Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective

Digitalization is a megatrend that conveys key challenges for e-Government and touches several hot topics. Knowledge is the fundamental bridge bringing together diverse extensions. Important developments include: Administrative Work, Collaborative Platforms, Open Government Data, e-Participation, Mobile Government etc.

While prior studies offer significant insights into the extent of EGS (Electronic Government Service) implementation from productivity-transparency trade-off perspectives, critical questions remain about how transparency of government department/agency facilitates the implementation timing of EGS. Such questions are important because transparency is an explicit indicator to outsiders, such as IT (Information Technology) vendors, to help them plan their marketing strategies in advance. Drawing insights from signaling and upper echelon theories, this research contributes to the electronic government literature by proposing that the government department/agency performance transparency is closely aligned to its timing of EGS implementation. Moreover, this relationship varies as it depends both on the size of the government department/agency and the level of tyranny of its leader or head. Empirical findings indicate that, in order to gain a competitive advantage, a tyrannical manager in a smaller organization accelerates the speed of IT implementation to use it as a strategic weapon to elicit favorable public response. This research, thus, complements and extends extant knowledge by exploring the key roles of both a government department/agency performance transparency and its tyrannical leadership on the timing of EGS implementation.

The traditional model of public administration operations has an inherent productivity flaw as it focuses on the activities of processing as opposed to the data of the cases to be processed. It is argued that an electronic forms-based model of operations in which the focus is laid on data would result in significant productivity increase. The paper presents the concept of the electronic forms-based processing as well as it describes the architectural elements of a unified integrated system in the context of the current Hungarian electronic government technical infrastructure. The conclusion is that existing architectural elements, if pragmatically applied, can be utilized into a system able to support hybrid, that is, both paper-based and computer system supported operations.

Urban planning is changing in all its issues, especially with regard to transparency and citizen participation. The purpose of this paper is to provide a complete view of the planning process explaining the project implemented by Aragon’s Government with the ultimate aim of digital switchover of all the stages. The project starts by ensuring urban information access through the use of web-based technology and Geographic Information Systems with a preliminary standardization work, continues with the development of an electronic processing system for urban planning instruments and finishes with the implementation of a new tool that will encourage citizen participation from the beginning of the process. The platform will allow the speed up of these procedures, facilitate the task of municipalities and achieve a greater coordination between administrations and also, as a transparency instrument, should enable the citizen to take an active part in the relationship with public administrations, in other words being involved in the decision-making process.

The ecosystem perspective is widespread in open data research. First, some open data ecosystem models are discussed according to the roles identified. In these systems, we found room for a new role, at least a transversal role, consisting in stimulating the ecosystem. This role is specific in that it implies to understand the configuration, the mechanisms of the ecosystems and to define an influence strategy. Then, we show that strategic management has thoroughly analyzed the role of stimulator, or leader, that this discipline has built strong theoretical frameworks grounded in case studies. Therefore, we discuss the interest and the conditions to transpose these findings to an open data context and enrich the dimensions of stimulator’s functions. Following several spearhead initiatives, we state that public procurement is the best vehicle for channeling stimulator interventions. We conclude by a diagram summarizing the stimulator’s role that is intended to be instantiated in the frame of the BE-GOOD programme.

Recently, many governments have developed open government data portals as a way to facilitate the finding and the access to datasets produced by their agencies. The development of these portals has facilitated the retrieval of this kind of data, but they still have significant limitations. One drawback of current portals concerns the resolution of queries with spatial constraints. Many portals solve spatial queries selecting the datasets that contain in their description the place name informed by the user, which can lead to queries with low recall and precision. Aiming to solve these limitations, we propose a new spatial search engine to improve information retrieval in open government data portals. The main contributions of this work are the development of a system that retrieves OGD at the level of resources and the proposition of a ranking metric that evaluates the relevance of each resource retrieved from a query. We validated the proposed search engine using real data provided by the Brazilian open government data portal. The results obtained from the initial experiments showed that our solution is viable as it can retrieve data with good accuracy for many spatial queries of different granularities.

The motivation for publishing data as Open Data and its benefits are already clear to many public authorities. However, most of open data is published as 3* data classified using the 5-star deployment scheme. When it comes to publishing data as 5* data, i.e. as Linked Open Data (LOD), for many authorities the benefits and motivation become abstract and unclear. In this paper, we introduce a playground which clarifies these benefits to public authorities in the Czech Republic using their own datasets. The playground consists of 73 real datasets transformed to LOD and two mature tools for LOD processing, visualization and analysis. We demonstrate the benefits on two concrete datasets provided by the Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic. We show how other public authorities may perform a similar demonstration on their own datasets. The paper is by no means limited to public authorities of the Czech Republic, as the same principles and processes are applicable everywhere else. Our example can be used to demonstrate the benefits of publishing 5* data on real datasets, and as a motivation and guidelines for building a similar playground for other countries.

