E-Office project still a pipe dream

ISLAMABAD: The much-hyped E-Office project for the placement of paperless functioning and decision-making among 40 federal ministries has not seen the light at the end of the tunnel during the last two decades.

Now the Prime Minister’s Office has highlighted major flaws in the latest endeavours for implementing E-Office undertaken by the National Information Technology Board (NITB).

Official documents and background interviews by The News revealed on Sunday that the PM Office took a serious notice of the unwarranted delay in implementing the E-Office and found that some major flaws existed.

The premier was told that the scrutiny of the project revealed that the software’s User Interface was designed with multiple features, but the UI should have been developed with only two to three options. Excessive options led to confusion. One of the reasons that after so many years, ministries and government officers are reluctant to give up paper is due to the confusing UI of the E-Office.

The E-Office was aimed at transforming from a paper-based to a paperless transition, but the system mirrors paper-based processes, negating digitalisation’s benefits. A user-centric approach has not been applied in the E-Office system as there is no element of feedback from users.

A search function is essential for any E-Office system. The existing system cannot provide modern search capabilities, requiring users to open each file to search its contents. There is non-compliance with the Electronic Transaction Ordinance (ETO) 2002. The E-Office does not adhere to ETO 2002 standards. Approved documents must undergo e-signing and e-sealing (digital certification) for tamper-proofing and legal compliance. This is a serious concern and must be addressed immediately, as it compromises a major feature and makes the government non-compliant with local and international standards. It also exposes the system to approval fraud and misuse of official documents and signatures, which are placed with copy-paste methods.

The system’s reliance on a licenced Oracle platform poses licencing costs and expertise challenges. Additionally, hosting the system on a data center with various bottlenecks impacts performance. Several other major flaws were identified by industry experts.

Upon further investigation, it was found that the E-Office system suffers from a variety of issues, starting with a poorly designed and overly complex user interface that falls short of industry standards. A fundamental requirement for any professional system is that it should be simple and effective, yet E-Office fails to meet this criterion. The international standard for technology adoption is around 80 to 85 percent, with users starting to use the system. However, E-Office failed to attract more than 50 percent of users, who also complain about poor processes, poor functionality and poor UI.

The prime minister was displeased with the slow progress and quality of the E-Office development. In response, he directed the Ministry of IT to either rectify the issues immediately or shut down the system altogether.

Following this directive, the ministry hired industry experts to conduct a system review and work with the main vendors to fix the system’s problems.

Although these experts reportedly completed many of the pending tasks, the project hit another roadblock due to a change at the secretary level. As a result, the project has once again fallen victim to negligence and incompetence. The main vendors and subcontractors, including project staff, complain of poor or no response from the CEO of NITB, who does not make decisions nor fulfill his written or verbal commitments with the vendors and project staff.

In a large ministry-wide meeting chaired by the secretary of MoITT, where the E-Office vendor was also invited to address the slow and poor performance of the E-Office solution, the vendor blamed the CEO of NITB entirely for not replying, not paying, or not taking any interest in the project. Upon this complaint, the CEO of NITB’s dashboard was examined, where over 100 cases were pending since January 2024. That was the reason none of the projects under the CEO of NITB could be completed. Sources say the secretary of IT warned the CEO of NITB to clear his pending work and start making decisions, or the ministry will be forced to take action.

When this scribe contacted the CEO of NITB, Babar Majeed Bhatti, and sought his comments, he said that he was hired in NITB almost two years back and they developed and placed E-Office-related software among all 40 ministries at the federal level. He said that there was an element of adoptability for which they organised around 30,000 training programmes but conceded that there was resistance to implementing the system fully. He said that there were some standalone ministries, such as the Foreign Office or the Ministry of Information Technology, where the majority of work was done through the E-government system. He said that digital signatures would be developed at a later stage, probably after six months, but other priorities would be implemented first.

Babar said he proposed major changes as he placed 25 officials of bureaucracy in the surplus pool of the Establishment Division. There is a need to revamp the NITB or close down this entity, he concluded.