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• What does the Internet offer to governments?
• Internet in brief - A simple glossary
• What is needed to join the Internet
• 28 April 1997: ESCAP joins the Web
• Status of Internet development in Asia and the Pacific
• Internet -- Fundamental changes for journal editors?
• Committee on Statistics retains mandate in public sector computerization
• ESCAP observes 50th Anniversary

What does the Internet offer to governments?

The Internet and Intranets can be very useful for individual civil servants, public sector organizations and their customers. Benefits come from improved access to information, improved internal and external communication, and speedier provision of information and services to the customers.

The Internet and Intranets can significantly increase the speed and accuracy of various government transactions, internal and external. The networks are also excellent coordination tools as they allow convenient sharing of information among the government departments. Practically every area in the public sector can benefit from these technologies.

The Internet, in particular, can be a vehicle for providing better services to the general public, the private sector and NGOs, and other customers of the public sector. There are no limits on what information can be maintained in the global network. For instance, governments can provide information to citizens, tourists, domestic and foreign investors; they can promote the country in general and its export items in distant markets. The provision of information on the location, extent and limits of natural resources can help the effective and sustainable use of these resources.

It is not only the use of these networks that has substantial economic impacts. The construction of the information infrastructure itself requires investments and generates new jobs in sectors that are important for overall economic development. A good national information infrastructure attracts investments to other sectors as well.

Of the social sectors, the highest impact is felt in education. In the Internet era, learning and teaching are no longer restricted to one location and its resources. Initially the Internet may be used as an enhancment of traditional teaching, but as methodologies and communication links develop, it has the potential to become a primary tool for distance learning. With multimedia technologies improving, transmissions of live lectures and demonstrations are becoming technologically possible, at least in selected developing country locations. The Internet supports well the concept of life-long learning, especially after a greater number of work places and homes become connected to it. Technically this is because it provides a convenient linking facility to information repositories in academic, administrative and private networks.

Particularly important to developing countries, health care can be improved with the help of Internet. Already low speed connections are sufficient to deliver text-based health information for prevention and cure of illnesses. The Internet can be useful also in the surveillance of emerging diseases and in the management of patient services, community and home-based health programmes. Electronic transfers of patient and diagnostic information, such as electrocardiograms and X-rays, would help remote physicians to consult hospitals and colleagues to find appropriate cures. If high speed links are available, video conferencing offers possibilities to conduct distant training for health care teams. Analogous uses of the Internet can be found in other sectors, for instance in engineering.

Productivity concerns

Properly used, the Internet and Intranets in general, and e-mail in particular, are excellent productivity tools in government agencies. In principle, they can help the employees to optimize their time use: Information can be searched for exactly when needed and electronic correspondence handled when needed or when time allows.

The mere existence of an Internet connection, however, does not automatically increase an organization's total productivity. Governments need to invest in staff training; self-learning must also be

encouraged. During the introduction period, the staff would inevitably (have to) venture to areas that are outside their immediate field of work. However, that should not become a norm. To prevent Web browsing from becoming habitual at work places, brief guidelines and samples on its appropriate uses in the organizational setting may be considered. Web addictions of enthusiasts should be directed to serve the organization's goals.

Some studies have shown that a fairly large proportion of Internet use in offices is not directly relevant to work and therefore can reduce individual productivity. One private company, realizing that the checking of e-mail and surfing on the Net started to disrupt productive working stretches during the day, solved the problem by disabling those tools, except at particular early morning, lunch-time and evening hours.

Although the administrators can to some extent monitor the traffic generated by local users, they cannot effectively restrict the access to particular substantive areas in remote content providing sites. The Internet is simply too large and too dynamic to be controlled or effectively kept outside the work place. The only simple way of preventing non-business use is not providing access in the first place, which would be a pity since with appropriate policies and training, the benefits of the Internet, and in particular Intranets, by far outweigh the disadvantages.

Finding information becoming easier

Finding specific information on the Internet used to be difficult. Fortunately, the Internet information search tools have been improved tremendously during the past couple of years. There are already several reasonable search engines available and more are launched every month. There are many on-line guides on how to search for a particular piece of information on the Internet. The authors of one such tutorial (Teaching Library University of California, Berkeley: Finding Information on the Internet - A Tutorial, URL http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/ TeachingLib/ Guides/ Internet/FindInfo.html) point out that the investment of time to learn to effectively and efficiently find information on the Internet using complex search strategies is worthwhile, and simple searching is usually not.

Strategies for successful information provision

A government agency can establish its presence on the Internet fairly quickly, if it rents space in the Web server of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and has its hypertext pages prepared externally. The pages do not necessarily need to be physically near. If the domestic infrastructure is inadequate, foreign ISPs can be considered. (This model is actually quite commonly used by private sector companies in developing countries). That way the outlay on hardware, software and training would be minimized.

