Transparency and Accountability

under constant pressure to improve the efficiency in providing services. The turmoil that occurred during the enrollment in the newly passed Affordable Health Care Act in the United States shows that unless a government creates a proper delivery system, massive problems may result. In this instance it created mass frustration among the public, which led to the departure of the then Secretary of Health and Human Services. The department was unprepared to deal with the numbers of people trying to enroll at the same time. So, it is the responsibility of administrators to predict the demand and prepare the technology of delivering the services accordingly. Otherwise, it will cause frustration among the public. In the age of the Internet, people have less patience, meaning that the website is not accessible within a few seconds, people will not want to wait for services. At the same time, the services must be easily accessible. Melitski and Calista (2016) mentioned that one of the major challenges is in maintaining the effectiveness of digitalized governance. Internet bureaucracy must be simplified. For example, people do not have to go through several places to access the services. People do not want to see human bureaucracy to be replaced by internet bureaucracy. So, the challenge for the government is how to make the service both efficient and accessible for the public. Leikums (2012) suggests the integration of documents to promote the inter-operability of different types of information systems for all different electronic documents Kumar Suri (2014) emphasized the necessity of flexibility of processes in improving efficiency in e-governance. He suggested re-engineering and change mechanism in the processes.

transparency and accountabIlIty E-governance has improved both transparency and accountability in the government. All the information is wide open to the public to access for their purposes. E-governance has enabled information to be available to any interested person by providing wider publicity. E-government “is understood as the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to promote more efficient and cost-effective government, facilitate more convenient government services and allow greater public access to information, and make government more accountable to citizens” (Charag and Mufeed 2013, p. 445). Public officials realize that their information can now be viewed by anybody with an internet connection. As a result, they realize the necessity of being accountable to the public. Transparency and accountability are the major elements for democratic governments