Email this to a friend. A stovepipe approach to building systems for e-government is going to bea nonstarter. It's not necessarily because the various stand-alone systemsdeveloped won't provide the specific services to the government's businesspartners or the general public as intended. When the government develops and deploys security systems one by one,at best you end up with sound security, but you waste a lot of time andmoney managing those systems, driving up the costs of what is already apricey venture. At worst, you are left with a patchwork of uncoordinatedsecurity systems with cracks and blind spots waiting to be exploited byfoes and mischief-makers.
Agencies can build the most elegant and sophisticatedonline solutions imaginable.
But if the public and business partners donot trust those systems to protect their privacy or secure their transactionswith the government, then the systems that are expected to power the transformationto e-government will never get off the ground. But security is about more than just buying and deploying technology. The wrong approach is when an agency uses a survey of available productsas the proj-ect starting point, then fits the security and privacy policiesto those capabilities. It must be the other way around. Before any specific discussion of technologybegins, government executives should first decide the objectives of thesystem, what information should be exchanged and the baseline security requirementsto ensure the integrity of the transactions and the privacy of the participants.