MITA to overhaul e-government platform

The Malta Information Technology Agency is to overhaul the present e-government platform into a new one that would take service delivery to citizens and businesses into an entirely new dimension, according to MITA chairman Claudio Grech.

"As we speak, we are entirely re-engineering the complete e-government framework and targeting a new concept of how we deliver e-government services, what we are internally calling 'e-Government 2.0'. We are literally charting the future of electronic services and trying to visualise where we should be in the next five to seven years in terms of e-government and online participation," Mr Grech told The Times Business in an interview.

Mr Grech said that looking ahead MITA has the opportunity to use "a myriad of technologies" which exist focusing on creating an entirely new open platform at the middleware level and completely re-building the e-government collage of components "into one which is not bound by technologies or systems but limited only by the depth of service fulfilment the public entities wish to deliver to their clients."

"We are creating this central engine, a sort of intelligent services broker at the middle of our e-government which, essentially, will enable us to rapidly deploy any service which the government wants to deliver, any time and on any device," he said.

Mr Grech also said MITA is looking at how third party services could link to its infrastructure. "We will be in a position to enable third party individuals and business organisations to deliver public services which are of interest to their particular client-base or community."