Definition: Electronic governance or e-governance is the application of information and communication technology (ICT) for delivering government services, exchange of information communication transactions, integration of various stand-alone systems and services between government-to-customer (G2C), government-to-business (G2B), government-to-government (G2G) as well as back office processes and interactions within the entire government framework. (Wikipedia) 

Big data and analytics are the big topics of the industry right now and are fundamentally changing processes and systems – making them more efficient, effective, and affirmative. According to IBM, the number of individual sensors gathering and generating data is expected to reach 30 billion by 2020. In today’s context of IoT, every mobile device, every sensor, scanner, every business transactions made, energy being consumed, every accomplishment made in every industry is producing data. This humongous data being generated is effectively useless unless there’s a way to analyse them and made to use.

Governments across the globe are working diligently to implement these learning into their governance structure, military, and intelligence units. Gartner talks about the hype curve, and right now, advanced analytics, machine learning and the Internet of Things is at its peak. With the assistance of data capture, storage, and data analyzation, the military and intelligence community are able to identify threats, react quickly, and even become more proactive and less reactive – by being able to identify relationships and trends much more in advance. By utilising big data insights and analytics, governments are able to bridge the gap between what it’s citizens can do, and empower and enable what they aspire to achieve. By being able to extract insight and clarity from data sets quickly, a efficient and effective solution can be derived.

Private equity is critical in the context of e-governance and big data and is an essential element in government contracting. Private equity provides quintessential discipline and other non-tangible things that can spell the difference between success and failure for government contracting than just simply providing investment capital. In essence, it’s a sense of urgency and discipline that comes from having private equity choose you. One has to think about the cost of the capital, and what is the opportunity cost of having to do X over Y? Private equity will continue to play the role of being an intuitive behaviour set for E-governance to be a success.

Niku Dutta, Digital Strategist