Abstract

This paper outlines an e-government initiative of the Cabinet Secretariat of the Republic of Indonesia, the adoption and implementation of an Electronic Document and Records Management System (EDRMS) called the Legal Document Retrieval System (LDRS). The authors were engaged in the early developmental stage of the project through a special training program involving key personnel of the Cabinet Secretariat under the auspices of the Indonesian Australia Special Training Project (IASTP) III.3 This experience has provided insights into the challenges and potential pitfalls for such development projects. Taking these challenges and potential pitfalls into account, a set of critical success factors is proposed for the LDRS and similar projects. The paper highlights the difficulties of such individual undertakings within public sector and governmental contexts in which good governance frameworks generally, and ICT governance frameworks and infrastructures in particular, are still emerging. In such contexts, a fine “balancing act” is needed to meet the challenges, avoid the pitfalls and optimise the benefits. If this balancing act can be achieved, the LDRS project and others like it have the potential to provide models of best practice in egovernment and to demonstrate the features needed in whole-of-government frameworks in this area. In such contexts initial and ongoing education and training for key personnel become even more critical success factors.

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