Galaxy Backbone Reveals its e-Government Agenda at e-Government Summit

Galaxy Backbone Ltd, a leading ICT infrastructure and services company wholly owned by the Federal Government has revealed its e-Government agenda at the ongoing E-Government Summit which commenced today in Abuja.

Yusuf Kazaure, managing director/CEO of Galaxy Backbone Ltd while delivering a goodwill message at the event, commended E-Payment Providers Association of Nigeria (E-PPAN), FSS 2020 and the Central Bank of Nigeria and other sponsors for providing a veritable platform designed to engender robust national discourse and engagement on a very important issue such as E-Government.

According to the MD’s representative Frank Ugbodaga, group head, Customer Operations and Services at Galaxy, “Galaxy Backbone is a service provider to the Federal Government, and it is in this regard that the company is well positioned to play a major role in the national e-Government agenda”.

He stated that Galaxy has adopted a ‘Whole-of-Government Approach’ as its strategy by developing a shared technology platform for e-Government services known as 1-GOV.net.

This approach was vindicated when the company won the United Nations Public Services Award in 2013 for this initiative as a creative and exemplary solution that transformed the chaotic information technology landscape in the Federal Government into a single, coordinated platform for e-government programmes within the space of 5 years.

Ugbodaga highlighted three major benefits of the Whole-of-Government approach to include economies and efficiencies of scale – where Government will realize significant cost savings from pooling resources together and avoiding duplication of common services; also, where citizens can benefit from a one-stop interface with interoperable information systems of Government agencies.

He further emphasized the benefit of information security and data sovereignty - citing data as the key determinant of relevance in the knowledge economy and the need for the country to generate, host and control its own data at all costs.

To achieve the key objectives of the e-Government agenda, he said that Galaxy Backbone is currently developing the National Shared Services Centre (NSSC).

The facility, which is already shortlisted for the 2015 World Architecture Award is planned for completion in 2016 and will serve as the Federal Government’s primary Data Centre and host for the first Government owned cloud as well as the Network Operating Centre (NOC) for the fibre optic network linking all FGN MDAs.

These components essentially make up the common infrastructure for all E-Government services of the Federal Government. 

Within this platform there will also be common services for MDAs – electronic payments, security, big data analytics as well as services oriented data exchange.

The ICT expert concluded that Nigeria is long overdue to provide leadership in the area of E-Government and urged the conference delegates to remain focused in taking advantage of the wide range of knowledge and insights that will feature during the opening ceremony and the technical sessions within the two days of the summit.