Digital Government

This chapter provides a critical introduction to the idea of digital government. It argues that governance is itself a technological project. The main barriers to e-governance are considered and the concept of governmentality – and the governed e-public – are explored.

Digital or Electronic Government Research (EGR) finds itself at a crossroads. While the body of electronic-Government-related knowledge is rapidly growing, questions have been raised about whether EGR qualifies as a legitimate discipline, and what the accepted methods and procedures of inquiry should be. This chapter proposes that EGR will be fortunate not to develop into a traditional discipline and not to restrict itself to a narrow set of procedures. Rather, EGR should keep drawing upon multiple disciplines spanning the whole spectrum of hard-pure, hard-applied, soft-pure, and soft-applied sciences. In so doing, EGR might best thrive as a multi-, inter-, or transdiscipline with the prospect of becoming an academic role model for integrative knowing capable of coping with the complexity of problems and phenomena without unduly simplifying them.

This chapter asks: Is Digital (or electronic) Government (DG) a legitimate new field of research? If so, what aspects of government should be studied, and why? Since DG is obviously an interdisciplinary endeavor, which disciplines can or should play a role, and why? How can they interact? Is it likely that a single integrated language, research methodology, project style, and structure of research paper will evolve, and if so, what might this hybrid look like? The chapter presents a model in which government is viewed from three perspectives. First, the technological. As a processor of information, government uses the results of ICT research and development, as performed by computer scientists and human factors specialists. This begs the question: which new technologies should be designed and built, and why? Second, therefore, the normative. The idealized (or at least improved) functioning of government, which tends to be the purview of political scientists, ethicists, and legal scholars, must furnish models toward which new ICT and its deployment can strive. In turn, this begs the question: how well does newly-enabled ICT-enriched government actually do? Third, therefore, the evaluative. This involves the challenges of studying the effects of using technology on society and government itself, enterprises that tend to be the domain of some sociologists and public administration researchers, and, within government, of organization management and information systems specialists. The chapter suggests that good research in DG, and good DG research papers, should combine these three perspectives, thereby including in each study all three aspects: technological, normative, and evaluative.

Electronic Government (e-gov) research is mainly applied research serving a rapidly growing field of practice. Hence it is torn between academic analysis and practice demands for solutions to immediate problems. The research field has grown rapidly and now features several journals and a huge amount of conferences. Research quality is important to positively influence practice, but it takes time for a research field to settle with focus, borders, and quality standards. This paper follows up on an earlier study (Grönlund, 2004), which found quality lacking, by assessing 117 papers from two e-gov conferences, E-GOV 2005 and HICSS 2006, using rigor and relevance criteria derived from a straightforward maturity model. We find that since the last measurement, e-gov research papers on average are increasingly technically rigorous, increasingly descriptive (as opposed to analytical), increasingly product descriptions, and increasingly focus on IT rather than government, society, or individuals/citizens. Some potential explanations to the findings are discussed, and the paper concludes by discussing the issue of the nature of e-Government research – are we headed towards academic maturity or rather towards production of technical artefacts to support industry in a short-term perspective?

This chapter considers e-democracy and e-Participation research across Europe. This is a relatively new and emerging area of research when compared with other physical and social science disciplines. The range of contrasting and, in some instances, conflicting definitions of the terms emphasize the ‘newness’ of the domain. For this chapter, e-democracy and e- Participation can be considered as the use of information and communication technologies to broaden and deepen political participation by enabling citizens to connect with one another and with their elected representatives. The chapter begins by discussing the critical need for such research given that a large proportion of western society is drifting away from political activities such as voting in elections and joining political parties. Having discussed the growing apathy to formal political processes, the chapter then proceeds to discuss the current status of research and practice. e-democracy and e-Participation, by their very nature, are multi-disciplinary research activities with research based in democratic theory, political science, communication studies, information management, computer science and more. As such, researchers need to understand how to harmonize and align concepts and methods from this range of academic disciplines to ensure that an inter-disciplinary approach is adopted.

