Using Information and Communication Technologies to Render Transparent Governance in Transition Countries

The process of automating citizen-government interactions using information and communication technologies (ICTs) needs to be analyzed as a sociotechnical information processing system. During the process of improving the enforcement of rules via automation, which is clearly the best way to render transparency, socio-cultural factors need to be considered as they play a very important role. This is especially true in the case of post-communist transitioning countries such as Armenia where the challenges are unique. These countries are struggling with the transformation of their legacy bureaucratic and administrative processes. In addition, almost every post-Soviet country has inherited systemic corruption that is built in to the ‘modus operandi’ of both the public and private sectors. Without some method of categorization, assessment and modification of existing administrative processes, the formation of good policy and planning capable of leveraging the current capacity of institutions to deliver public service in a more transparent and efficient way is simply not feasible. Automating existing bureaucratic processes that are defective will not yield results. In this paper, we propose a methodology to render transparency in the governance of transition countries using information and communication technologies that goes beyond mere automating existing citizen-government interactions.