By Lee Jin-woo Jeong Kuk-hwan, assistant minister for egovernment at the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs, said an integrated administration reinvention system will bring a significant change to the current government system from next month. "If the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries applies for expanding their internal organization, which is an assignment to our ministry, related maritime ministry officials will be able to monitor the entire administrative procedure of our ministry in real time under the new system," Jeong explained in an interview with The Korea Times. "It will also let us evaluate each of our officials' ability and competitiveness automatically," he said. "Several ongoing projects, including providing government services via Web sites, mobile phones, PDAs or even television sets are all moving toward our ultimate goal of providing ubiquitous government services, which means people will be able to gain access to necessary information at any time and any place." Regarding additional costs that new electronic methods might create, which are feared to leave the have-nots behind in the fierce race for better information accessibility, he did not deny such negative side effects. However, he emphasized the ministry's effort to educate and financially support those who are not familiar with up-to-date information services. "One of the two major obstacles that I have faced was criticism over the low adoption rate, or acceptance rate, of the newly-established electronic govern-ment services in the beginning stage," he said. "Many people have criticized our new system as wasting taxpayers' money, but I'd like to ask them to be just a bit more patient until it starts to bear fruit." "The other challenge was to seek support from other government agencies in sharing information, mostly classified information, in order to build up a competitive and substantial electronic government system." The 49-year-old expert in the field of government reinvention based on information technologies has been responsible for several key initiatives for electronic government since August 2000. They include the G4C (Government for Citizens) project, Information Network Village Project, Government-Wide System Integration Project and IT application projects for local government administration. The integrated online portal, www.egov.go.kr, the center of the G4C project, which started its operation in November 2002, was one of the main reasons South Korea was ranked fifth in the Global E-Government Readiness Report 2004 of the United Nations.