This paper presents a modular knowledge organization system within a pilot project for e-Participation in the EU law-making process. The ontological approach here presented is the ground of a web platform allowing citizens and other stakeholders to actively participate in public consultations. Citizens can provide comments and amendments, as well expressing sentiments on pre-legislative documents. The modeling approach follows a pure RDF(S)/OWL implementation for all the produced contributions (documents, comments, amendments, statistics), with the aim to made them available as Linked Open Data.

The analysis of complexity of ontologies in a domain reveals their underlying characteristics and support their selection, reuse and maintenance. This study performs the analysis of e-government ontologies in the oeGov repository based on their complexity. The complexity metrics of oeGov ontologies are computed and analysed. Results revealed that only the top level ontologies in the oeGov architecture have classes, properties and instances; the majority of the constituents of the oeGov repository are instances or datasets of the top level ontologies. Results further revealed important facts on the distribution of relations and instances in the oeGov ontologies and portrayed that the government (gov) and geopolitical ontologies are the more complex ontologies in the oeGov repository.

Organizational activities require and produce documents like policies, transactional documents, business reports, audit reports. These documents are usually stored in document bases belonging to their hosting IT systems that makes difficult to search them. However they are connected to their generating, modifying and utilizing activities in process models which can be transformed into process ontologies. Process ontologies can be served as a basis for transforming process models into workflows, and interpreting or searching documents released during the runtime of processes. An application presented in this paper uses process model transformation, process-based text mining and semantic technologies for processing documents and querying them.

The business processes and workflows of Public Administration within the Hungarian Government are transformed profoundly in the past years. As more and more tasks of public administration are carried out by the assistance of electronic solutions, the tracking and monitoring of activities became possible whereby data in electronic form are available for data processing. In enterprises, the performance measurement, strategic enterprise management and similar approaches turn out to be fashionable; moreover, the techniques and methods out of data science provides the opportunities for data analytics on the collected data. As the e-public administration develops and significant amount of data will be accessible for data processing it will give the chance to apply data science for the wide spectrum of activities within public administration. There is project that is planned and dedicated to the before-mentioned task. Firstly, a data warehouse will be built that will collect and load the data from disparate sources in a data schemes within the data warehouse that will suit data analytics. We will analyze the E-government architecture, public administration processes and the available techniques of data science that will provide useful services for the senior public officers.

The use of the seas and oceans is overall regulated by the United Nations through the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which defines the rights and responsibilities. However, with the rapidly increasing use of the sea and oceans it is inevitable that conflicts may arise. Accordingly, there has been an increasing international recognition of the need to manage human activities that influence the marine environment and its ecosystems in an integrated, cross-sectoral manner. Recently, Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) has gained significant attention as a new paradigm aiming at minimising the conflicts among different sea uses through involving various stakeholders and sectors while aiming for sustainable growth. The aim of this research is to build a conceptual model for a Data Infrastructure to support marine space in a transnational context addressing the challenges related to the increasing use of marine areas and resources. The work was carried out in a close cooperation between several public authorities and research institutes in the Baltic Sea Region.

Mobile penetration rate is high, so m-government services have a huge potential to spread. Our research aims to investigate how elderly users profit from m-government. Europe is now and will be in 2060 the oldest continent in the world, so elderly is an important target group for future m-government services. There are several m-government initiatives and projects offering various government services, like information sharing, alerting and mHealth services, which provide mobile remote patient monitoring in order to measure vital signs, bio-signals of patients outside hospital environments. Such systems can strongly benefit from improved acceptance by elderly users; therefore, investigation of social and psychological aspects of mobile adoption is an emerging field of research. The goal of our research is to find a way to map the needs of the elderly and set guidelines for the design of m-government systems. We apply IGUAN framework [11] for usability investigation, which we developed, in our earlier research as a guideline for improving the usability of e-government systems. We constructed a scenario in usability investigation, a search for medical treatment. Our research follows a user-driven method and uses the data acquired on usability of m-government by the elderly from Germany and Hungary. The main contribution of this paper is the assessment of the requirements for m-government systems’ development for elderly, by investigating the factors, which lead to a low acceptance of m-government by this group.

This paper proposes a new mobile social media infrastructure for motivating collective people to participate in flourishing our society. For motivating them, designing human behavior through social influence within communities is one of the most important issues to make their lifestyle better, but it is not easy to promote the entire collective people’s activities towards achieving a common goal. Our proposal is to use a layered approach where an entire community consists of many micro-communities; if each independent community is encouraged to contribute to its society, the entire community will be finally motivated to achieve a flourishing society. Our approach adopts a virtual currency and a crowdfunding concept to encourage members in a micro-community; we analyze the effect of social influence on human behavior from the experiment-based analysis. The analysis shows that the proposed approach might work well within a community of well-known people. We finally suggest a possible solution to overcome potential limitations as a future direction.

