Sheikh Salman Subah Al Salem Subah, Assistant Undersecretary of the National Guard of Kuwait; and Ali Al Kamali, managing director of Datamatix and chairman of the Gitex Conference organising committee.

Sheikh Khaled said: "Decision makers should have a vision of how the concept of e-government will affect business. They should be able to deal with various systems that are involved. "There should be sound planning. Any huge project must have a plan that will assist and generate good judgement against defects that might arise, and help make adjustments.

"Another factor is progressive deployment. We cannot just embark on the subject of e-government and claim to get it accomplished in a year. It takes time to deploy the concept countrywide. Some people are of the opinion that as we are a small country it will not take long. Other countries like the UK and the US have put in at least five to 10 years in building the concept of e-government."

Sheikh Khaled said leadership also plays an essential role in the enforcement of e-government. "Enforcement should come from top government leaders. If visibility of leadership does not exist, we are bound to waste a lot of time wondering who is responsible for problems that might surface. Emphasis should also be on coordination of different ministries that are going to be involved.

"In e-government, there is a change in the entire working procedure. In other words we should be ready to re-engineer and re-organise government programmes. "Currently, there are a lot of areas where work is carried out manually. As a result, if we are talking of getting everything on the Internet all at once, we are not heading in the right direction. Matters should be handled one by one."

Stressing the importance of building mass awareness, Sheikh Khaled said: "While a lot of talk is going around pertaining to the Internet and e-government it is very important for the government to concentrate on generating awareness.

"The programme should tell people how things are going to be under e-government. The public will know what, when and how to expect things." Suggesting a unified portal for all ministries as it becomes difficult for the user to interface with various ministries, he said: "There should be one sign-in scheme where the user can deal with all the ministries concerned."

He finally addressed the subject of training government employees to work more efficiently on the Internet.