Bhubaneswar, Dec. 8: The Orissa government has asked all its departments to develop an information management plan to make e-governance more effective in the state.

According to the plan, officers of the rank of deputy secretary would be posted as chief information officers. The CIOs would see to it that the official website of the government, (www.orissagov.nic.in), is updated regularly.

To assist the CIOs, a computer-savvy officer from every department would be designated as officer-in-charge of the information management unit.

The CIOs would also be responsible for information management of the three-tier structure ? administrative department, heads of departments and field offices. Every CIO would be familiar with the plan, budget, activities, projects, institutions, infrastructure, cadre strength, statistics and monitoring mechanism of his/her respective departments.

In a recent circular, chief secretary Subash Pani requested the secretaries of all departments to augment the IT infrastructure in terms of computers and software. He said priority should be given to computerise the typing section by installing a small local area network there. Pani has asked the secretaries to ensure the supply of computers to officers up to the rank of deputy secretary and later to every section. The secretaries have been asked to check the websites on a regular basis.

In February, the government signed a one-year memorandum of understanding with Microsoft to jointly develop and deploy solutions for e-governance in the state.

Microsoft has appointed the government?s Orissa Computer Application Centre (Ocac) as its strategic Microsoft technology partner (SMTP) to provide, consult, develop and deploy solutions based on the company?s technologies.

Microsoft is currently developing an Oriya Office software to put in place the citizen friendly e-governance. Ocac will develop a core team to work on Microsoft technologies. The software giant is also in the process of setting up a Microsoft Centre of Excellence in collaboration with Ocac. The centre will help the government conduct technical training sessions for its personnel.

The MoU also entails the rollout of the Microsoft Valuable Project initiative for engineering students. This initiative will help create a pool of manpower well-versed in software development for e-governance projects.

The panchayati raj department is gearing up to take IT to villages by initiating various e-governance programme. The department has launched a website where it has posted all rules and circulars of the department and provided citizen-centric information.

The government will set up touch-screen kiosks at block headquarters for transparency and a paperless citizen-centric information processing centre, said panchayati raj secretary R.N. Dash.

The IT department is updating the telephone directories of the government and Raj Bhavan, besides making them online.