Electronic Government

Change has become ubiquitous with globalisation and competition as dominant drivers. A common “quest for growth” exists paired with economic imbalances, finan-cial instabilities, societal and political unrest. Affluences and deprivation occur as well as an increased stratification of societies. Technology has become pervasive with no pause of evolution in sight. Economic necessity and lifestyle promote mobility and a round the clock economy. With a broad advancement in embedded computing, open systems interconnection and ambient intelligence technology reach all areas.Likewise, expectations on government have grown. Living under good governance is a common goal calling for democratisation, coherence, accountability, efficiency, transparency and effectiveness. Such ideals have to be mirrored in the way government is working. The idea of good governance embodies four key marks:citizen-centric in attitude,cooperative in nature,seamless and joined up seen from the clients,multilevel and polycentric in composition.

The paper discusses, mainly on a principal and general level, answers to the question: To what questions about democracy is Information Technology (IT) the answer? Parliamentary-centred democratic procedures, in a newsmedia-saturated society, generate less and less enthusiasm among citizens. There’s no evidence that people are turning anti-democratic, but opinion polls in both western Europe and North America show that in practically all countries, citizens feel gradually more detached from the established political process. Political reality seems to be moving further and further away from the ideals of democracy as described in political science textbooks. Although IT could be designed to support democratic procedures by which citizens could regain the political power they obviously feel they have lost, this is not happening. Electronic Democracy is very little about electronics, and very much about democratic reform – about power.

Research originally suggested that new technologies, particularly the Internet, provided a useful mechanism for engaging young people – an otherwise largely disenfranchised group. Subsequent to the evaluation of a number of pioneering projects in this field it has become apparent that merely providing online tools is not sufficient to engage young people democratically. In order to begin to resolve some of the underlying issues a number of interviews with youth consultation coordinators in Scotland have been conducted and youth consultation best practice documents have been researched. This has resulted in the development of four high-level stages, which situate online youth dialogues in a much broader, supporting scheme. Evaluation research is planned through the development and field-testing of further youth consultations. Our work will continue to research ways of developing online youth consultation tools that are both used and useful. At present, as this paper details, it appears that the only way this will occur is if ‘traditional’ offline techniques are implemented to help alter a cultural view of young people in opposition to what it means to be a citizen.

Different initiatives are initiated to utilize ICT to maintain and develop democracy. Democracy models are developed to explain differences between different democracies. This paper reports from a case study where a web-based discussion board is developed and implemented. The findings indicate that politicians and citizens add support to different democracy models by their contributions to the web-based discussion board. Contributions from the citizens add stronger support for the neo-republican model where as politicians mainly support the demo-elitist model. These differences might become obstacles to the utilization of the technology. Identifying potential differences early on in a project may increase the opportunity to develop services capable of handling requests from different stakeholders.

This paper addresses the framework of e-Democracy, which is presented in the generic sustainable e-Democracy form, such as management and stakeholder, business driver, technology driver and development methodology. The related contents of creating e-Democracy applications are also discussed. Furthermore, this paper presents the model of Thai e-Democracy. The survey of Thai citizens’ opinion about government services through electronic media by the National Statistical Office is illustrated. Some examples of e-Democracy in Thailand are also discussed. To promote the efficiency of Thai e-Democracy, the broadcast of cabinet meeting via television is commenced.

Democracy is an evolving normative project with lots of facets. Using and shaping networked ICT to enhance democracy is a challenging task. It needs action research as well as theoretical considerations. It needs societal pull and technological push. It needs research funding and self-organised grass-root activities. It needs both an administration oriented approach of development and an autonomous citizen-oriented approach. This has to be balanced.

Interoperability has been identified as a major issue to be addressed by all e-government agencies. In the first stage of this awareness, interoperability deals with applications and semantics concepts, which will enable the seamless information flow between organizations. However, it will not be enough for enabling the sort of interoperability required for a true seamless service delivery to citizens and business, which is the vision of the e-government strategies. A second stage in interoperability shows up which deals with the building of an enterprise architecture. In the article the main initiatives in interoperability are presented and the degree of fulfillment of the above two-stage roadmap is evaluated.

