Electronic Government

We surveyed the worldwide e-Gov researcher community and collected data on disciplinary backgrounds, topical orientations, and publication preferences from over 200 scholars including more than 80 percent of the most prolific scholars in the domain. The results demonstrate the richness and diversity of electronic government research worldwide. Some topics are more prevalent in some regions than others. The paper presents the results and discusses, which directions the domain may take to further strengthen its growing reputation and recognition.

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how system dynamics modelling can be used in e-government policy and systems as an aid to spport territorial ananlysis, planning and governance, sustainable performance in urban areas and the assessment of policy outcomes. Topics such as renewable energy, efficiency, the design and exploitation of urban energy, water and waste management infrastructure and the alignment of different stakeholders provide relevant fields of study for the analysis of this paper. Specifically, we reflect upon the way in which a preliminary dynamic performance management model of an exemplary case study can be used to foster a common shared view among different policy makers as a way to highlight new ways to enable sustainable development in urban areas.

Government transparency is critical to cut government bureaucracy and corruption, which diminish political accountability and legitimacy, erode trust in government, and hinder citizen engagement and government performance. Previously, Jakarta’s local governments lacked government transparency, holding high-level meetings under a close-door policy, sustaining a critical and fundamental flaw in policy-making and fueling government inefficiency and corruption. Social media radically increased the speed, reach and transparency of information. Yet, social media-enabled government transparency has not been sufficiently investigated. This research presents strategic use of YouTube by Jakarta’s new local government to “open doors” to high-level political meetings and other reform-oriented government activities for greater local government transparency. We conducted an analysis of 250 government-generated videos on YouTube viewed and liked by Jakarta’s 7.8-million net-savvy citizens. We conclude transformational leadership’s political will and strategic use of YouTube are the keys to advancing local government transparency and facilitating citizen engagement with government’s reform initiatives.

At this moment there is little coordination of the publication and use of open data. In this research coordination needs and challenges for open data and coordination mechanisms that can help in improving coordination are identified. A literature review shows that the opening and use of data are isolated and unrelated processes. Open data publishers do not profit from the wisdom of the crowd by having knowledge of how their data are reused. In addition, results of data reuse are not discussed and little feedback is gained by data providers, in this way barely supporting policy and decision-making. Coordination mechanisms, such as standardization and interconnected processes, can enable open data providers to profit from publishing data and to use this for improving their policy-making and decision-making. Yet, it is difficult to coordinate the open data process with these coordination mechanisms due to the complexity, lack of structure, uncertainty, dynamism, and the involvement of varying stakeholders in the open data process. Further research is necessary to investigate which coordination mechanisms are appropriate in the context of open data publication and use.

Governments around the world are opening up their data to increase transparency and stimulate re-use of their data. Semi-public organizations follow, but often for different purposes as they also aim to realize commercial gains with their data. Many organizations, however, find the process of opening up data cumbersome as changes need to be made to different organizational layers. This paper identifies drivers, enablers, and barriers of open data, by reviewing literature and by conducting a case study of open data in a semi-public organization in the Netherlands. We found that while the drivers for opening up data remain the same in every phase of the process, the enablers and barriers shift between the different phases. While in the beginning of the process, organizational factors such as having an implementation strategy and ensuring data quality gained much attention, this attention shifted to factors related to re-use of data. Further research should thus focus on how to develop valuable open data business models, how to foster re-use and build strategic partnerships with users.

Dataset portals such as Data.gov and Data.uk.gov have become flagship initiatives of open government and open data strategies. These portals aim to fulfill the open government objectives of promoting re-use of public sector information to develop new products and services, and increasing transparency for public officials’ accountability. This work focus on the latter and its aim is to propose a set of requirements as part of a framework to assess whether dataset portals are indeed contributing to a higher degree of transparency focusing on accountability. Previous studies on internet-based transparency (including Internet Financial Reporting – IFR) were analyzed, from which several requirements were derived concerning the data types sought after, the public entities covered, the information seeking strategies adopted and the desired qualitative characteristics of data. The rationale behind our proposal is that dataset portals developed under the open government principles should, at least, be able to fulfill the informational and operational requirements identified in the ‘traditional’ transparency assessment literature.

This article presents a guide to implement open data in Public Agencies (PAs). The guide is the result of a worldwide proposal’s study, of the application of a maturity model to diagnose the situation of PAs in Latin American countries, the opinion of experts in different excellence centers, e-government authorities, and developers of open data application in the world. The guide is simple and orients decision makers so that PAs following the actions of the guide can see their capacities improved when facing a diagnosis of their institutional maturity in implementation of open data.