Digital government research aims not only to generate new knowledge but also to make useful connections between research and practice. To achieve both ends, digital government research ideally derives research problems from practical challenges, and translates research findings into both new knowledge and usable results. Ubiquitous problems related to data availability, quality, and usability; information value; technology choices; and organizational and cross-boundary information-enabled processes are all of interest to both scholars and managers. These challenges take specific forms in different organizational and policy settings, but they also have common characteristics that can be usefully approached using analytical lenses that focus on some combination of strategy, policy, data, skills, costs, and technology. This chapter uses a public management perspective, represented by a set of real-life case studies, to explore how these considerations interact to produce both desirable and undesirable results. These interdependencies present researchers and managers with special challenges to overcome as well as unique opportunities to collaborate.

Protecting information privacy in the context of e-government is critical to achieve the potential benefits promised by e-government. If individuals do not believe that their privacy will be protected, they will not use available e-government features. In order to identify and analyze relevant privacy issues, this chapter uses Layne and Lee’s (2001) four-stage egovernment model: 1) cataloguing; 2) transaction; 3) vertical integration; and 4) horizontal integration. The chapter also evaluates the privacy protecting solutions that are available and necessary at each of the four stages. The analysis demonstrates that privacy protections are most effective when they are formulated as part of the early design of e-government initiatives, not when they are added on after complaints and concerns have been registered.

Online access to electronic government does not necessarily guarantee that an individual will be successful in obtaining information and resources sought. Web accessibility barriers must be overcome in order to realize the full capability of electronic government. Federal mandates and statutes have played an integral role in promoting access to electronic government resources by all Americans. However, these have to be enforced over the long run to ensure that Web content and supporting technologies remain accessible to those with and without disabilities. Web accessibility, in this chapter, is discussed as an ongoing concern for federal electronic government.

The 2000 election called attention to the need for assessing the usability of voting systems and accelerated the introduction of electronic voting systems across the United States. An expert review, usability laboratory study, and field study were conducted to assess six electronic voting systems and four vote-verification/election audit systems. Though most of the systems were evaluated favorably, there were significant differences among them in the difficulty of correcting mistakes, casting a write-in vote, or changing a vote. The differences could be traced to characteristics of the systems, such as the use of automatic advancing, mechanical navigation, and a full-face ballot. It required more time and movements to cast a ballot on some systems; the more time and movement required, the lower the satisfaction ratings. Systems also differed in the frequency with which help was needed. Most voters succeeded in casting their votes as intended, but several types of errors were found, including voting for an opposing candidate. Ballot type greatly affected performance. In addition, certain voter characteristics related to the digital divide had an impact on their voting experiences. There were noteworthy differences in voters’ assessments of the verification systems; these were related to ease of use, extent of distraction, and the need for help.

This chapter considers the importance of ‘e-enabling’ elected representatives to support their

legislative

role, and relates that firstly to their roles as representatives of constituents and civil society groups, and secondly as actors in political parties. The Introduction considers legislators ICT support as a gap in e-governance development, and outlines a current project, eRepresentative, which is addressing European assemblies’ needs to provide web-based mobile services to support their elected members. Recent literature portrays an increasing pace of change in European assemblies, but with parliamentarians mostly adopting new ICT tools of their own accord rather through strategic development by political parties or parliamentary administrations. The chapter describes the rationale for the eRepresentative project goals and requirements; to enable legislators to get personalized, specific, filtered data ‘anywhere, any place and anytime’; to collaborate with each other and appropriate stakeholders, securely and conveniently, and influence the legislative process in a timely and convenient manner. Interim conclusions focus on the research questions emerging from the organisational change issues likely to affect usage of a pilot service in the five participating assemblies.

In beginning to understand the phenomenon of electronic government, it will be useful to look at the history of the World Wide Web (WWW) as it swept through U.S. government agencies. At first, the Web was used by agencies for making public paper documents available online. Quickly it became apparent that Internet technologies could be used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government service delivery to citizens and other government agencies, yet many technological and public policy challenges would need to be solved when working in the electronic or digital government domain – e-Government faces different challenges than eBusiness. The U.S. National Science Foundation understood the need for identifying these challenges and in response to the research community and government practitioners established a digital government research program in 1997. This chapter provides context, background, case studies, references and the history of the digital government research program in the United States.

