In its continued commitment towards the implementation of the present administration’s Renewed Hope Agenda, particularly in the area of improving governance for effective service delivery, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), is intensifying efforts to create a one-stop-shop portal for all government services.

The initiative aligns with the President’s directive to digitise 75% of government services by 2027, a target that is now actively being pursued by various stakeholders.

This was made known when the DG NITDA, Kashifu Inuwa CCIE and his team played host to a delegation from the Ukrainian Embassy in Nigeria led by its ambassador, Mr Ivan Kholostenko to the Corporate Headquarters of the Agency in Abuja to discuss possible areas of collaboration between the rwo countries on ways of enhancing productivity, transparency and trust in government processes.

Despite efforts made for several years at establishing a centralised e-government portal such as the OneGove.net, the NITDA DG noted that the Agency has been playing a pivotal role in shaping the design, standard guidelines, and implementation strategies towards its establishment.

He however stated that renewed commitment and extensive research into global best practices have reignited the drive for pursuing the agenda.

While stating that the Agency has been doing research on how other countries have been able to implement the unified digital government services platform, the DG said, “We have been doing research on how UK, Kenya and other countries have achieved this, so I believe we can learn from you as well to see how we can build our own.”

“While such models are not entirely transferable between nations, we can learn from their experiences to develop a framework that works for Nigeria,” he added.

Proposing an introduction of legal frameworks to back up the initiative, Inuwa disclosed that NITDA has identified multiple models from other nations that allows government agencies to provide services through an Application Programming Interface (API) while other countries provide services exclusively through designated portals backed by law.

“If we want to achieve this, we need to have these laws in place and kickstart the process of enacting the laws in other to facilitate a smooth and effective digital transformation,” he averred.

Inuwa also disclosed that the agency is engaging with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to ensure alignment with global digital governance standards and the engagement is expected to provide valuable expertise and insights into structuring Nigeria’s digital transformation roadmap.

“This initiative is seen as a critical step towards enhancing efficiency, reducing corruption, and promoting transparency in government operations. By leveraging global best practices in alignment with national policies and digital transformation goals, Nigeria will have a smart, seamless and citizen-friendly government service experience, “he concluded.

In his remark, Mr Kholostenko said that Ukraine runs a digital platform known as the Diia application which is an ecosystem that encompasses all of the state registers, databases and can perform all the state and government services for citizens in one place.

He disclosed that it is the intention of his country through its Ministry of Digital Transformation to expand the reach of this initiative and provide full support for other countries to create such kind of system.

“I want to note that we are interested to expand and help other countries to make a digital state, reduce bureaucracy, reduce time for getting state services and of course, to reduce corruption risks, because human-to-human interaction is minimal,” he said.

United Kingdom has issued a “technical capability notice” to Apple, mandating that the company create a backdoor to access users’ encrypted iCloud data.

This directive, issued under the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, requires Apple to provide British security officials with the means to retrieve all content uploaded to iCloud by any user worldwide.

Apple’s Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature, introduced in 2022, offers end-to-end encryption for iCloud data, ensuring that only users can access their information.

The UK’s demand challenges this security measure, potentially compelling Apple to either comply by creating the backdoor or withdraw the ADP feature from the UK market.

Compliance could set a precedent, leading other governments to request similar access, thereby raising global privacy concerns.

The UK Home Office has declined to confirm or deny the existence of such notices, stating, “We do not comment on operational matters, including, for example, confirming or denying the existence of any such notices.”

This development underscores the ongoing tension between governmental surveillance efforts and technology companies’ commitments to user privacy.

Oracle on Thursday added another set of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to NetSuite, one of its corporate finance software offerings, including some that might make it faster for consumers to get a price quote on purchases like custom bicycles.

Oracle has taken a different tack with AI than rivals such as Microsoft. Rather than racing toward general purpose virtual assistants, Oracle has decided to add targeted features that speed common-but-tedious tasks like entering a brief write-up of how a sales meeting went into a corporate records system.

Another such task that is common in the business world is giving a customer a price quote on a complicated purchase that might have a lot of options, when a sales professional would need to sift through materials to come up with a price.

NetSuite on Thursday announced a feature to compile such a quote via conversation with a chatbot asking what the customer wants, which can either be used by sales professionals behind the scenes to speed up their work, or directly by consumers in the case of e-commerce businesses.

“When you buy something like a bicycle, you have to configure it – figure out what parts you want and which parts work together. We all do it when we buy our cars on the web these days,” Evan Goldberg, executive vice president of Oracle NetSuite, said.

“If you can configure (products) for customers more easily, you can do more deals in a day, or each deal costs less.”

To power those features, Oracle has decided to skip the costly race to develop huge AI models and instead works with partners such as Canadian startup Cohere.

Goldberg said that Oracle’s recent agreement to build massive data centers with ChatGPT creator OpenAI could lead to working with it as well, though the two firms have made no formal announcements.

“I think you could safely say that there’s a possibility that OpenAI will be part of this,” Goldberg told Reuters. “We are eager to work with OpenAI.”