Publications

e-Government Readiness Assessment is a vital step in developing effective e-Government strategies which provides important knowledge for policy- and decision-makers. Particularly for developing countries, it is imperative to analyse the conditions, opportunities and challenges of an existing environment to ensure that the resulting e-Government strategy is realistic and workable, whilst enabling public administration reform in support of a sustainable development agenda. While there are different approaches to e-Government Readiness Assessment, the review of existing literature reveals a general lack of focus on methodology and survey design for e-Government Readiness Assessment applicable to developing countries. In this paper, we present the key elements of a holistic e-Government Readiness Assessment methodology, considering national- and agency-level survey model and instrument design. In addition, we discuss implementation issues and present recommendations for future research including the validation of the proposed methodology.

Electronic Government requires new approaches to the acquisition, management and distribution of knowledge in the public organizations to transform public service delivery, enable inter-agency cooperation and support for complex decision making activities by both middle level and senior level public officers. This paper explains the need for knowledge management (KM) in government, explores knowledge management requirements for public organizations in the context of electronic government, and describes available KM solutions. In addition, the paper presents and analyzes examples of national and international KM initiatives and characterizes the maturity of current KM practices by governments. The paper concludes by indicating challenges to public sector KM practice and identifying essential elements of a robust KM framework for e-government. 

This paper focuses on the challenge of sustaining Electronic Governance (EGOV) initiatives in developing countries to ensure their real impact on the society. While the challenge is well-recognized in the international development community, there is little evidence of research that discusses this challenge and how it could be addressed. This paper attempts to fill this gap by presenting a comprehensive approach which directly addresses the sustainability issues as part of the EGOV development lifecycle, and demonstrates how this approach was applied in a real-life project context in Afghanistan, aimed at addressing country-specific EGOV sustainability challenges. In view of this experience, the paper also discusses the adequacy of the approach to meet a range of sustainability challenges, with concluding remarks to guide developing countries in their endeavors to sustain EGOV programs.

 The ability of governments to develop and effectively manage knowledge assets is now considered a critical capability for electronic governance. Good Knowledge Management (KM) practices in government are usually driven by clear vision and objectives which are part of KM strategies. Developing such government-wide KM vision and objectives requires inputs from individual government agencies and other stakeholders on their needs and priorities (so-called demand-side). However, while there is significant literature on models and tools for measuring KM capabilities (so-called supply-side) and impact of KM practices, very few scholarly work is available on assessment of specific KM needs of individual agencies or other stakeholders. This paper presents an Integrated KM Assessment Model which measures both the demand and supply sides of KM in government. The model was used for assessing the KM needs and capabilities of government agencies in Macao SAR as part of a study for determining the readiness of government as a whole for KM. Results from our study show that innovation in government operations is considered by agencies to be the most KM demanded area, while KM capability for task-specific activities was found to be the weakest KM capability area. In addition, document-intensive and high-volume transaction agencies, such as educational, financial, electronic data interchange agencies have relatively higher KM awareness and capability.

Electronic Government leads to technology-enabled transformation of government organizations, and consequently of their relationships with citizens, businesses and other arms of government. Developing countries can greatly benefit from Electronic Government development, in terms of increasing the capacity of government organizations to meet tremendous socio-economic needs. However, they also face common challenges: weak implementation, delivery and coordination; policy-strategy and strategy-implementation gaps; insufficient human capacity; lack of research to precede project implementations; etc. This paper proposes a rigorous Electronic Government Development Framework (EGOV.*) to address some of these challenges. The framework enables systematic construction of Electronic Government for a given Public Administration (PA) in terms of: (1) establishing the readiness of the PA for ICT-enabled transformation; (2) determining state-of-the-art in Electronic Government practices and solutions around the world, as relevant to the PA; (3) building a PA-wide vision and strategy towards the development of high-quality Electronic Government; (4) constructing a government program to implement this strategy; (5) building human capacity within the PA, covering leadership, management and technical skills, to be able to execute and benefit from this program; and (6) establishing a Resource Center for Electronic Government on the basis of existing institutions, particularly government and academia, and raising the capacity of this Center to execute the program. The framework has been applied in three countries - one completed, one ongoing, and one to start.