Publications

 A promising strategy to promote good governance is the harnessing of opportunities provided by the use of mobile phones, which are widely accessible to most segments of society. A study recently presented at the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, of which two authors are from the UNU-IIST Centre for Electronic Governance, investigated the strategic use of mobile technologies by governments to achieve the desired development and social inclusion outcomes. The study focused on the case of migrant head porters – local micro-logistics service providers – from Ghana. Its implications include supporting policy efforts for achieving the Millennium Development Goals on poverty alleviation and gender (specifically, women’s empowerment).

 The availability of domain frameworks to enable rapid development of Electronic Public Services (EPS) is essential to meet the increasing demand for mature EPS by various government stakeholders. This paper presents a composite domain framework comprising frameworks to build the Front-Office and Back-Office parts of an EPS. The framework supports a set of domain requirements obtained through a detailed analysis of over 30 concrete public services. After presenting these requirements, the framework is described in four stages - architecture, design, implementation and instantiation - all using UML to capture the artifacts built during development. We also illustrate the application of the framework through a case study in developing an Electronic Licensing Service by means of framework instantiation. We conclude with some comments on the complexity, flexibility and performance of the framework. This work was carried out as part of the e-Macao Project to build a foundation for e-Government in Macao, funded by the Government of Macao SAR.

 Electronic Government offers a great potential for improving performance, increasing quality of services and reducing costs in the public sector. In order to gain these benefits, organizational changes and re-engineering of administrative processes within and between public agencies has to take place. This, in turn, requires strong government leadership. Countries considered the worldwide leaders in e-government have all created central coordination offices to lead, manage and promote e-government initiatives. In this paper, we present the experiences of Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Singapore and the United States in e-government coordination, as well as discuss the best practices in organizational structures for managing e-government. We also present some recommendations for establishing a central coordination office for Macao.

 There are several well-established surveys on e-government. These surveys employ different assessment models for e-readiness, digital divide and other relevant factors, leading to varying conclusions on the global state of e-government. This paper presents a comparative study of 11 international surveys on e-government between 2001 and 2004. It identifies a common set of 'core indicators' for assessing e-readiness and suggests ways to determine the weights for them. The paper also introduces the concept of a 'target e-ready state' and examines how it may provide a scale for determining the progress of individual countries.

 This paper presents generic domain models to underpin the development of Electronic Public Services (EPS) - from conceptual models, through requirements and architecture, to implementation models. The conceptual model follows the analysis of 25 concrete business licensing and 6 social welfare services delivered by governments to businesses and citizens respectively. Based on this model, we characterize generic business licensing and social welfare services and, following the Governance Enterprise Architecture, synthesize a generic process for delivering Authorization and Certification classes of public services. From the generic process, requirements are obtained and the architecture is defined to support these requirements. The architecture comprises three categories of components - Front-Office, Mid-Office and Back-Office. We present the static and behavioral view of this architecture and show how it supports the variability in the development of concrete e-Licensing or e-Welfare EPS through: concrete process specification at the Mid-Office, binding of specialized tasks to automation support at the Back-Office, and general use of configuration files. Finally, we discuss an Enterprise Application Framework as a particular implementation of the architecture based on open standards, and describe the use of the framework for rapid development of EPS based on concrete project experience. This work was carried out in the context of the e-Macao Project, a two year project funded by the Government of Macao SAR to build a foundation for Electronic Government in Macao.

 e-Macao is a two-year project to build a foundation for Electronic Government in Macao in terms of readiness assessment, software research and development, and capacity-building for government workforce. The project focused on five main activity areas: (1) survey - a detailed survey of the current state of e-Government practice was carried out, both locally and globally; (2) training - a comprehensive training program was organized for government workforce in technical and management skills for e-Government, promoting collaborative, cross-agency development among government trainees; (3) development - a prototype software infrastructure for e-Government was developed, with example Electronic Public Services delivered to citizens, businesses and government built on top of this infrastructure; (4) research - relevant research was conducted in foundational and applied aspects of e-Government; (5) dissemination - the findings were disseminated inside the project, locally among e-Government stakeholders, and internationally. The project was carried out from July 2004 to June 2006. It was led by UNU-IIST and funded by the Government of Macao SAR through Macao Foundation. UNU-IIST partners on the project were: the Government of Macao SAR, including 44 agencies in all vertical areas of the Government (Administration and Justice, Education and Culture, Finance and Economy, Security, and Transport and Public Works), University of Macau and INESC-Macau. The second phase of the project has been approved by the Government, promoted to a program framework, and extended to last for three more years until end of 2009. The aim of this report is to explain the project, from its aim and objectives, through activities and deliverables, to its organization and evaluation. More information about the e-Macao Project can be found from the project portal at http://www.emacao.gov.mo.

