Lagos, Microsoft sign MoU on e-governance
The Governor of Lagos State, Mr. Babatunde Fashola (SAN) and the President of Microsoft International, Jean-Philippe Courtois, over the weekend in Lagos firmed up the memorandum of understanding (MoU) they entered into last year at Redmond, Seattle in the US, over e-governance and other initiatives that will make the state a knowledge-driven society.
Courtois, who was on his maiden visit to the country, said at Lagos House in Alausa that he was motivated by the level of commitment demonstrated by Governor Fashola in readiness to turn the state around within a short period of time to an e- driven state in all facets of life.
Discussing the progress made so far on the MoU, the governor said in respect of the Citizens’ Relationship Management (CRM), the state has deployed two functionalities on cloud services which will be moved to a private cloud with Dimension Data.
He said the two modules are CRM's Enquiries/ Complaints and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). According to him, they are systems that allow citizens reach the government through short message service (SMS) and designated call numbers similar to the 767 and emails. He promised that that the two functionalities would go public next month.
On e-health, the governor said with the visit of both the state government and Microsoft's team to the implementation site, the teams have come up with e-health solution that provides IT support to social health insurance programme and solutions such as clinical decisions support, data gathering, analytical capacity, integration with clinical laboratories/test result and biometric verification.
According to the governor, all these solutions will be delivered using the cloud for easy access by all health care practitioners in the state both from public and private facilities.
The governor added that progress had also been recorded in the area of education such as ease in students' registration, curriculum planning, academic planning, grade management as well as delivering instructional materials to students through the provided cloud computing solution.
Lagos State is partnering Microsoft Corporation to take advantage of all the innovative applications of the technology giant to help the state in establishing an e-governance platform towards improving service delivery by using platforms such as e-mail, SMS, internet and other mobile applications.
Under the MoU, Microsoft is to provide the state with the best of breed innovations such as cloud computing, citizens' relationship management, social health insurance platform, government dashboard and other productivity tools that will help in education, health, budget, finance, physical planning, transportation, and tax collection.