Publications

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.

Information sharing (IS) is a key capability required for one-stop and networked government, responding to a variety of intra-organizational, inter-organizational, or cross-national needs like sharing service-related information between parties involved in the delivery of seamless services, sharing information on available resources to enable whole-of-government response to emergencies, etc. Despite its importance, the IS capability is not common for governments due to various technical, organizational, cultural, and other barriers which are generally difficult to address by individual agencies. However, developing such capabilities is a challenging task which requires government-wide coordination, explicit policies and strategies, and concrete implementation frameworks. At the same time, reconciling existing theoretical frameworks with the IS practice can be difficult due to the differences in conceptions and abstraction levels. In order to address such difficulties, this chapter proposes a conceptual framework to guide the development of Government Information Sharing (GIS) policies, strategies, and implementations. By integrating theoretical frameworks and the GIS practice, the framework adopts a holistic view on the GIS problem, highlights the main areas for policy intervention, and provides policy makers and government managers with conceptual clarity on the GIS problem.

Better integration of Electronic Government (EGOV) and Public Administration Reform (PAR) strategies has been identified by global EGOV benchmark reports as one of the contemporary issues to address in improving the outcomes of EGOV programs. This chapter presents a technique for aligning EGOV and PAR strategies based on the Strategic Alignment Model (SAM) of Henderson and Venkatraman. By treating EGOV and PAR strategies as two different alignment domains, similar to organizational and technological domains respectively, we re-frame the original SAM to address our specific alignment needs. Our model provides a procedure and metrics for analyzing: (1) alignment between a pair of EGOV and PAR strategies and (2) the internal coherency of an EGOV strategy. We discuss our experience in applying this approach in Macao and conclude with how it may be used in aligning EGOV with other strategies such as those related to governance and development.

This paper presents a Minitrack on Development Methods for Electronic Government, organized as part of the Electronic Government Track at the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-42), 5-8 January 2009, Big Island, Hawaii. The minitrack focused on development methods, including technical, managerial and organizational dimensions, to address various challenges facing Electronic Government development: dependability and accessibility, evolving requirements, adherence to law and regulations, multi-channel service delivery, technical and organizational complexity, dependence on ever-changing legal and operational environments, etc. Of particular interest are contributions that can make Electronic Government development more measurable, predictable, replicable and scalable, contributing to the establishment of theoretical foundations and engineering practices for the domain.

The three papers accepted by the minitrack were: (1) “Government Enterprise Architecture Grid Adaptation in Finland” co-authored by Katariina Valtonen, Ville Seppänen, and Mauri Leppänen; (2) “Developing User Requirements for Transnational Government Information Systems” co-authored by Philip Seltsikas and Nikolaos Papas; and (3) “(Semantic) Model-driven Development for Electronic Government Applications” co-authored by Aadya Shukla, Charles Crichton, Jim Davies, Steve Harris, and Andrew Tsui.

This paper presents a Minitrack on Development Methods for Electronic Government, organized as part of the Electronic Government Track at HICCS43 - 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-43), 5-8 January 2010, Koloa, Hawaii. The minitrack focused on development methods, including technical, managerial and organizational dimensions, to address various challenges facing Electronic Government development: dependability and accessibility, evolving requirements, adherence to law and regulations, multi-channel service delivery, technical and organizational complexity, dependence on ever-changing legal and operational environments, etc. Of particular interest are contributions that can make Electronic Government development more measurable, predictable, replicable and scalable, contributing to the establishment of theoretical foundations and engineering practices for the domain.

The six papers accepted by the Minitrack were: (1) “A Goal Oriented and Knowledge Based e-Government Project Management Platform” by Demetrios Sarantis, Yannis Charalabidis and Dimitris Askounis; (2) “Simulation Games for the Collaborative Development of Multichannel Public Service Delivery” by Bram Klievink and Marijn Janssen; (3) “Can e-Government Adopters Benefit from a Technology-First Approach? The Case of Egypt Embarking on Service-Oriented Architecture” by Ralf Klischewski and Ranwa Abubakr; (4) “EA as a Tool for Strategic Planning – a Case Study of a Local Government” by Katariina Valtonen, Ismo Korhonen and Riku Rekonen; (5) “On Mapping Business Document Models to Core Components” by Michael Strommer, Christian Pichler and Philipp Liegl; and (6) “Semantic Interoperability in Practice” by Aadya Shukla, Steve Harris and Jim Davies.