Metadata are “data about data” or “information about information”. In the public sector, metadata may be used amongst others for the discovery and retrieval of governmental information. An increasing number of governments worldwide recognize the role of establishing a metadata standard as an integral ingredient of their interoperability framework towards realizing their eGovernment strategy. This paper presents an overview and comparison of eGovernment metadata initiatives throughout the world. Most metadata initiatives worldwide are currently based on Dublin Core (DC) thus in this study only standards based on Dublin Core are considered. We start by reviewing Dublin Core and the work within the Dublin Core – Government Working Group. We thereafter review national metadata standards and compare them with Dublin Core. We finally present a metadata element set that has been proposed by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN).

We discuss the role of Enterprise Architecture as a prerequisite to e-Government implementation, and underscore how simply taking an IT perspective is a serious mistake. We discuss the influence of the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF) guidance on e-Government and the holistic perspectives respectively to better assess their viability. We argue that those who take an IT-centric narrow view confuse the new Office of Management and Budget (OMB) mandated Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) Reference Models as providing a methodology for satisfying government legislation and as a replacement for the FEAF. This confusion is often the result of agencies’ zeal to satisfy whatever OMB issues as guidance and their over reliance on external contractors who are charged with building their EA and in so doing emphasize selling their products. With such an emphasis they cannot demonstrate the business value of the EA they deliver and instead are primarily product focused.

IT managers in administration must decide how to contribute to cross-organisational integration and what strategy and means to choose for achieving interoperability. Comparing the frameworks and guidelines provided by central European and U.S. governmental units, we find information integration and process integration as prominent concepts to guide interoperability efforts, but they seem to point to different directions. This paper aims at contrasting the different characteristics of both approaches and concludes with recommendations according to the intended organisational scope of integration. To be successful in these efforts it is important to understand that (a) interoperability requires a guiding vision of integration, (b) each type of integration points to a different set of interrelated ideas, assumptions and technical means, and (c) integration implies a strategic commitment to explicit forms of cross-organisational cooperation and their implementation.

The need for keeping information secure is increasingly important in modern e-business, e-commerce, and e-government environments. This holds because personally identifiable information can be electronically transmitted and disseminated over insecure open networks and the Internet. Security and privacy constitute the basic foundations of a trust framework, which composes a sine qua non condition for Information Societies. Requirements engineering (RE) is the principled application of proven methods and tools, which can design this trust framework effectively, in all aspects of modern e-Government applications considering the directives described in the e-Europe Initiative. This paper describes a number of well-known RE frameworks developed for eliciting and managing security requirements (SR). It also presents a comparative analysis of existing frameworks from a number of complementary viewpoints. Based on the results of this analysis it identifies a number of unresolved issues that need to be addressed by research in the SR field.

In many countries public institutions, as the main producers and distributors of legal source information, have promoted projects aimed at improving the availability and the free access to information via the web as a significant component of the process of transparency in citizen/institution interaction. This paper describes the state of the art in terms of European projects created by public institutions for facilitating access to regulatory information and it focuses on the necessity of integrating structural documentary standards with semantic ones for the description of content. The Italian JurWordNet project is a source of semantic metadata aimed at supporting the semantic interoperability between sectors of Public Administration; the creation of a multilingual lexicon that extends the Italian model to five European languages (the aim of the Lois Project that has recently been approved by the EU) is also described.

Interoperability is a key concept for understanding the changes in progress in e-government. These changes are made gradually and with a phased implementation. The paper proposes conceptual frameworks to analyse actual practices and to guide the development of electronic administration. It stresses the need to consider different dimensions (political, organizational, human and technical) when implementing interoperable systems in local governments.

The recently proposed intermediation schemes in e-government are meant to speed up and facilitate integration and access to services offered by local and regional public sector service providers. They should provide end-users with ubiquitous e-government services, in the sense of adapting to citizens/businesses location, context, channel, language or skills and, what is more, take care for the seamless (i.e. transparent to end-users) integration of cross-organisational services. In this paper we present e-government intermediation requirements.

Way up to now, e-government was mostly seen as an IT issue and rather had a technical dimension. Taking process modelling and process reorganisation into account and determine them as key criteria in regards to successful implementation of e-government, strengthens the fact that this topic is complex and has to be treated in a comprehensive way. The purpose of this paper is to point out process management with specific requirements of public authorities including legal as well as security aspects. Reading through this contribution, the reader should recognise the added-value of BPM for public administrations and that the management of processes within public administrations is a relief and not a burden.

We discuss briefly in this paper the design of a knowledge based DSS developed for supporting local government staff in the choice of energy saving projects. The modelling process concerns: the quantitative models, the qualitative knowledge, the data and the user/DSS interface. We show that by combining reasoning and the evaluation of models we can simulate a complex cognitive process and support better the users by providing diagnosis and explanation.

The integration of data from distributed sources within and among different public authorities is an important aspect on the agenda of e-government. In this paper we present a specific data integration scenario at the Municipality of Bozen-Bolzano, where data from different sources have to be joined via addresses of citizens. We analyze in detail the problems which arise in this scenario. We show that addresses can be represented in a tree structure, and hence, the problem of matching addresses can be reduced to approximate tree matching.

In this paper, we present an approach based on hierarchically structured business models as artifacts of business process modeling that are used in a stepwise acquisition process for large software systems to reduce complexity and to increase efficiency and effectiveness. These models are abstract enough so that the scope for ideas of the suppliers is not unnecessarily narrowed. But, they can be detailed and deeply technical if this is necessary. An adequate degree of abstraction allows the public authority to benefit from the ideas of the supplier in a collective learning process. The business models are furthermore a lingua franca for all parties concerned in the acquisition process and a valuable source of information for the time after.

The success of job qualification depends strongly on the transfer of learning aspects into everyday business. Within the project “Customer Support for Job Learning on Demand” a multi-functional hotline via internet video conference was built up to guarantee properly matching vocational IT qualification on demand. The results of the project include a contribution for an improvement of the quality of occupational training towards specifically required qualifications, and focus on lifelong learning through active inclusion of the users’ actual work. Learning and training are not “stored”, but really available on demand. It was also possible to demonstrate the successful feasibility of such job training programmes with immediate reaction to current customer concerns in the area of public administration with its high security requirements.

Recent e-voting pilots in the UK have demonstrated that there are different factors to be considered in the administration of electronic voting. In this paper we present a framework for the evaluation of the level of difficulty involved in the deployment of e-voting schemes. Taking the public authority’s point of view we identify eight factors, which increase the overall difficulty of e-voting administration. We suggest that as new e-voting technologies and associated activities are introduced in the re-design of the electoral process, its administration becomes increasingly more difficult. We provide examples explaining the practical use of the suggested framework based on some of the 2003 UK e-voting pilots. In concluding we refer to existing limitations of the framework and suggest future work, which could expand its analytical value.

The paper proposes a method to implement the role of an election committee in electronic voting. Decisions in the committee need not be made unanimously, rather arbitrarily defined quora are supported.

In spite of doubts and misunderstandings regarding CRM implementation in the government context, its adoption has been significantly growing in the last years. Different initiatives have been uncovering CRM benefits for government. Such as benefits may potentially enhance government responsiveness and acceptance by society. In this paper we address the issue of what makes CRM different from other existing solutions and approaches towards customers. We also further analyze the importance of customer-focused strategies for government and which CRM functionalities are being exploited in order to improve organizational performance and relationships with stakeholders. Different dimensions of CRM are briefly mentioned in order to provide a better understanding of its scope and concepts.

Information and documentation are central elements in the control of international cross-border trade and logistics, aiming for provision of necessary level of society, economy and revenue protection by the Customs administration and other border agencies and as well as acceptable border release times for the trade. Standardized data sets and electronic messages using international code standards are key for effective and efficient B2B, B2G, or G2G exchange and sharing of such information. Historically there is a major lack of global standards for cross-border trade business processes such as import, export or transit. This paper presents the results of the first survey study on potential impacts of two cross-border related technical instruments under development at the World Customs Organization – Customs Data Model and Unique Consignment Reference – on operations and performance at Customs administrations in 18 countries worldwide.

This paper discusses the results of a research project that the Utrecht School of Governance of Utrecht University and a Dutch Ministry conducted in 2003 to know to what extent focus groups are a useful instrument to get insight into citizens’ expectations related to electronic service delivery by municipalities and how the results of such ex ante program evaluation can be used to develop a citizen oriented policy in this field. We asked citizens for which service(s) delivered by their municipality they would like to use new media (such as e-mail) and for which ones they would rather prefer old media (such as a letter). The conceptual framework which Mayer & Greenwood (1980) developed for investigating a policy problem will be used to analyse the results of the focus group for ex ante program evaluation.

The present focus of e-government on one-stop shop applications is justified as a medium goal but does not take into account the importance of proper interfaces for decision makers. More and more information has to be assessed and approved by decision makers where instruments of easy access, selection, structured representation and data analysis are still missing. The support provided by the chief secretary has to be (partly) supplemented by a new decision-making interface. This paper contains a sketchy analysis of this need and gives directions for future research. Main elements of such electronic assistants are the index and related support features, a structured knowledge representation and data mining. Such specified interfaces may greatly improve the acceptance of the new IT environment for decision makers.

The need to measure and evaluate urban development has led to the development of numerous social-economic indicators. However, depending upon the large set of indicators, we find difficulties in interpreting the progress and often reach different conclusions regarding economic and social development of towns and evaluating the sustainability. The aim of the research reported in this paper was to develop the research methods and analysis tools for assessing and implementing the goals of sustainable urban development, including the presentation of information needed for decision making in the Internet. The research presented in this paper uses factor and cluster analysis methods to generate a set of underlying attributes (factors) that capture the sustainable urban development. Based upon the factor scores of systems’, the study finds the towns with similar characteristics (clusters). We demonstrate an application of the model using a database of economic and social development of towns in Lithuania.

The TANGO e-government arena is a project in Southern Sweden, funded by the Innovative Actions of the European Regional Development Fund. The project is now nearing its end, and we are thus at the stage of reflectively reviewing what has actually been accomplished and how this relates to the original goals of the project. In July 2002, when the project began, the aim was to establish cooperation between the public sector, private enterprise and university-based research in designing public e-services. In cooperating around development of new, integrated services, catering to various categories of users as well as to a growing diversity of mobile technologies, we have aimed towards establishing feedback channels between practice and theory, between use and design, and between different academic disciplines where we see a need to synchronize the models and methods we work with. Our research questions have focused on exploring and managing multi-perspectivity as a resource for design. In this paper we look at how we organized our cooperation around these goals, and attempt to address those basic summing-up-the-project questions; How well have we succeeded? What have we learned in the process?

Among the European countries Denmark is ranked high with respect to on-line services. This paper presents a preliminary, exploratory analysis of variables supporting the diffusion of eServices in Danish municipalities. The objective of the study is to perform an explorative search for explanatory variables, which make municipalities adopt eServices, and specifically to gain an understanding of why some municipalities embrace eServices more extensively than others. Based on an analysis of quantitative data it is found that urbanization, population density, educational level of citizens, and increase in employment in the municipality appears to be the most significant explanatory factors supporting a high level of eService adoption.

The presence of economies of scale has been often taken for granted in the discussion of many eGovernment implementation issues. This paper discusses this assumption by showing that empirical evidence in favor of economies of scale may be considered context dependent. Although the analysis carried out does not lead to discard the presence of economies of scale in the provision of eGovernment services, it casts a new light on the concept of one-stop-shopping portals as well as providing some insights for future research.

This paper assesses the maturity of the eGovenrment (eGov) field by examining the nature of 170 papers published at three major eGov conferences using a maturity model. Papers were examined mainly for rigor, but to some extent also for relevance. It was found that theory generation and theory testing are not frequent while case stories (no theory, no structured data collection) and product descriptions (no analysis or test) are. Also, claims beyond what is reasonable given the method used are frequent. As for relevance, only a few of the cases where theories are either tested or generated concern the role and nature of government, most concern general organizational issues which could well find a place within traditional IS conferences. On the positive side, global outreach appears fairly good, as does involvement of various pertinent disciplines. It is concluded that eGov conferences need to address quality criteria, both rigor and relevance oriented ones, if the field shall develop to become a distinct research field.

The paper that follows is concerned with the communities of interest (or actor networks) and communities of practice that articulate the delivery of e-government services, and with the discourse formations that shape the delivery of e-government services in the UK. The approach adopted within this paper is based on historical reconstruction and discourse analysis. This suggests that the delivery of an integrated and accountable e-government apparatus is a non-trivial objective for system developers, and that the overall complexity of such a development has been, and is grossly underestimated.

Recently national, state, and local governments from many countries have been attempting to reform their administrative structure, processes, and regulatory frameworks. E-government can be seen as a powerful approach for government administrative reform. The dynamics and evolution of e-government is a complex process resulting from strategic behavior, development of rules and standards, and appropriation of those rules and standards by the international community. The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical and analytical framework that explains how this e-government evolution has taken place. Based on a literature review about the study of rules and principles from both institutional and principal-agent theories, a dynamic feedback-rich model is developed and a number of lessons are presented and discussed.

The introduction of e-Government thus far has been largely focused on improving service delivery and governmental back office integration. Nevertheless the State of Affairs in e-Government in Europe shows a growing mismatch between supply and demand in e-Services to the public. The current focus on the reduction of the administrative burden however has opened up new perspectives in the development of e-Government. In this paper we present an overview of the political and technological issues that dominate the discussion on the reduction of administrative burden. We will furthermore explain some critical success factors in this process. As an illustration we will refer to the approach followed in the Dutch e-Government Programme.

The scope of this paper is to analyze the main obstacles that resulted in the deployment of an unsuccessful G2G (Government to Government) enterprise in Brazil due to user resistance to Information Systems. In order to achieve this, case study explanatory methodology along with interpretative research based on a recent real-life case was adopted, namely the digital link between the Brazilian Central Bank and the Federal Senate. Some findings are drawn with respect to the importance of adequately managing the change associated with an endeavor such as the one analyzed in order to assist policy makers and public administrators in dealing with this new field of knowledge.

International trade negotiations among national governments and organizations are usually arduous and complicated. We propose a framework that supports government to government negotiation. With this framework, governments can keep track of previous negotiations using a database of negotiation records in an electronic platform. Moreover, the framework supports searching, sharing and learning past negotiation records as well as the ability to conduct negotiations on a variety of resources, products and services.

The development of effective public policies and programs concerning the big problems of modern societies is an increasingly complex task. The social problems today are multidimensional and their solution requires close collaboration among various Public Organizations from many regions or even countries. Each individual organization involved possesses pieces of information, experience, knowledge and competence about the problem. Their values, interests and expectations are often different, or even conflicting, and have to be taken into account. Similar hold for the ‘high level functions’ of the Public Administration, such as decision making towards the development of legislation. This paper presents a web-based system that supports collaborative activities in the above setting. Through a well-structured discourse graph, the system facilitates the wide participation and collaboration of the Public Organizations involved in the solution of social problem and provides a series of knowledge management and argumentative decision making features. The use of the system is described through a detailed example concerning a debate about state vs. non-state universities, which has recently started in Greece.

A deeper cooperation among Public Administrations (PAs) could prevent or at least reduce the inefficient provision of complex administrative services typically suffered by individual citizens and organizations. For this aim Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can be adopted for the design and implementation of a cooperative architecture providing an information system in which the distributed, independent PAs participate by exchanging services each other. A technological infrastructure based on e-Services, which, through the interconnection at application level of the different PA information systems, could (semi-)automate complex processes and intensify the communication among PA employees, is currently under development in the IST EU-PUBLI.com project: the context and the requirements as well as the architecture are presented in this paper.

Realizing complete digital intake and processing of building permit applications has been a long time challenge for many governments. Especially the processing of digital drawings and plans constitutes a major obstacle. In 2004 legal barriers to communicate digitally between government and applicants have disappeared in the Netherlands. A group of local governments used the momentum to study the feasibility of a large scale introduction of the intake of digital building permit applications by using a shared services concept. The feasibility study contained technical, economical, juridical and demand site feasibility aspects. This paper reports especially on the demand site feasibility. The paper is mend to present a case study about the readiness of both applicants and local governments in the Netherlands to deal with building permit applications in a digital way.

In this paper we identify the high-level requirements for a G2G collaborative platform to support the deployment of e-voting in the UK context. After referring to the stakeholders involved in the deployment of e-voting projects we identify the government agents that the platform would serve. Based on the process description followed in earlier pilots we define the role of each government agent and subsequently suggest four areas of collaborative support. Accordingly we refer to aspects of knowledge sharing that the system could foster. In concluding we suggest not only the usefulness of such a collaborative system for government agents but also its prospective benefit in supporting transparency and public scrutiny of e-voting.

The OSCI protocol supports the secure and legally binding message exchange without media breach. International standard have been taylored to meet the requirements of european laws. Application specific layers for standardized message payload make use of the security mechanims of the underlying transport layer. The modernization of the people registration process in germany in the sense of electronic message exchange will be based completely on both layers of OSCI.A sound standardization of message contents at the application level is a crucial factor for an successful e-Government infrastructure. In the OSCI–XMeld project, the XML schemata and the written documentation are derived in an automated way from the formal UML model.

In the delivery of e-government services to citizens it should be clear that the viewpoint cannot simply be the standard one of client-supplier commonly used to provide services on the Internet. In a modern society it has rather to be the peer-to-peer approach which is typical of democracies, where institutions are equal to citizens in front of the law. But this is not yet a widely accepted standpoint in digital government efforts going on in many advanced countries in the world.Italian government, in its ever increasing effort to provide citizens with easier access to online government services, has instead adopted and is pursuing this symmetric approach, which is going to represent a fundamental tool in the ongoing march towards e-democracy.In this paper we describe the organizations involved in the process and the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure enabling the effective management of the whole process while ensuring the mandatory security functions in a democratic manner.Organizational complexity lies in the distribution of responsibilities for the management of people’s personal data among the more than 8000 Italian Municipalities and the need of keeping a centralized control on all processes dealing with identity of people.Technical complexity stems from the need of efficiently supporting this distribution of responsibilities while ensuring, at the same time, interoperability of IT-based systems independent of technical choices of the organizations involved, and fulfillment of privacy constraints. The IT architecture defined for this purpose features a clear separation between security services, provided at an infrastructure level, and application services, exposed on the Internet as Web Services.

eGovernment is expected by all “customers” of the administration (citizens, enterprises, administrative coworkers) as an additional channel of interaction. Creation and funding of such eGovernment structures require the willingness to cooperate across both functional and organizational entities in technical regard and concerning the definition and implementation of standards. Inter-municipal eGovernment as Public Private Partnership (PPP) can be a good model to create and finance this additional channel of interaction.

This paper proposes an e-Government platform that intends to support legacy integration and service collaboration, at the design and run time, in order to turn viable all the characteristics of electronic government applications. Technology independence is considered as a very important goal to be achieved. