Parastatals to Migrate to .ng Top Level Domains

The Federal Government is set to ensure that all its Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) migrate from their existing disparate domain names to Nigeria’s country code Top-level domain name, .ng both for their websites and official email addresses.

Minister of Communications Technology, Mrs Omobola Johnson, who disclosed this in Lagos, said the decision is part of measures by the government to bring all Information Technology-based activities of the MDAs to a single platform thereby engendering a connected government that allows for sharing of facilities and information amongst parastatals.

She said this initiative, to be co-ordinated by her ministry, is aimed at achieving true e-government.
 

E-Government (short for electronic government), is the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to improve the activities of public sector organisations.

The minister said: “We are looking at Information and Communications Technology in government. I can’t stand here and preach to you about the importance of IT development in the industry without telling you about what we are doing in government, using ICT as a means of transparently administering governance and engaging the citizenry.”

To achieve this, the minister said her ministry was already working with Galaxy Backbone Limited, an agency under the ministry “to ensure that we have a connected government, a government that shares information.”

Explaining the need for the connected government initiative, Mrs Johnson said: “Today, we have many different databases scattered around the MDAs across the country and we hope we can have shared databases in order to share information across different government agencies and have one connected government.

“We are putting in place a message and collaboration system to facilitate a connected government. All MDAs will be on .gov.ng. I have already started using mine.”

The minister also explained that e-government is a major area that the ministry was currently focusing on in its quest to make sure that government engages its citizens in a meaningful way.

“We have a very ambitious e-government programme and I can’t reveal the details because it’s a work in progress. But we hope that before the end of 2012, we would have launched one of the biggest call centres in Nigeria basically using that as a basis of engaging government and its citizens.

“We have set ambitious targets for ourselves. Those targets are tangible. We will be engaging the industry regularly to ensure that the targets are achieved,” she said.

Culled from The Nation Newspaper

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