Data integration is one of the most significant IT problems facing government today. Using information technology, government agencies have collected vastly more data than was ever possible to collect before. Unfortunately, for lack of standardization, most government data today exists in thousands of different formats and resides in hundreds of systems and versions, spread across dozens of agencies. This situation makes the data almost impossible to find, re-use, and build upon after further data collection. A considerable amount of research has been performed over the past decades to overcome this problem. Within Digital Government, several projects have focused on government data collections. Three principal approaches have been followed: (1) direct access, using information retrieval techniques; (2) metadata reconciliation, using ontology alignment techniques; and (3) data mapping, using information theoretic techniques. This chapter discusses each approach, and provides specific examples of the last two.

Since the emergence of the Semantic Web building ontologies have become quite popular and almost every conference on information science including artificial intelligence and e- Government have tracks that cover (legal) ontologies. Ontologies are the vocabularies that can be used to describe a universe of discourse. In this chapter we want to explain the roles (legal) ontologies play in the field of legal information systems and (juridical) knowledge management. We emphasize the fact that these ontologies are social constructs that can be used to express shared meaning within a community of practice and also have a normative character. Many different ontologies have been created for similar and different purposes and two of them, both core ontologies of law that specify knowledge that is common to all domains of law, will be explained in more detail. The first one, is a Functional Ontology for Law (FOLaw). This ontology describes and explains dependencies between types of knowledge in legal reasoning. FOLaw is rather an epistemological framework than an ontology, since it is concerned with the roles knowledge plays in legal reasoning rather than with legal knowledge itself. Nevertheless FOLaw has shown some practical value in various applied European ICT projects, but its reuse is rather limited. We will also explain some aspects of the LRI-Core ontology which captures the main concepts in legal information processing. LRI-Core is particularly inspired by research on abstract commonsense concepts. Legal knowledge is based upon these commonsense concepts. Since legal knowledge always refers to the ‘real world’, although in abstract terms, the main categories of LRI-Core are physical, mental and abstract concepts. Roles cover in particular social worlds. Another special category is occurrences; terms that denote events and situations. In this chapter we illustrate the use of LRI-Core with an ontology for Dutch criminal law, developed in the e- Court European project and an ontology for Dutch administrative law developed in a project for the Dutch State Council.

In recent years there has been a thrust on public safety related information-sharing efforts. However, many public safety information systems are incapable of efficient data sharing due to their heterogeneous nature. Digital government research has focused on the use of ontologies as they might play a key role in achieving seamless connectivity between heterogeneous systems. In this chapter we conduct a survey of public safety information sharing initiatives and discuss the ontological implications of the systems and standards. We also include a comprehensive review on ontologies and ontology-based information sharing and integration approaches in the digital government and other domains. We discuss the importance of ontology mapping for the public safety domain and present a survey of the state-of-the-art in ontology mapping. To showcase ontology-based sharing efforts we present two case studies: the first on evaluating mapping tools with law enforcement data and the second on using ontologies for sharing and analysis of extremist data.

This chapter discusses issues faced when both the IT infrastructure of the government agencies of different countries and existing software applications must be reused without modification to develop a cyberinfrastructure for transnational digital government. The sources of heterogeneity across IT infrastructures and software applications are identified and the impact of these sources on interoperability and compatibility of hardware, software, communication, data and security mechanisms are analyzed. Virtualization technologies are introduced as a means for coping with infrastructure heterogeneity and enabling the deployment of unmodified applications on existing infrastructures. A concrete case of digital government that entails the sharing of immigration information between Belize and the Dominican Republic is described. This example is also used to validate and evaluate the benefits of virtualization technologies in developing and deploying the cyberinfrastructure needed to implement a transnational information system for border control.

