Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and just as the global economy begins to recover from a painful downturn, Asian citizens have mixed feelings on whether government should have more control over industry and the distribution of wealth, according to a global BBC poll.

Increasing IT costs have become a huge driver for standardising IT operating environment across schools in New Zealand, a survey last week has shown.

Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz told an audience of Asian business leaders and government officials last week that specialist blogging is the “ultimate targeting” for reaching audiences young and old, and called the mobile phone the “new frontier” in communication for government.

Certainly the hottest topic, cloud computing has been drawing attention from many public sector organisations, as well as the IT industry. To many, the paradigm is no longer seen as a conceptual hype, but actions to be taken to embrace the benefits.

Simple ways of telemedicine practised in the rich world more than a decade ago still have its future in rural India

With the availability of mobile broadband infrastructure, mobile applications for governments will take off in China, Professor Qu Chengyi, Member of the Advisory Committee for State Informatisation, told FutureGov.

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and just as the global economy begins to recover from a painful downturn, Asian citizens have mixed feelings on whether government should have more control over industry and the distribution of wealth, according to a global BBC poll.

For both businesses and individuals, life is becoming more complex and the pace of change is ever accelerating. Nowhere does this have a greater potential to challenge processes and resources than within government agencies. To help it meet that challenge, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is leveraging SAS Business Analytics.

The education sector was a major contributor to the growth of the thin client market in Asia Pacific’s public sector, a recent report has shown.

IT industry leaders are not doing enough to deal with electronic waste, governments, environmental activists, and community groups have claimed.

Even as disaster response teams begin to embrace smaller format devices that make operations more flexible and mobile, large format printing still plays an important role in how the public sector responds to emergency situations. So says Santiago Morera, the Vice President & General Manager of Hewlett Packard’s large format printing business.

While the devastating Ketsana typhoon disrupted classes in the Philippines for three full weeks, the best device which helped teachers and students stay connected was the mobile phone.

The pressure on government to efficiently deliver services has probably never been greater. Such is life for governments during downturns. Systems are under stress. And yet extracting tax revenue from citizens and businesses to fund huge economic stimulus packages has probably never been more difficult.

Dr Chan Wai Sin, Deputy Director of Macau’s Health Bureau and Director of Hospital Conde S. Januário, actively promotes e-health based on international standards, amid strong resistance in a 135 year old hospital.

Government officials from Australia and Singapore have admitted that there is much to be done to understand how social media can be used to gather intelligence on security matters from the public, at the FutureGov-run Transport Security Forum this week (Monday October 26th 2009).

The Hong Kong Government has invited private healthcare providers to join the Electronic Health Record Engagement Initiative.

How does a country keep track of all the goods crossing its borders? What is the best way to achieve tax harmony? Avoid smuggling? Heavyweight international trader China looks to its statistics department to achieve all this. China Custom's SAS-based Enforcement Assessment System (EAS) has now been live for over two years, and the results are undeniably impressive.

Malaysia has ambitious plans to increase entry to higher education to 40 per cent by 2010, up from 30 per cent in 2005. With that in mind, the Malaysian government is working hard at improving the availability of online education, shared Dr Zubaidah Aman, Principal Assistant Director, Ministry of Higher Education at the FutureGov Summit in Bali.

The Chinese municipal government of Dalian has launched a user evaluation and electronic monitoring system to gauge the popularity and usefulness of its citizen-facing web sites, and to respond faster to complaints from the public.

Governments need to be more wary of the security risks posed by the consumerisation of the internet and the changing working habits of the public sector work force. So senior executives at global cyber security firms have warned civil servants in interviews with FutureGov.