 Many governments worldwide are establishing one-stop portals to provide access to various public services based on the needs of citizens or businesses and not the internal structure of the government. A critical support for such one-stop portals is a workflow infrastructure, supporting the matching of the needs against provided services and coordination of the implementing processes, often spanning several government agencies. This paper describes a generic workflow infrastructure for one-stop government - GovWF. GovWF supports the operations of a Virtual Government Organization - a hierarchy of agencies providing collectively a set of public services, while offering a uniform one-agency view to its customers. Conceptual and formal models are provided to rigorously describe the operations of GovWF. We describe how GovWF is implemented and also present a case study for illustration.

 The paper addresses the requirements for human capacity development for e-government in general and for Macao in particular. It starts by justifying the training of public officers as a critical success factor for e-government. It then presents some basic principles and guidelines for formulating an effective e-government training policy for public officers, followed by specific skills-sets considered essential for e-government according to: the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the UK Office of the E-Envoy and the US Chief Information Officer (CIO) University. In addition, the paper highlights the best practices in the development of public workforce for e-government. The paper reveals that allocating at least 10% of e-government budget on training and capacity development is essential for successful e-government programmes. It concludes with some recommendations for developing the public workforce for e-government in Macao.

 We present a service-oriented survey for government agencies and its applications to e-government planning. The survey documents for each agency its mission, structure, resources, on-line presence and perceptions about e-government. It considers all kinds of interactions within the agency (unit-to-unit), within the government (agency-to-agency) and between government and non-government entities (government-to-citizen, government-to-businesses, etc.) as services. We explore various uses of this survey such as: identifying key agencies and possible agency alliances, recognizing sharable resources for e-government, discovering opportunities for new e-services, formulating common infrastructure and staff training needs, and supporting the drafting of government-wide strategies for e-government. The survey has been applied and tested through a comprehensive analysis of the public administration system in Macao, China.

 The paper presents a rigorous framework to plan, perform and manage foundational e-government projects. Each project aims to establish a government-wide direction for e-government and create an initial impetus in this direction within individual agencies. The framework identifies five kinds of tasks - survey, development, training, research and dissemination, and prescribes how they can be planned, performed and managed to achieve the stated objectives. The general focus is on support for strategic planning and capacity development. The technical focus is on middleware infrastructure development. We also outline how the framework was applied to carry out an e-government project in Macao, China.

The Strategic Alignment Toolkit aims to provide a clear and rigorous process for Organization-Technology alignment at the strategic level. Its purpose is to assist public sector organizations and governments in aligning their various organizational transformation initiatives with counterpart technology-related initiatives.

The toolkit briefly introduces the context and background for strategic alignment and presents the pro-posed methodology though a practical process which can be adopted and adapted across the whole of government or within specific public sector enterprises. It describes all major activities involved in strategic alignment of organizations and governments, including assessing and aligning the respective domains to achieve the objectives of: (i) technology support for organizational strategies and goals and (ii) enabling technology-driven organizational goals and strategies. The activities in this toolkit can be used to examine the congruence or gap between organizational business strategies and their technology strategies, giving valuable insights into planning and project implementation.

A case study is also presented which clearly demonstrates how the toolkit can be used to align Public Sector Reform (PAR) programs - organizational strategy, with Electronic Government (EGOV) programs - technology strategy, at the central level. The case study establishes the application of this toolkit in aligning the Public Administration Reform program and the Electronic Government program of the Macao SAR Government.

 This survey examines the current state of South-South Cooperation in Software Technology. Results from the survey show that there has been a surge in South-South Cooperation in Software Technology (SSC-ST) in general since 2003, with significant increase in regional, in addition to bilateral cooperation. A significant increase has also occurred in the contributions of UN organizations (e.g. UNCTAD, UNDP and UNU-IIST) as well as donor OECD countries (particularly Japan, South Korea and a few EU countries) to both the development of software technology capacities and their applications in the areas like agriculture, e-governance, transportation and the Information Society in general. SSC-ST in the areas of e-governance and e-learning is particularly high. However, there is a pronounced divide even among the countries of the South in the area of software technology, with India, China and a few South-East Asian countries providing almost all capacities of the South. So far, not much inter-regional cooperation was documented. SSC-ST cooperation in the area of Open Source Software (OSS) has been growing rapidly in the past three to five years. This has been strongly supported by UN organizations primarily as a means to affordable access, catalyst for capacity acquisition, and a possible solution to reducing the scale of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) problem.

This report serves as a toolkit to guide Information Technology (IT) Managers in carrying out strategic IT planning in government organizations. It presents process models and detailed descriptions of the various activities and tasks involved in a typical IT strategy exercise in public institutions. The report begins by explaining the concept of strategic planning and why it is an important exercise in achieving organizational-IT alignment. Next, it reviews different models for strategic planning and subsequently presents a generic process model for Strategic IT Planning guided by a set of principles. Later, the report describes each step or activity of the IT Strategy Process in sequence. For each activity, it provides: overview of the step, required inputs, expected outputs, tasks lists and process diagram, supporting tools, related tasks and general remarks. The strategy development activity is based on the Balanced Scorecard technique. As tool support for the strategy process, a set of templates and a strategy management software system which manages elements of IT strategies resulting from strategy activities have been developed.