Within the Homeland Security domain, it is critical to be able to identify actionable and credible knowledge for the prevention of, response to, and recovery from incidents. This also allows threat and vulnerability assessment. Today’s National and Interstate border control agencies are flooded with alerts generated from various monitoring devices. In such an environment, the difficulty of knowledge discovery is compounded by the fact that data is collected by heterogeneous sources having different semantics within various agencies operating in disparate mission spaces. There is an urgent need to uncover potential threats to effectively respond to an event. In this chapter, we present a

Semantics-based Threat Mining

approach that uses the semantic and spatio-temporal contextual relationships among data sources and data flows (events) to identify alerts with potentially dangerous collusion relationships. We use

Semantic Graphs

to represent the potentially dangerous collusion relationships, and further score and prune the edges with semantic weights using a domain specific ontology of known dangerous relationships, resulting in an

Enhanced Semantic Graph

(ESG). The analysis of such an ESG using graph’s characteristics of centrality, cliques and isomorphism further enables to mine the global threat patterns that are difficult to see when alerts or clusters of alerts are looked at independently. In the context of shipments crossing the border, which are under the jurisdiction of the respective ports and Port Authorities, we present a Semantic Threat Mining prototype system in the domain of known dangerous combinations of chemicals used in explosives.

Identity management systems play a critical role in the field of e-Government and e-Business, as they constitute the basic building blocks enabling secure and reliable access to online services. In this chapter, we highlight the main technical and organizational pitfalls of current approaches to identity management which are either based on a centralized architecture or require adoption of common (technological and organizational) standards. We believe that these limitations can only be overcome by designing a common infrastructure which provides applications with transparent access to identity management services, independently of the underlying identity technology. Moreover, we describe the bridging backbone, an interoperability architecture based on a federation of national infrastructures which follows a cooperation-based approach and is fully compatible with and respectful of organizational and technical choices of existing systems.

The global trend of ever increasing volumes of digital data is also evident in spatial and spatiotemporal datasets, as it is estimated that approximately 80 percent of all databases have a spatial component. Furthermore the spatial community is witnessing a diversification in data availability, with complementary datasets available from diverse providers. Thus, government agencies using spatial information are now faced with the challenge of using heterogeneous spatial and spatiotemporal datasets. Consequently, there is an ever-increasing need for reliable and highly automated spatial data integration. The integration may be spatial, whereby two or more datasets depicting complementary information for the same area are brought together to extend their coverage or to aggregate their content; or temporal, whereby two or more similar datasets conveying the same thematic information at different time instances are brought together to analyze the evolution of their content. In this chapter we present some of the dominant approaches for these two types of information integration for geospatial applications, both at the spatial and the spatiotemporal domain. We also present some of the recently developed approaches to spatial and spatiotemporal queries, and discuss their role in spatiotemporal pattern detection and analysis.

A declared purpose of digital governance is to empower public for information access and analysis to enable transparency, accuracy, and efficiency for societal good at large. Hotspot detection and prioritization become natural undertakings as a result of the information access. Hotspot means spot that is hot, that can be of special interest or concern. Hotspot means something unusual—an anomaly, aberration, outbreak, elevated cluster, critical area, etc. The immediate need can be for monitoring, etiology, management, early warning and prioritization. Responsible factors can be natural, accidental, or intentional. Geoinformatic surveillance for spatial and temporal hotspot detection and prioritization is crucial in the 21st century. And so also the need for geoinformatic surveillance decision support system equipped with the next generation of geographic hotspot detection, prioritization, and early warning within emerging hotspots. This chapter describes ongoing cross-disciplinary research and some of the interesting results for geospatial and spatiotemporal hotspot detection and prioritization, driven by a diverse variety of case studies and issues of interest to government agencies, academia, and the private sector.

In today’s emergency management environments geoinformation technologies play a vital role, but their potential has not been fully exploited. Key decision makers usually do not have direct access to Geographic Information Systems and if they receive access, complex user interfaces often hinder performance for high pressure tasks. In order to provide decision makers with direct and easy access to geoinformation in emergency situations and support group collaboration, we developed three collaborative geoinformation platforms: the Multimodal Interface Platform for Geographic Information Systems (GeoMIP), the GeoCollaborative Crisis Management platform for mobile collaboration and a web-portal for humanitarian relief logistics. The technologies developed are intelligent, multimodal (speech and gesture-based) user interfaces that allow synchronous and asynchronous collaboration between decision makers; support GIS use by mobile emergency management teams; and provide open standards-based web portal technologies.

