Abstract
Japanese e-Government strategy and open source policy Our mission is to construct public infrastructure so that every nation people can enjoy the benefits of IT in their everyday activities. We think that e-Government is keystone for it. The first deadline of Japanese e-Government strategy is April 2004. We have already established e-Government infrastructure such as: the national and local governments WAN, the Government PKI system and some laws, that approve to handle electronic data in public and private procedures in the same way as paper documents. All government agencies are developing electronic filing system for their own use. By April 2004, the development will be completed and more than 53,000 government procedures will be made available on the net. We are now preparing e-Government version 2. It will include: 1. one stop electronic filing system for our services 2. the business process restructuring of government internal procedures 3. more sophisticated work flows reformation and IT systems planning, procurement, introduction and operation methods. We recognize that some countries announced that they gave special focus on open source software, especially LINUX, in their governments` procurement. Though the Japanese government has not made official announcement yet, we are preparing some projects to evaluate LINUX and other open source software in terms of security, total cost of operation and their maturity as software application tools. I would like to introduce our study in the implication of Japanese e-Government and discuss the reason why LINUX and open sources now. |