Outsourcing may be a recommended strategy if the information to be provided remains fairly static, such as general information about the organization. The Internet is, however, best suited for the provision of information that keeps changing, such as news, price quotes and interactive transactions. An efficient on-line information provider would integrate the production of its Web pages to its other daily operations (business processes). For instance, word processing documents could be produced in such a way that their conversion to HTML can be automated to a large extent; this may require a new look at the organization's word processing. Similarly, existing databases could be interfaced to the Web without an extra step of converting the records to HTML.

The availability of an Internet connection is only the first step in the path towards effective Internet service provision. As has been said, training is required at all levels, including the Webmaster, information content producers and the management. Internet and Intranet, which are essentially information sharing tools, can potentially improve many of the established operations in an organization. However, high expectations are warranted only if the organization is willing to adopt new ways of working, and especially, if it is willing to go the distance towards an open information culture.

Internet in brief - A simple glossary

The Internet is best introduced through live examples of what can be done with it today. Browsing through the information and services provided in the sector by leading national and foreign organizations helps one to imagine how one's own organization could utilize the network. If it is difficult to perceive how the

external clientele would benefit from the Internet services, one may want to focus on what internal benefits could be obtained from the Internet and an Intranet. To assist the general management tune into the language of the IT staff, the Newsletter has compiled a concise glossary of the central Internet terminology.

What is needed to join the Internet

Equipment: Computer, modem, dialup telephone line/ dedicated line, or network connection (LAN connected to the Internet Service Provider)

Software: TCP/IP interface, communication software, Internet client software

Internet Service Provider (ISP) , which provides the international gateway. The table on page 9 provides a list of countries which have local Internet Service Providers (ISPs). ISP would have negotiated the terms and implementation of a link to the global Internet with one or more parties already connected to it. If ISP service does not exist at all or is inadequate for the intended use, government agencies and academic institutions may initiate the establishment of a new provider. The private sector may be invited to collaborate.

Instructions from the ISP, hardware and software manuals, books on the Internet , organization's internal instructions and policies about the use of Internet applications.

A schematic of the Internet. All clients, servers and routers have unique IP-addresses, which are managed by Domain Name Servers located along the route. Some users may have a shell account (terminal connection) to their ISP, in which case they would not have their own IP addresses; they would use client software in the ISPþs computer for their Internet work.

Internet client software, such as versatile www-browsers, make the Internet servers, services and information easily accessible to end-users. Incoming and outgoing traffic can be controlled in routers with firewalls, which check identifications of users and contents of packets being transferred.

Indicative data transfer rates in various types of connection

28 April 1997: ESCAP joins the Web at http://www.un.org/Depts/escap

The idea was welcomed by all a long time ago, but its implementation took time. A fair amount of coordination and work was required to get ESCAP's long-awaited home page up. It was inaugurated by the Executive Secretary in connection with the Ministerial Segment of the Commission session in April.

The site is not (yet) as fancy as many others, but delivers a good dosage of UN documents for those interested in regional aspects of socioeconomic development. You can find the Government Computerization Newsletter updated twice a year at http://www.un.org/Depts/escap/stat/gc/gcnl/gcnlhome.htm. Make it a habit to check other offerings at http://www.un.org/Depts/escap. For the time being, as you can see from the URL, the pages are located in the UN web server in New York.

Statistics Division's home page can be found at http://www.unescap.org/stat/

Status of Internet development in Asia and the Pacific

National networking initiatives have emerged in almost every country in the region. With the recent additions of Bangladesh, Cambodia, Maldives, Micronesia, Northern Mariana Islands, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga and Turkmenistan, the list of members and associate members without full Internet connection has shrunk to 15 out of 60. In spite of the existence of connections, the access of citizens and public sector organizations remains very limited in the majority of the region's developing economies.

Internet -- Fundamental changes for journal editors?

Assuming that all readers would have access to the World Wide Web of the Internet, this feature issue could be a simple list of a dozen or so links to selected well-written and informative articles available publicly on the Internet. That concept of modern publishing would make such publications as the Government Computerization Newsletter more or less redundant, would it not?

What else does the Internet mean for the Editor of the Newsletter ?

• It is an important medium to keep abreast with the latest technological information. It allows us to cross-check facts given by one source.
• It allows us to follow better what is happening in other organizations and what others are publishing.
• It challenges us to publish a meaningful articles to the readers, whose requirements for content have increased with improved access to information. Searching and copying others' texts is easy (but we try not to fall into that).
• It challenges us to provide something new for the increasingly heterogeneous readership.
• It is a medium that allows us to service the readership better as the readers can get the texts in electronic format and reuse the material more easily.
• It makes the potential readership much larger. We (can) have readers all over the world, including in the private sector and interested individuals.
• It reduces the drafting time of certain types of articles as the source material is readily available.
• It may eventually allow us to cut down the mailing costs of the Newsletter. Today we know that the majority of the readers do not have a viable electronic connection to read it. Another consideration is that most people, including the Editor, prefer to read printed material rather than the monitor (which cannot conveniently be taken along to most comfortable reading locations). However, readers of the electronic versions always have a freedom of choice to print the texts for later perusal at their convenience.
• Its e-mail facilities allow the transmission of more instantaneous feedback from our readers.