Information is one of the most valuable resources in government. Government managers are finding however, that information needed to plan, make decisions, and act is often held outside their own organizations, maintained in disparate formats, and used for widely different purposes. Efforts to bring this data together across boundaries have provided new understanding into just how difficult cross-boundary information sharing is. Finding ways to bring together information and integrate it for use in solving pressing public problems is fast becoming a focus of attention for digital government practitioners and researchers alike. This chapter reports on one such study1 of cross-boundary information integration that revealed three important lessons for creating and sustaining cross-boundary information sharing: 1) interoperability is key, 2) a shift in agency culture is necessary, and 3) the role of policymakers is central to this type of project. Four recommendations for action derived from the case studies are presented as well. Government executives and policy-makers need to ensure the creation of enterprise-wide mechanisms and capabilities such as (1) governance structures, (2) resource allocation models, (3) scalable strategies, and (4) non-crisis capacity.

Decisions regarding urban transportation investments such as building a new light rail system or freeway extension, or changes in land use policies such as zoning to encourage compact development and curb low-density urban sprawl, have significant and long-term economic, social, and environmental consequences. Further, land use and transportation decisions interact. Integrated simulation models can help government agencies and citizens make more informed decisions about such issues. We briefly describe the history of urban models, and present a taxonomy of needed refinements to them. We then present a case study of the UrbanSim model system and a significant application of it to the Puget Sound Area in Washington State. We also situate this effort in the digital government research arena, in which is presents a significant research opportunity: hard technical problems, unmet demand from government users, and important issues around supporting a more democratic planning process.

Grading Best Practice model cases paves the way for wide-reaching improvements in e- Government applications. This contribution provides a short overview of the eEurope Awards for e-Government 2005, including details on their objectives, the process and the awarded projects. Then some lessons learned from the e-Government Awards 2005 in relation to Best Practice transfer are summarised. In this context, key issues pertinent to using Best Practice model cases in practice and knowledge transfer are explored. The salient point is how to put model cases into practice. Four points have to be considered: finding suitable model cases, evaluating the feasibility of a project, entering a learning process and using various knowledge transfer mechanisms.

This case study focuses on the use of an online petitioning system for the Scottish Parliament. The system, called ePetitioner, was developed through a partnership between Napier University in Edinburgh and BT Scotland. The objective of ePetitioner is to provide a service for citizens to raise concerns and have them addressed through the formal processes of parliament. Traditional petitioning merely allows citizens to add their name and address to a petition if they support it, typically without the opportunity to consider and reflect on the issue and also with no mechanism to register opinion against the petition. Adding technology to support such a push-button process is recognized by many as running counter to supporting democracy and therefore not enhancing participation. Therefore ePetitioner was designed from the outset to allow background information on the petition and links to third party websites to be added to better inform potential visitors to the petition web pages. Additionally, a discussion forum is integrated into each petition to facilitate discussion on the petition and allow arguments for and against to be voiced. We argue that these additional features added to the traditional petition process can be viewed as technology design aiming to enable more participative democracy.

Modern electronic technologies have dramatically increased the volume of information collected and assembled by government agencies at all levels. This chapter describes digital government research aimed at keeping government data warehouses from turning into data cemeteries. The products of the research exploit modern electronic technologies in order to allow “ordinary citizens” and researchers access to government-assembled information. The goal is to help ensure that more data also means better and more useful data. Underlying the chapter are three tensions. The first is between comprehensiveness and understandability of information available to non-technically oriented “private citizens.” The second is between ensuring usefulness of detailed statistical information and protecting confidentiality of data subjects. The third tension is between the need to analyze “global” data sets and the reality that government data are distributed among both levels of government and agencies (typically, by the “domain” of data, such as education, health, or transportation).

Infectious disease informatics (IDI) is an emerging field that studies data collection, sharing, modeling, and management issues in the domain of infectious diseases. This chapter discusses various technical components of IDI research from an information technology perspective. Syndromic surveillance is used to illustrate these components of IDI research, as it is a widely-adopted approach to detecting and responding to public health and bioterrorism events. Two case studies involving real-world applications and research prototypes are presented to illustrate the application context and relevant system design and data modeling issues.