Local governments are increasingly looking for new ways to involve citizens in policy and decision-making, for example by combining public sector data sources with data gathered by citizens. Several examples exist of data gathering where personal mobile devices act as data collectors. While these efforts illustrate the technical capability of data sourcing, they neglect the value of local knowledge where people use their senses to capture and interpret data. Traditional data gathering initiatives, however, exploit this local knowledge to inform policy makers, e.g., neighborhood policing. To understand data gathering processes of these traditional data gathering initiatives, three cases are examined. We analyze these cases, focusing on the various elements they contain, concluding how digital data gathering can be informed by these traditional variants, concerning what the benefits of using digital means can be for data gathering and how traditional initiatives ensure data re-use by the public sector.

Although the recently launched Open Government Data (OGD) movement promised to provide a number of benefits, recent studies have shown that its full potential has not yet realized. The difficulty in exploiting open data seems surprising if we consider the huge importance data have in modern societies. In this paper we claim that the real value of OGD will unveil from performing data analytics on top of combined statistical datasets that were previously closed in disparate sources and can now be linked to provide unexpected and unexplored insights. To support this claim, we describe the linked OGD analytics concept along with its technical requirements and demonstrate its end-user value employing a use case related to UK general elections. The use case revealed that there is a significant relationship between the probability one of the two main political parties (i.e. Labour Party and Conservative Party) to win in a UK constituency and the unemployment rate in the same constituency.

Current discussions of possible tax reforms are characterized by an increasing relevance of related governments’ budgetary implications, thus, in this respect each tax reform proposal is reviewed in detail and an assessment of the consequences is essential from a political point of view. We developed the innovative micro-simulation model ASSERT (Assessing the Effects of Reforms in Taxation), which factors in changes in macro-economic conditions (GDP growth) as well as cross-border effects to analyze EU-wide tax reforms. To this end ASSERT is based on firm-level data, applies a forecasting algorithm and considers tax provisions for European countries. This paper presents the current version of the artifact as well as the development/evaluation process.

This work analyses instances of discussion related to the Brazilian public policy on health information and communication technologies (ICT). Departing from a theoretical model, which relates health ICT outcomes to instances of discussion, this work aims to identify how multiple actors participate on decision-making processes regarding health ICT. Laws and norms related to discussion forums about Brazilian health system were researched. The work shows that the discourse of participation has been present since SUS (Brazilian Unified Health System) beginnings, and, in recent years, new forums have been created. Thus, this paper concludes with the importance of a coordinated work between the forums, as well as the very need of participation of multiple actors in the instances of discussions about health ICT.

Government architecture (GA) is a relatively young discipline in which concepts are slowly emerging. Often terms and concepts are used in various ways and there is no uniform agreement on these concepts. Further, the relationship between GA, benefits and public value creation is unclear. In this paper we unravel and define GA concepts that are often used by governments. Although GA is used in different ways there are common concepts. GA practice in two different countries, the Netherlands and Norway, indicates that although the Netherlands clearly has more experience with GA than Norway, both countries employ similar concepts. Nevertheless our study confirmed the assumption of conceptual confusion. In both countries GA efforts are concentrated towards guiding design projects and dealing with complexity. We found that the impact of GA is ill understood. We defined central concepts of GA, and propose a conceptual model illustrating the relationships between GA concepts, its use, benefits and public value drivers.

Developing countries have embarked on e-government initiatives in their modernization activities, as the developed countries. Despite the effort, implementation of e-government in developing countries is still rated as not sufficient. Several literatures, such as the UN 2012 survey, investigate challenges faced by developing countries; poor management and limited availability of resources being the main ones. Developing an e-government system with limited resources and with the challenges developing countries are facing requires careful planning. The ultimate question is the public value generated and the sustainability of e-government initiatives in developing countries. Our main question driving the investigation in this paper is, therefore, whether guidelines exist to develop e-government solutions with the goal of public value generation in mind. The investigations of literature have unveiled many guidelines for designing e-government systems. However, there is still lack of a comprehensive framework that will enable developing countries to design e-government systems whilst generating public value. In this paper, existing guidelines for development of e-government systems are first reviewed followed by a comparison among the guidelines. Then the challenges for designing e-government systems in developing countries are outlined. Through a consolidated view emerging from the comparison and the outlined challenges, the paper brings forth a comprehensive strategic framework for successful design of e-government systems. The proposed framework is for policy makers and e-government coordinators to design e-government systems in a way that the objectives are met and that the investments generate public value.

