Evolution of Readiness indicators

The United Nations (UN) established "e-Government Readiness Index" (eGRI) and "e-Participation Index" (ePI) as indicators to gauge capacity and willingness of Member States for evaluating their e-Government initiatives. UN claims eGRI to be a true global ranking programmatic tool. It measures relative indices of UN's Member States with respect to each other for the particular year as well as their own positions with respect to the past years, thereby portraying evolving patterns of Member States' e-Government performance. Over a period of time, feedback from ongoing process of e-Readiness evaluation and a number of resources accumulating UN's knowledge base about e-Government have helped to shift the focus of these surveys from measuring "investments made in deployment of information and communication technologies (ICT)" to "the degree of connectedness in terms of back office information integration for efficient ways of offering e-Governance." Assumptions made while designing issue-based UN Surveys pose a series of limitations in terms of interpreting the results. However, eGRI can be definitely used effectively by Member States for human development through technologies in respective parts of the world. UN's advocacy for building a skilled human capital for a future knowledge-based society is one of the valuable offerings made by these Surveys. Socio-economic uplifting of citizens through ICT and the principle of "inclusion for all" offer a strong guiding framework for Member States to craft related policies, design large scale ICT-led projects and deployment of ICT in the future. Since all the imperatives, rankings, views and suggestions expressed by UN through these Surveys are highly "context" dependent, failure to understand this core principle could take governments off the fundamental path of "inclusion for all." Devising a risk-to-reward index, trust index and citizen satisfaction index are some of the possible ways to better inform e-Readiness Index in the future.