In conclusion, the Internet is a wonderful assistant that makes our work in many ways easier, but forces us to think about the value that we can add with our publication.

The Internet has significantly increased the openness and transparency of the United Nations. ESCAP inaugurated its Web site at http://www.un.org/Depts/ escap during the fifty-third session of the Commission on 28 April 1997 (see previous story). Our pages hopefully make us also more approachable to outsiders. For the time being, ESCAP has very modest resources available for its internal web development. A choice was made to concentrate on the substance rather than the fancy design of the site.

It sometimes appears that information repackagers, or those who know how to tap existing resources on the Internet, have an edge in the modern information society. The same phenomenon has been witnessed in the field of international statistics, where private companies are able to add value to data they buy from various international statistical agencies (including the United Nations) by creating centrally accessible user-friendly repositories for a wide array of statistics. We have no choice but to improve our mastery of the technological environment. At the end we believe that primary producers of information and original authors will regain their relative positions.

Committee on Statistics retains mandate in public sector computerization

The fifty-third session of ESCAP, which was held in Bangkok from 23 to 30 April 1997, reviewed its own conference structure. A resolution adopted on the conference structure retained the Committee on Statistics with only slightly modified terms of reference. Public sector computerization activities will therefore continue to be monitored by the Committee on Statistics.

The newly approved parliamentary structure, in particular the names and the terms of reference of the Committees, resembles the old one (1992-1997) in several respects and the underlying thematic approach has been retained. The members and associate members recommended that the secretariat structure, which is under the jurisdiction of ESCAP's Executive Secretary, be organized with a high degree of congruence with the parliamentary structure. That incongruence had been identified as one of the weaknesses in the old system. The Committees that had a sectoral orientation (i.e. Statistics, Transport and Communications) had generally experienced stronger representation from the capitals than those with a broad thematic mandate.

The approved overall parliamentary structure consists of the following five committees, which should meet at the intervals and for the maximum duration indicated below:

Committee on Statistics on its tenth session

Following a standard procedure, the Commission considered the report of the Committee on Statistics on its tenth session, which had been held in November 1996. Noting that the Committee had had extensive discussions on its terms of reference at its previous two sessions, the Commission endorsed the strengthening of the Committee's institutional structure, including the adoption of new terms of reference for its bureau.

Apart from the Committee's terms of reference and discussions on statistical issues, the Commission reaffirmed its support for the development of the ESCAP Statistical Information System (ESIS) as a key regional repository for reliable and comparable economic and social data, and urged the secretariat to allocate resources for making the System operational and accessible to member countries as soon as possible. Linking ESIS with similar national statistical information systems could facilitate the dissemination of data in the region. Noting that the ESCAP World Wide Web site was about to be launched, the Commission urged the secretariat to use it actively for disseminating statistical information, documents and data.

The Commission stressed the fundamental importance of information technology in the work of national statistical offices and was convinced that it provided one of the most cost-effective ways to improve the collection of reliable and disaggregated data. The adoption of the latest technology was, however, severely hampered in many countries by the unavailability of skilled personnel. The Commission therefore urged the secretariat and the Statistical Institute for Asia and the Pacific (SIAP) to provide more training and advice on information technology applications in statistics to supplement national human resources development efforts.

Focus of computerization activities

The Commission noted that the Committee on Statistics had asked that greater attention should be paid to applications of information technology in statistics rather than to the public sector in general. On the other hand, the Committee had asked the secretariat to find a sharp focus for its work in the field of public sector computerization, especially by concentrating on those recommendations of the 1995 Expert Group Meeting to Review Computerization Development in the Public Sector where the available resources could have a meaningful impact. These recommendations and severe resource constraints have made it necessary to rethink the secretariat's strategy in public sector computerization. A recent internal evaluation of the past activities revealed, among other things, the difficulty of raising extrabudgetary funding for projects in this particular area, as public sector computerization had so far not ranked among the priority areas of donors.

ESCAP observes 50th Anniversary

A month before its 53rd session, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) observed its fiftieth anniversary on 28 March 1997 with the theme "50 Years of Achievement". ESCAP was established on 28 March 1947 under the terms of Economic and Social Council resolution 37 (IV) as the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) to assist in post-war economic reconstruction. The name was changed in 1974 to ESCAP, reflecting both economic and social aspects of development and the geographic location of its members. From an initial membership of 10 countries, ESCAP has grown to 60 members and associate members, representing some 60 per cent of the world's population, or 3.5 billion people. Its membership ranges from small Pacific island countries such as Niue to the most populous countries of the world, China and India.