The increased importance of IT in the public sector results in a greater need to establish IT performance management mechanisms. Public administrations need to control IT related investments by using performance management in order to assess and reduce IT costs. However, public sector organizations are only slowly adopting performance management of IT. So far, the driving forces, barriers and influencing factors regarding performance management of IT in the public sector have not been analyzed. The aim of this paper is to identify, analyze and discuss these driving forces, barriers and influencing factors by conducting a literature review and to show how performance management of IT can be designed in the public sector in order to improve its acceptance.

This paper aims at providing an integrated framework and process for identifying and assessing values in mobile government applications. Value proposition with related management issues of offering and delivering mobile government services to citizens, businesses, and government agencies are described and discussed. Based on a business model perspective, we further specify and structurally link constituents, values, services, and indicators for mobile government systems. The proposed approach and results could be valuable for adoption to guide the planning and evaluation of value-centric mobile government strategies and projects.

A major challenge of interoperability projects and initiatives is to validate that different implementations work together and are compliant with underlying standard specifications. Interoperability testing can ensure that required end-to-end functionality is adequately fulfilled and all systems are implemented in conformity with existing standards. Adopters of standards have different methods to prove fulfillment of interoperability requirements. This often results in different efficiency, different quality and a lack of conformity. In this paper, we present the interoperability testing framework used in PEPPOL (Pan-European Public Procurement Online). The framework has supported the project well in establishing various production pilots that interoperate together in the field of e-procurement. It thereby aggregates different testing perspectives ranging from conformance testing to compliance testing and provides guidelines how to prove implementations through testing scenarios. Consequently, the key research question in this paper is how interoperability initiatives can prove that different implementations are compliant with underlying standard specifications and how interoperability can be ensured among different implementations beyond the technical approval mechanisms provided through conformance testing.

This paper concerns representational practices in demands driven development of public sector, and the problems they involve. The term demands driven development refers to a movement in public sector towards a closer cooperation with the citizens, primarily with regards to the development of public e-services. The objective with the paper is to explore representational practices through the analysis of practitioners’ talk about demands driven development. There are several interrelated problems with representational practices, in this paper analysed through the discussions of practitioners who work with demands driven development of public sector. The conclusion is that these practitioners work with representational practices in a way which they at the same time seem to consider rather problematic.

Public administration is under pressure to work more effectively and increase effectiveness with regards to internal administrative processes as well as level of service towards citizens. This paper identifies process management challenges encountered in Swedish municipalities and provides concrete examples of consequences of these challenges by using a bottom up approach. It is done by using a common public service process and a mobile solution as platform for discussions with municipal officials working with the process. To categorise the challenges they are grouped into six core categories of business process management, which provide a picture of challenges that municipalities face today. Results show that Swedish municipalities face challenges in all categories and that it was not possible to design a generic process for the analysed service. To initiate work with improving process maturity in local governments the bottom up approach used was found successful.

Concepts and tools for process management have often been transferred to emergency management projects. The driving objective has been to bring assistance to planning procedures and quality assurance. This seems rather natural, since idea and concept of business processes and standard operating procedures appear like siblings. In this paper we discuss whether the concepts of process modelling are adequate for managing standard operating procedures and whether emergency management organisations can capitalize on off-the-shelf business process modelling tools to prepare for disasters more effectively. This paper presents ample evidence that prevailing business process means are inappropriate for emergency management in light of organisational as well as technology issues. In a nutshell, business process concepts are utilized as a “golden hammer” in many emergency management projects, a suitable tool for all purposes. Yet, the question rises whether emergency management issues are always fitting nails.

In this article we discuss in what ways an e-government project can give both expected and unexpected effects for agency employees and their working tasks. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the fact that, besides the aim to increase agency efficiency and citizen benefit, e-government implementation might also change the salience of involved stakeholders. We do this by focusing on one stakeholder group which was reluctant and hesitating in the beginning of the studied project; marginalized, passive, easily convinced, and old-fashioned. After the e-government implementation, this group had turned to satisfied, proud, influential, active, powerful, and modern IT users. The case shows how stakeholder salience might change over time in an e-government project. Stakeholder influence aspects and IT driven change aspects are intertwined. This makes it necessary for any e-government project to address the notion of stakeholder involvement in decision-making during the development and implementation phases, but also to acknowledge e-services force to change how things and people are perceived during these phases.

