Many countries, India included, have recognized the fact that E-Governance can be used as an instrument of change that enables the citizen to do business with the government in a transparent and satisfying manner. From the inception, NIC has been in the forefront to help automate Government businesses. NIC continues with this commitment to reach new vistas of IT-enabled government services. In 2004, NIC has launched a number of initiatives that aim to ensure the following: ™ Implementation of identified National E-governance projects ™ Incorporation of state-of-the art applications development technologies into its developmental activities. ™ Creation of a collaborative development environment over NICNET. ™ Evolving a strategy for making a unified SRS for the National E-Governance Projects. ™ Interoperability and standardization of E-governance applications development. The following are the highlights of activities undertaken by NIC in 2004 towards achieving the above objectives. € | National Level E-Governance Projects NIC identified certain key domains and declared them as National Level Projects for time-bound execution, using the state-of-the-art technologies and applications development tools. The selected domains were Treasury, Land Records, Property Registration, Courts, Hospital Services and Employment Exchange.The overall objective of this national effort of NIC involving the state units concerned is to produce unified products in each of the above six areas of E-Governance. Six Project teams working under designated National Project Leaders/ Coordinators and a nearly 50-member Core Competency team, appropriately trained and briefed have been charged with the responsibility to successfully complete these projects. € | Technology Exposure Workshops It is essential to accelerate the process of absorption of new, state-of–the-art Applications Technologies into NIC’s developmental initiatives. With this goal in focus and to initiate a fast-track scheme to build in-house capacity for the purpose of using modern Applications Development Technologies in its technological endeavors, NIC organized a series of technology exposure workshops. € | Project Management Techniques Workshop Competency in project management techniques is an essential attribute for successful implementation of projects. In order to develop this core competency among the project leaders, a workshop was held at Bangalore. The faculty resources were drawn from IIM (B) ,WIPRO and INTEL. € | Collaborative Development Environment It is considered essential to have a mechanism to monitor and manage the various projects underway in different units as well as to share the common resources. In order to address this issue, an on-line integrated collaborative environment is being set up at the NIC headquarters in New Delhi. This NIC Integrated Collaborative Development Environment (NICODE) will provide the distributed groups of developers, working with disparate development tools, with one collaborative development environment that supports all phases of the application lifecycle, from requirements, through development and testing, to support. € | Linkage with Industry NIC interacts closely with the technology solution providers in the industry with a view to have the applications developed around open standards so that they become platform independent and interoperable. € | Towards Evolving Interoperability Standards Having developed a large number of e-governance applications and built-up a huge inventory of ICT solutions, NIC recognizes the vital importance of interoperability across these applications that reduces administrative and software costs to the government. NIC has initiated a detailed exercise for achieving inter-operability amongst those applications that are internally developed. Efforts are on to evolve an inter-operable framework for e-governance which is an agreed set of technical policies and standards for achieving interoperability and coherence of ICT systems across all E-Governance applications developed by various NIC development teams geographically distributed across the country. For further information, mail to suchitra@hub.nic.in