MORE GOVERNMENT MINISTRIES AND AGENCIES ARE ACCESSIBLE THROUGH PORTALS AND WEBSITES

Housing and Local Government Ministry, Sarawak State, and my Government Portal and Website Awarded the MSC Malaysia 5 Star Rating 2008

CYBERJAYA – 25 August 2008: More government ministries and agencies are using portals and websites to promote, provide and obtain feedback from the people on their programmes and services.

In a recent MSC Malaysia website and portal assessment that was carried out in collaboration with Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI) and Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) between November 2007 and March 2008, a total of 1,133 portals and websites were assessed, indicating the increase of portals and websites - 1,055 in 2005 and 903 in 2005. Three websites and portals - Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Sarawak State and myGovernment portal – were awarded the MSC Malaysia 5-star rating for scoring between 80 to 100 points in the assessment.

“This is the continuation to the Malaysia Government Portals and Websites Assessment 2007 which was undertaken to assist in transforming the government portals and websites towards having the same “look and feel” and ultimately to provide better service delivery to the citizen,” said Dato’ Badlisham Ghazali, CEO Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC).

Badlisham said the increment has proven that the awareness towards the importance of promoting information and services for greater accessibility and convenience to the public has leveled up among the agencies.

The award presentation ceremony was held at the third Malaysia Government Portals and Websites Seminar for the various government agencies at Putrajaya Shangri-La here organised by MDeC. The seminar aims to share the knowledge and experience of good government portals and websites from those who obtain 5-star rating apart from providing an interactive session with the participants on the scoring and criteria based on their respective portals and websites.

It is anticipated that by holding an award presentation and knowledge sharing, it would encourage the rest of the government agencies to develop portals and websites with more offerings such as online services.

“Currently 30% of agencies are providing them via myGovernment portal, multi language, website personalization, feedback mechanism, workable support links and navigation within tolerance,” said Badlisham, adding that these are among many other criteria evaluated by the Brown University (BU) researchers in the Global E-Government Report which is produced annually.

More recently, the Malaysian world EG ranking has improved immensely this year. By far, out of 198 countries, Malaysia has progressed in the BU report from the position of 157 (2005), 36 (2006), 25 (2007) to 11 (2008) with a score of 42.8. This steady rise in ranking is accredited to an assessment of all government portals and websites undertaken by MDeC of which they adopted the criteria by BU. In the 2007 assessment, there is a leap of 4-star and 3-star portals as well as websites percentages to 8.08% (85 agencies) and 36.79% (16 agencies) respectively.