This document is a companion to the Strategic IT Planning Toolkit (toolkit) developed by the Center for Elec-tronic Governance at UNU-IIST. It consists of a set of templates to support the major activities involved in a strategic IT planning exercise - from obtaining approval to commence project through stakeholder analysis and IT readiness assessment to IT strategy and objectives development. The templates show how the information required in each step of the strategy activities can be obtained through brainstorming and workshop-style sessions involving both internal and external stakeholders of a government organization. 

 The UNeGov.net Initiative - Building a Community of Practice for Electronic Governance - was established in order to transfer the experience gained through the e-Macao Project to other parts of the world, particularly to developing countries. The aim is to build a global Community of Practice, comprising experts and practitioners interested in developing, sharing and applying concrete solutions for Electronic Governance. The Initiative established an activity framework comprising: (1) a community portal to document all activities of the community, coordinate its work and maintain a repository of resources relevant to Electronic Governance, (2) a series of network-building workshops around the world, (3) a series of capacity-building schools and courses on various aspects of Electronic Governance, (4) a community-wide practice in collaborative problem-solving based on the common repository of resources, (5) a series of state-of-the-art and state-of-practice reports about Electronic Governance in various countries, (6) a curriculum for training public officials in planning, development and management for Electronic Governance, (7) projects promoting Good Governance through Electronic Governance, and (8) International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance. Within this framework, community actions are carried out in the scope of various thematic areas including: legislation, financing, organization, planning, coordination, human capacity development, e-readiness, e-participation, e-procurement, software infrastructure, public services, interoperability, standards for Electronic Governance, and others. The aim of this report is to explain the UNeGov.net initiative, from its aim and objectives, to concrete deliverables obtained and activities carried out during 2005 and 2006. More information about UNeGov.net can be found at http://www.unegov.net.

The Whole of Government (WG) approach is increasingly seen as an imperative for delivering coherent and integrated policies, joined up and seamless services, and integrated program management in government. Although no generic WG framework currently exists, there are reported cases of WG initiatives by different governments. Grounded in existing theories, frameworks and cases related to interorganizational collaboration, collaborative Electronic Government (EGOV) and joined-up government, this article describes how to build a collaborative IT Strategy Management (ITSM) environment based on the WG approach. The article first develops a WG model to identify the enabling elements for the WG approach. Next, it identifies the necessary conditions for creating a collaborative ITSM environment in government, applies the WG model to synthesize a set of generic requirements for implementing the WG approach, and presents a WG ITSM toolset to support the implementation. Finally, the generic WGITSM requirements are used to analyze a case study involving the WGITSM development in a city government. Based on the case study, the validity of the WG model and generic WGITSM requirements as well as the usefulness of the toolset are discussed. The article closes with the recommendations for the WGITSM practice and for further development of the WG framework.

Macao SAR (MSAR) has continued to develop its ICT infrastructure in terms of telecommunication services, particularly in the area mobile and internet services, making the city one of the top twenty cities in the world in terms of International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) Digital Opportunity Index. The MSAR Government has also adopted a series of ICT-friendly policies to promote the development of ICT including the transformation of the Office for Information Technology Development and Telecommunication Regulation (GDTTI) into a fully-fledged government agency – Bureau for Telecommunication Regulation (DSRT), and establishment of the Science and Technology Development Fund, Productivity and Technology Transfer Center, and the Macao-Zhuhai trans-border industrial park. In addition, major IT initiatives particularly in the area of strategic IT application in government (including the e-Macao initiative) have been adopted.

Despite this progress, Macao is yet to adequately leverage its existing ICT capability, and develop and exploit other ICT-related opportunities, particularly in the context of its socio-economic and political needs and priorities – diversification of the economy, development of environmentally-sound socio-economic initiatives, and human capacity building to meet local needs and enable global competitiveness of Macao citizens.

Apart from the e-Government Development plan launched in 2005 by the MSAR Government, there is yet no comprehensive ICT strategy to support the socio-economic, political and environmental development strategies of the SAR and the emerging individual IT strategies for specific agencies of the government.

This report documents the results of a comprehensive study to develop medium-to-long-term ICT strategies for Macao SAR (e-Macao 2015), to support plausible scenarios for Macao in view of the global and local change factors, in addition to the current government policies. Specifically, it captures: (1) scenarios for the future, developed upon a set of global and local socio-economic and political variables affecting Macao, to define the strategic context for the study; (2) the state of ICT development in Macao; (3) findings from the analysis of ICT strategies of selected economies and states considered leaders in ICT development, with geo-political and economic conditions similar to Macao, specifically Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malta and Singapore; and (4) the recommended ICT strategies. The document also provides guidelines for setting up the necessary governance framework to effectively drive ICT development in Macao, based on the analysis of good practices in different economies taken into account.