focus should be on transformation and not just automation. The Mongolian government has also adopted this principle in the implementation of its digitalization strategy. Bolor-Erdene Battsengel, the first female and the youngest chairwoman of the Mongolian government's Communications and Information Technology Authority, explained: "I wanted to eliminate all human interaction between the population and the state. Within three months, we launched E-Mongolia, initially with 181 online services. Then came Covid-19, and we skillfully used the lockdown by adding more services, but also encouraging people to use them. By the end of the lockdown, about 90 percent of the population was using e-Mongolia, and 650 public services were available."