Government agencies often provide web-accessible collections of documents for use by government employees as well as the general public. In our work, we focus on domainspecific digital libraries where the subject matter of the documents is restricted to the topics of concern in the government work; our goal is to assist government users who are knowledgeable in the domain(s) represented in the collection. We report here on two digital government projects: a project with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service with a focus on providing comprehensive access to documents produced by the agency for Forest Service managers, and a second project with the national health portal in Denmark, sundhed.dk, with a focus on meeting the information needs of family practice physicians as they treat patients. In this chapter, we describe how the use of a digital library application, Metadata++, can improve document and information retrieval, and we explore other aspects that contribute to project success, such as involvement of government partners, agency commitment, technology transfer, and evaluation.

Advances in information technology are bringing about fundamental changes in the way governments work, share information, and deliver services. For e-government to succeed, government agencies must manage records and archives, but the sheer volume and diversity of such documents/archives necessitate the use of electronic record management systems (ERMS). Using an established business–technology alignment model, we analyze an agency’s strategic alignment choice and examine the agency performance outcomes associated with that alignment. The specific research questions addressed in the study are as follows: (1) Do strategic alignment choices vary among agencies that differ in purpose, geographic location, or position within the overall government hierarchy? (2) Do agencies’ alignment choices lead to different outcomes? and (3) Does performance in implementing, operating, and using ERMS vary among agencies that follow different alignment choices? We conducted a largescale survey study of 3,319 government agencies in Taiwan. Our data support the propositions tested. Based on our findings, we discuss their implications for digital government research and practice.

Government informatization has become an important component of the national information infrastructure and a major factor affecting international competitive power. E-government construction is regarded as one of the most important tasks for the national economy and society informatization in China today. TH-DGRC has been researching and developing e-government projects since 2003. In this chapter, we first introduce China’s e-government history, progress, challenges, and plans. Next we propose a methodology for an e-government plan and design – GIA (Government Informatization Architecture) – and discuss its key reference models. Third, we present the government information resource catalog and exchange systems. Finally, we describe two case studies in Beijing’s municipal government.

For the first time, in 2006, the five yearly New Zealand Census was made available for completion and return online. This chapter discusses the grounding of the Online Census project within Statistics New Zealand’s overall strategy for the 2006 census, as well as New Zealand’s e-government goals, its multi-channel strategy, and its Bicultural and Disability strategies. The chapter then outlines how the project was set up, how the teams were established, and their relationship with other aspects of the overall Census project. The chapter describes the details of the Online Census option itself, the distribution of user ids, the construction of the web site and interface design, user support, and how the data was collected. Critical decisions related to estimates of uptake, load demand, and the choice of technology partners are discussed as well as the technology itself. Key factors in the success of the project, such as the identification of potential risks, especially risks associated with key stakeholder groups, and the communications strategy employed are also covered. In conclusion, the final uptake of the Online Census option, post-census evaluation undertaken, and some comparisons with other countries are presented.

The Digital Government Project at the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez is an attempt to leverage research in information technologies and computer science to identify and help overcome some of the most pervasive barriers to the adoption of IT by small and regional governments. We present a survey study that measures the level of penetration of IT in general and internet technology in particular by the citizens of the city of Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. We then proceed to present our experience in helping this small city adopt IT to enhance its systems and processes with the end goal of improving the internal work environment as well as the quality of services to the citizens. We hope that this experience will both help and stimulate similar ongoing and future efforts by universities to improve the quality of government and thus life in their surrounding communities.

A wide range of e-government services is being made available in both online (through Webbased portals) and offline (through physical administrative service centers with backend computer support) settings. This chapter examines issues related to developing hybrid egovernment projects leveraging both online and offline channels to maximize their impact. Three case studies based on ongoing projects initiated by various government branches in the Shanghai area are presented. The first case study focuses on Shanghai’s online portal “China Shanghai.” The second case study discusses a successful offline e-government project undertaken by the Qingpu District Government of Shanghai. The third case study is focused on a “Letters-and-Visits” (government customer relation and complaint processing) information system developed by the Xuhui District Government of Shanghai. The main findings of our studies indicate that hybrid e-government provides a convenient, timely, and implementable mechanism to bridge the digital divide. Its wide application is expected in developing countries.