GovChannel bridges the service gap
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GovChannel is a response to the public's need for convenience when contacting governmental agencies given the website's simplistic and user-friendly design, said Irada Luangwilai, deputy director of the Electronic Government Agency.
"Our task was solving how to create a central portal, allowing people to access all the services from the governmental sectors through only one channel,” Irada said.
Irada added that the idea was to link Asean more efficiently through technology in light of the full integration of the Asean community next month.
She said it was not only the government’s job to bridge communication and service gaps between public and people sectors – people also needed to advance their knowledge and awareness of technology to keep up with the fact-changing Internet trends.
“It’s true that governmental sectors need to strengthen themselves in terms of Internet technology, but we can’t be the only ones who handle things,” she said. “That’s why we also focus on how to make people aware of today’s technology and processes to deal with possible Internet threats.”
One of main concerns involving the government’s role as an Internet platform provider is how it could be hacked given the rising number of global hacks. Irada however said the main issues was how to restore hacked webpages as fast as possible.
“Even webpages of world-class companies, or official websites of some advanced countries, were still hacked,” she said. “So, we would not dare say how to prevent such hackers, but instead we focus on how to make our database system prepared if such a scenario ever happens.”
To shift paper-based services online usually shortened the time required to complete a procedure, she added. But it was up to each governmental agency to decide which services and information they wanted online, as it could be hacked.
Irada said it needed to be understood that Thai society had its own contexts that may sometimes result in Internet services being developed differently to other countries. She cited how Thais tend to stick to traditional ways of communicating with governmental agencies. Irada accepted that the Kingdom’s unique political context was one of challenges facing that development. However, the EGA had worked independently, free from political influence, since its establishment in 2011, she added.
“Our duties are mainly operative and technology-based, so we basically receive orders from any government in power at the time,” she said, adding that the current Cabinet approved GovChannel.