Nowadays, remote electronic voting has to deal with the fact that any computer can be a voting client for its voters, and these computers may be running malicious software on it. For this reason, cast as intended verifiability must be provided in any secure remote electronic voting scheme. However, existing cast as intended solutions for homomorphic tallying paradigm require the use of modular operations which cannot be performed by an average voter. Therefore, these solutions rely on the assumptions that a voter have access to a second device running a verification software and that the attacker cannot attack both. In this paper, we present a voting protocol under homomorphic tallying paradigm which provides a usable cast as intended verifiability solution using short codes without any extra device requirement.

Strategic management processes have been increasingly seen as essential to the effectiveness of public organizations. In the context of the Brazilian public management, the administrative reforms that undertook efforts to transform strategic management processes, usually, show little institutional sedimentation. The objective of the research was to analyze which practices implemented by the public organizations studied contribute to the advancement in the stage of institutionalization of its strategic management processes and models. The work was based on an applied, descriptive research with a qualitative approach, in which a case study was done in two public organizations, which have models of strategic management for more than five years. The analyzes were carried out from three theoretical perspectives: historical-analytical, institutional and technical. The results show that the technical motivations overlapped the isomorphic pressures. It was observed that the greatest difficulty of organizations in the advance of institutionalization resided in the practices of governance, confirming the theoretical propositions presented. Confirming part of the institutional theory, the actor’s perception regarding the benefits brought by Reengineerings have contributed to its maintenance. As for the adherence of the institutional theory, it was possible to observe theoretical gaps in the new institutionalism, with emphasis on the overestimation of the isomorphic mechanisms.

This paper examines the possibilities of using the Estonian e-Governance infrastructure in an innovate manner to help displaced Estonian residents in a hypothetical national emergency. We begin by exploring the challenges that displaced persons and aid organizations face throughout three key stages of displacement – flight from conflict zones, temporary displacement, and long term integration. On this basis we analyze how the Estonian e-Governance infrastructure can be used in a refugee emergency. We provide a definition of intangible e-Governance infrastructure. We identify the key component of the existing Estonian e-Governance infrastructure as well as the proposed Governmental Cloud and Data Embassy initiatives. We analyze linkages where the utilization of the infrastructure could potentially counter the challenges of displaced persons and aid organizations. To realize these linkages, we propose a policy to make certain refugee-related, otherwise restricted governmental datasets accessible to international aid organizations. Additionally, we introduce a legal framework for the policy, analyze the technological requirements of its implementation, and discuss its communicational and technology export-related implications.

Ten years ago, the digitalization of public administration was put on the agenda in Greece by the Digital Strategy policy. Only now, though, does e-Justice appear to be gaining ground. The article explains the current situation in Greek judicial operation and highlights the problems, such as judicial delays. It then outlines the new Civil and Criminal Court Case Management System. Against this background, the potential of Greek e-Justice reform is discussed, along with the future challenges it faces. The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it provides a contribution to the debate on judicial efficiency by conducting an analysis on the existing data. On the other hand, it presents the attempt to resolve these problems through the introduction of a new system.

In the educational field, new technology appears all the time, making the teaching and learning process more interesting and effective. In this scenario, one of the tools that has gained prominence is educational social networks. Despite the progress made, there is still no consolidated field of study for educational social networks. Therefore, the objective of this research was to identify the resources desired by students in this type of network. For this, 369 questionnaires were given, and to analyze the results, cluster analysis and discriminant analysis were used. The results reveal that the most relevant resources in an educational social network are the note consultation service, the evaluation of various aspects of the institution, and the sending of suggestions and improvements. Among the less important resources were the consultation of menus of canteens at the university restaurant and the sharing and evaluation of newsrooms. These results highlight the idea that an educational social network can contribute to collaborative learning and closer relationships between students and teachers.

The development of e-governance is impossible without appropriately training qualified professionals in this field. The lack of untrained personnel in government offices provided the need to create an interdisciplinary program linking different domains such as IT, law and public sector. This paper discusses the creation and development of a Master’s study program in e-Governance Technologies and Services, highlighting the most common obstacles and providing solutions. The curriculum prepares managers and specialists to be responsible for the development of e-Governance in organizations and e-Government initiatives. It enables them to master the management and business processes related to e-Governance. Students gain broad knowledge about the makings of a modern state and the transition process into e-Governance.

The need for efficiency and quality in high-level educational institutions (HLEIs) has been increasing. When determining the future direction of these institutions, planning is playing an increasingly important role, as it involves rethinking the application of resources and developing processes to achieve the goals and mission of the organisation. Planning requires analysing the environment, establishing organisational guidelines and formulating a strategy and strategic control measures. Thus, it is no easy task. The objective of this study is to evaluate the management of institutional development plans (IDPs) in Brazilian public universities and, based on the results, propose software and a reference document (guidelines) to aid the elaboration, implementation and management of IDPs in these organisations. This applied social research used a qualitative approach. After analysis, it was revealed that public managers demand support in HLEIs. Based on this finding, we propose a reference document and software to support managers in the elaboration, implementation, management and monitoring of IDPs.