The success of the electronic governance (EGOV) benchmarking has been limited so far. Lacking a theory to integrate existing conceptualizations has made the acquisition and sharing of knowledge produced by different benchmarking exercises difficult. In order to address this problem, this paper: 1) explains the nature of the EGOV benchmarking activity though a well-established theoretical framework - Activity Theory, 2) applies the framework to carry out a mapping between a number of existing EGOV benchmarking conceptualizations, 3) develops an unified conceptualization based on these mappings and 4) validates the resulting model though a real-life national EGOV strategy development project. The use of the Activity Theory in the paper has enabled defining and relating initial dimensions of the EGOV benchmarking activity, and mapping the dimensions present in existing conceptualizations. This not only created a unifying theoretical basis for conceptualizing the EGOV benchmarking activity but allowed learning from and integrating existing conceptualizations. The work impacts on the EGOV benchmarking practice by enabling a logical design of the activity, and contextually correct understanding of existing EGOV benchmarking results with respect to their intended usage.

Modern societies face high demands for skilled professionals, able to successfully design, deploy and utilize complex Information Technology (IT) –enabled socio-technical systems at everincreasing levels of reliability and security. Contrary to traditional education practices, the high-level training required to fulfill this demand should rely on the principle that the learners are themselves responsible for their learning process, that they have control over this process, and that the process aims at developing cross-disciplinary and problem-driven competences, not only at acquiring content knowledge. However, such training requires the presence of a highly interactive, problem-oriented environment for technology-supported learning (or e-learning). This poster presents a doctoral research project, which aims at designing, validating and monitoring a collaborative e-learning environment based on the principles of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). In order to validate its outcomes, the project will rely on two real-life professional training programs: in Software Engineering for software managers and in e-Government for public managers. The poster presents the objectives, research methodology and expected results from this project.

This document presents the mini-track on Development Methods for Electronic Government, organized for the third time under the Electronic Government Track at HICSS - Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. The document introduces the rationale and the papers presented as part of the mini-track.

This volume contains the papers presented at the 1st International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICEGOV2007) which took place in Macao during 10-13 December 2007. ICEGOV2007 was co-organized by the Center for Electronic Governance at United Nations University - International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST-EGOV), and the Center for Technology in Government, University of Albany, State University of New York, USA (CTG), and the United Nations Asian and Pacific Training Centre for Information and Communication Technology for Development (APCICT), Incheon, Republic of Korea.

This volume comprises the proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, ICEGOV2008, which took place in Cairo, Egypt during 1-4 December 2008. The conference was organized jointly by the Center for Electronic Governance at United Nations University - International Institute for Software Technology, and German University in Cairo.

The 5th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, ICEGOV2011, took place in Tallinn, Estonia from the 26th to the 28th of October 2011, under the patronage of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communication of the Republic of Estonia. The conference was co-organized by: e-Governance Academy in close partnership with Enterprise Estonia, Estonia; and Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, State University of New York, USA. Part of the ICEGOV conference series, ICEGOV2011 was supported by the series coordinator – UNU-IIST (United Nations University – International Institute for Software Technology) Center for Electronic Governance, Macao SAR, China. The conference took place in the framework of the Nordic IT Week and various ICEGOV2011-collocated events were organized as part of this framework on the 29th of September 2011.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Internet Technology, ICDCIT 2010, held in Bhubaneswar, India, in February 2010. The 26 papers presented consists of 12 long papers, 9 short papers and 5 extended abstracts. They were carefully reviewed and selected from 91 submissions. In addition the volume contains 4 invited talks. The topics covered are networking, grid computing and Web services, internet technology and distributed computing, software engineering of secured systems, and societal applications.

