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Pakistan moving toward e-procurement with Korea’s assistance

As part of the e-government vision, the government of Pakistan is seeking Korea’s assistance with e-procurement. Currently a feasibility study is proposed for 3 months. The key upside to e-procurement is transparency, competitiveness and managerial efficiency. The World Bank has an interesting report on Korea’s e-procurement model (PDF Format. HTML format here) . From the report: staffing requirements fell from 1058 to 935, procurements increased by one-third to $17.1bn. The e-procurement system managed $20bn in goods and services between Sep 2002 and Sep 2003 with the participation of 25,000 public agencies and 87,000 companies. The four factors from Korea’s experience: strong leadership, nationwide e-government reforms, information and communications infrastructure and comprehensive process reengineering. The toughest of those for Pakistan might be process reengineering. Korea began it’s e-government reforms under President Dae Jung Kim (1998-2002).

This is somewhat contradictory to our previous story: Pakistan ranked second last among ‘e-ready’ nations.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 5th, 2005 at 3:05 am and is filed under Government, IT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Pakistan moving toward e-procurement with Korea’s assistance”

  1. haq says:
    May 5, 2005 at 4:18 am

    process reengineering can come laterProcess reengineering might take some time to get right, but it can be refined along the way. The biggest gap between Korea and Pakistan in my opinion is this little section from the pdf:

    In Korea more than 70 percent of households (about 10 million) subscribe to high-speed Internet services, and in November 2002 more than 60 percent of the country’s 43 million residents used the Internet on a regular basis. Almost all private suppliers have high-speed Internet access.

    Now compare this to Pakistan’s 1 million regular dialup internet users in 2002. What good is the e-procurement system be if less than 1% of the pop have access to it?

    I think ramping up the infrastructure is where most of the challenge and opportunity is. As a matter of fact, the e-ready survey gave the most weight net infrastructure when ranking the countries.