Developing a web-based information system (WIS) to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of management in a Thailand local government

Over the past ten years, the explosion of the Internet and Web-based application has been attracting very much attention not only in business environments but also government organisations around the world. Many long vision government organisations in developed countries such as USA, Germany, UK, and Australia, are implementing Internet and Web based Information System (WIS) applications in their business processes to be able to enhance and meet to their objectives towards their citizens in this rapidly changing globalised business environment. However, most of the governments developing (i.e. Thailand) and under-developed (mostly in Africa) countries still remain partially or completely off-line.

Web-based Information System refers to moving business processes from paper-based to a fully electronic environment over the Internet. Research shows that every government organization (federal, state or local) that wants to provide the best customer service to the customers (citizens) must transform its strategy and business processes from traditional system (paper -based) to a Web-based Information System (electronic-based). In addition, the Web based Information System model is a system, which heavily relies on electronic features such as computer, local area and wide area network system, internet, intranet, extranet system, web based interface model, and other related software applications and hardware tools.

This project presents a study of developing a Web-based information system (WIS) to improve the effectiveness of management in Thailand Local Government. Therefore, this project is mainly concerned with the current poor performance in the delivery of public service within Thailand Local Government. Currently, one of the most important causes of inefficient performance and ineffective public service delivery is in the area of information system management. The problem is identified as that existing system relies on traditional paper based processing and communication tools, which produce very slow service delivery, inefficient performance, and are challenging to coordinate across the organization. Ideally, the WIS may be the key to solve the problem of traditional paper based management. That is to say the purpose of this study is to show that a WIS application model may be developed and successfully implemented in order to manage all business processes more effectively and efficiently within a local government environment in Thailand. Therefore, a Web-based information system model has been designed, developed and implemented to help to solve the problem. There are no previous and specific applications of WIS in any local governments in Thailand at the time of this study.

So the objective of this study was to develop an application model of a web-based information system in a local government environment. The main research question is whether a Web-based information system (WIS) application model can improve significantly the efficiency and effectiveness of administrative service delivery performances in local government. Therefore this project attempts to solve the current problem of inefficient performance and ineffective service delivery.

Local governments are dealing with hundreds of different and very complex interrelated business processes and services. Similarly WIS is a huge area and developing an application model requires focusing on a more specific field. Therefore, as the financial business activities are the core business processes in any local governments, this project specifies the area of study by focusing on the improvement of the effectiveness of financial activities, and efficiency of financial processes. For example, collecting revenue data, managing council rate, levy, consent fee data, and produce effective results for the users. All of other business activities and processes in other departments use the financial data as the primary data to perform their business operations.

Initially, the proposed WIS model had been designed and developed in a general form, and then modified during later stages of the study in order to make it more suitable and fit within the local technology and environment of Thailand Local Government. In addition to that to be able to make this research project more specific, realistic and applicable, Takhli City Municipality Council in Thailand has been selected as the research case study. The developed research model can also be easily implemented to the other local government in Thailand in the near future as they have very similar if not the same business activities in their business operations.

In more details, this project has been completed in eight stages as follows:

• Identifying the common business process related problem in local governments. In this stage involve 1st phase of focus group interview. The key management people (middle and upper managers) have been interviewed from a number of local governments in Thailand in order to figure out and have drawn up a context map in relation to the common problems of these organizations.
• Selecting Takhli City Municipality Council as research model case. Since there are more than 5,000 local governments in Thailand, which are located in different geographical locations, it is practically not possible to conduct research for all of them. Therefore to make this research project more practical and applicable, Takhli City Municipality Council was selected as a case model of this research. The reason for this decision is that this organization was already planning to implement a one stop service policy, which WIS may be able to provide the functions to support that policy.
• Identifying the core business processes of Takhli City Municipality Council. Specific and very carefully crafted, open-ended question based face-to-face interviews were conducted with the heads of each department in order to find out the most core business process function (the common one) of entities department. In this stage, financial activities were identified as the core business process function.
• Drawing up the existing working process flowchart of core business function (financial activities) of Takhli City Municipality Council. To realize this, second phase of focus group interview were performed with all staff employed in the financial departments. The questionnaire surveys were also conducted in parallel.
• Designing and developing WIS model. In this stage, the user need to analysis, interface design and web interface application construction were performed.
• Testing and adjusting the model. In this stage, testing and adjusting the developed model is performed in order to make sure that the WIS model is working properly and fits the needs and expectations of the organization.
• Implementing the model. In this stage, the implemented WIS model was demonstrated to all staff in the finance department of Takhli City Municipality Council. Staff training was also conducted in order to make sure that all staff know how to use the system properly.
• Benchmarking (evaluating) the model. In this stage, the interview, observations, questionnaire and recording were conducted in order to get feedback from the implemented system. Data interpretation and analysis were also performed in this stage in order to evaluate the reliability and validity of WIS model.

The research found that the developed Web Based Information System Model met the organisation's expectation by means of efficiency and effectiveness of financial processes in terms of significantly reducing the error rate; speeding up the operations, providing real-time customer service, reducing cost of administration and service cycle time. The "Web Based Information System Model" is able to improve the efficiency of revenue collection administration in terms of faster service delivery by generating a quick response to customers' enquires. The model enables effective revenue collection with the capacity of recording necessary revenue's data, retrieving information quickly, and sharing data through a secure intranet system.

The expected contribution of this project to the Takhli City Municipality Council and other government organizations is to improve the business (financial) processes dramatically in the sense of revenue collection by reducing cost, saving time and enabling to provide superior real-time customer service. The result shows that, the model can also be easily implemented into other departments within this organization; even to other local government organizations as well due to the flexibility, simplicity and adaptability of the developed model. However, other factors related to local politics, political support, the type of organization and its culture, users knowledge of IT, the endowment of the organization can be impacted upon the attempt to adopting the model successfully.

Finally, a WIS application model has been developed and successfully implemented in order to manage all business processes (particularly financial processes in this study) in a secure networking environment. It may be said that the developed WIS application model for the effective and efficient management of local government in Thailand is one of the first studies in this field.