One of the key challenges that governments face in supervising international supply chains is the need for improving the quality of data accompanying the logistics flow. In many supply chains, individual parties in the chain work with low quality data for their operations and compliance, even though somewhere in the supply chain, better data is available. In the European CASSANDRA project, ICT-supported information infrastructures are developed to exchange data between businesses and government, to support visibility on the supply chain and the re-use of information. However, to gain better data, actors need to be open about their operations, processes and systems to parties that are geographically and culturally on the other side of the world. This adds (perceived) vulnerabilities for parties already operating in a highly competitive environment. This could be a major barrier for making the innovation work. We argue that Living Labs, as a collaborative innovation approach, are able to support the adoption of innovative information infrastructures. They help identifying gains that innovations may bring. Furthermore, the trust-based setting also mitigates the added (perceived) vulnerability such innovations bring for the participants. We illustrate this by examples from the CASSANDRA Living Labs.

User resistance to information systems implementation has been identified as a significant reason for the failure of new systems and hence needs to be understood and managed. While previous research has explored the reasons for user resistance, there are gaps in our understanding of how users evaluate change related to a new information system within patent office organizations. This paper explores the sources of resistance associated with the implementation of a Patent Management System (PMS) at the Brazilian Patent Office, which is named ‘Instituto Nacional da Propriedade Industrial‘ (INPI). This study investigates typical types of user resistance together with strategies for overcoming these resistances. In the case under analysis, the study shows that resistance to the PMS caused a delayed adoption of the system and the main motives for resistance were: the employment relationship and the perceived interference of the system with the power and autonomy of the patent examiners.

Electronic signatures play an important role in e-Business and e-Government applications. In particular, electronic signatures fulfilling certain security requirements are legally equivalent to handwritten signatures. Nevertheless, existing signature-creation tools have crucial drawbacks with regard to usability and applicability. To solve these problems, we define appropriate requirements for signature-creation tools to be used in e-Government processes. Taking care of these requirements we propose a modular architecture for adaptable signature-creation tools. Following a user-centered design process we present a concrete implementation of the architecture based upon the Austrian Citizen Card. This implementation has been used to prove the applicability of the architecture in real life. Our tool has been successfully tested and has been assessed as usable and intuitive. It has already been officially released and is widely used in productive environments.

In order to improve the governmental efficiency, effectiveness and transparency, an important part of e-government is the digitalization of documents and the processing of these documents through electronic channels. Such a critical document in business process chains is the invoice, which is why the European Commission strives to increase the adoption and diffusion of electronic invoicing (e-invoicing) among public and private sector organizations. However, the adoption rate among businesses is still low and especially very small firms resist using e-invoicing.

By collecting quantitative and qualitative survey data of 416 German companies resisting the usage of e-invoicing, we confirm and explore factors affecting the resistant behavior towards the electronic exchange of invoices and elaborate on differences in those factors with organizational size. In particular among micro firms, the lack of knowledge regarding the theme and procedure of e-invoicing represents the relatively most important influencing factor, while comparatively larger firms also expect huge change management efforts.

The electronic ID card (eID) was introduced in Germany in 2010. Besides the traditional way of authentication, it offers the possibility to activate a function for online authentication. However, more than two thirds of the Germans do not make use of this function. Despite the advantages that the eID offers, the lacking adoption is said to be traced back to lacking information and only few application cases. In our study, we propose online application as a use case for the eID in a university. In a quantitative survey with 1,632 students, we analyse the factors influencing a possible adoption of the eID by students. For this purpose, we extend the basic TAM by the variables perceived risk, social context, experiences, communication and demographics. Our analysis reveals that especially the social context and targeted communication influence the behavioural intention to use and can extremely shape the attitude towards using the service.

Social media are often regarded as a set of new communication practices which are likely, if deployed effectively, to make public sector organisations more responsive to the various stakeholders with whom they interact. In this context, responsiveness is usually approached as an administrative function of establishing additional channels of information and responding faster to citizen queries. Notwithstanding the importance of these objectives, this study aims to reconceptualise the relationship between social media and government responsiveness. Drawing on current literature and the case of the Food Standards Agency in the UK, the study identifies new dimensions of social media responsiveness. The findings of this study can provide useful insights both for researchers in the area and those in the process of developing social media strategies in government.

This paper suggests how eGovernment and public services can apply “topic-opinion” analysis (developed in the EC IST FP7 WeGov project) on citizens’ opinions on the Internet. In many cases, discussion tracks on the Internet become quite long and complex. Stakeholders are often interested in gaining a quick overview of such a discussion, including understanding its thematic aspects, identifying key arguments and key users. The topic opinion analysis that is part of the WeGov toolbox aims to provide appropriate summarization techniques by identifying latent themes of discussion (topics), most relevant contributions and arguments for each topic, as well as identifying the most active users that influenced a certain aspect of discussion. In this paper we focus on online forums and social networks as digital places where users discuss potential political issues. Therefore we setup two different case studies to validate the accuracy and usefulness of analysis results of the topic opinion analysis.