A major issue in organizations including public organizations is how to ensure that investments in Information Technology (IT) optimally deliver the expected value for stakeholders. Since most organizational transformation agenda in the government are articulated and implemented under the Public Administration Reform programs, and IT projects in government are increasingly associated with e-governance initiatives, the need to align reform and e-government programs arises. This paper shows how the Strategic Alignment Model (SAM) may be adapted for aligning public administration reform and e-government strategies. It shows how to partition strategies into domains equivalent to the four classical SAM domains and presents: (i) metrics for evaluating current level of alignment between the reform and e-government program, (ii) a process or sequence of steps to achieve desired alignments between the four domains, (iii) our experience in the application of the process in project involving the alignment of the e-government program and the reform roadmap of a city state in South-East Asia, and (iv) some features of the tool that has been developed to support the alignment process. Finally, the paper highlights our ongoing work in this area.

The paper presents a measurement framework for assessing the e-Governance maturity level of countries through the analysis of municipal websites. The paper also introduces the results of a survey carried out to apply and validate the framework. Applied to municipal websites of different countries, the framework considers websites content and design. For each country, the sample included three websites of local governments belonging to regions with low, medium and high population, respectively. The country measure was calculated based on the average obtained by the municipal websites adjusted by a correction factor based on the compliance of general features. The numerical values obtained by countries allow comparing their degree of e-Governance maturity and ranking them accordingly. The contribution of this paper is to present a novel approach for assessing e-Governance maturity of countries based on analyzing how electronic public services are delivered through municipal websites to citizens living in different populated areas.

The paper presents the development of a dependable messaging infrastructure for Electronic Government. Based on a few simple concepts like messages, members and channels, the infrastructure was developed to facilitate the exchange of messages by government agencies in a dependable and automated way. The dependability requirement was addressed on various levels: design, development and application. Considering design, the infrastructure comprises a small core offering plain messaging services, a repository of extensions to provide additional services, and a development framework to rigorously specify, implement and verify messaging extensions. Considering development, the infrastructure was build through rigorous use of modeling and analysis in various development stages. Considering applications, government agencies can use the infrastructure to exchange messages through carefully managed logical communication channels and the prudent use of necessary extensions, including extensions to implement required security measures. The paper presents the development and explains why the outcome satisfies the dependability requirement.

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.

Responding to the issues of complexity, relevance, cost and risk of Electronic Governance (EGOV), we witness a specialization of the roles responsible for EGOV development and operation, professionalization of the personnel playing such roles, and utilization of the EGOV services and information to fulfill citizen needs. In order to build competencies required by such (managerial, professional, technician and user) roles, education becomes a key success factor, and a growing variety of EGOV learning opportunities emerges. However, lacking conceptual underpinnings for EGOV education, the discovery, analysis and integration of such opportunities is difficult. To address this need, the paper develops a theoretical construct for EGOV education; applies six measures to this construct: who - learners, why - roles, what - competencies, how - programs, where - schools, and when - prerequisites; and validates it through a landscaping exercise focusing on EGOV university programs. 

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 egovernment 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 eready state’ and examines how it may provide a scale for determining the progress of individual countries.

Electronic Government (e-Government) provides a means to good and better government facilitating citizen engagement, effective service delivery and improved efficiency in government functions. E-Government’s potential for contributing to good government is dependent on strong e-Leadership that is formalized in executive IT leaders and Government Chief Information Officers (GCIOs). After presenting the motivation for e-Leadership and GCIOs, the paper introduces the evolving role of GCIOs and discusses main issues for defining a GCIO system, such as readiness assessment, legal and regulatory framework, institutions, and GCIO education and development. The experience of five countries in establishing a GCIO system is presented, analyzing the regulatory framework, capacity-building programs and organizational support defined as part of such systems. Based on country experiences and the importance of national mechanisms and policies to coordinate efforts of CIOs in government through cross agency institutions and programs, the paper proposes a framework for instituting a GCIO system. The main contribution of the paper is a step by step approach for developing a GCIO system in the public sector.

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.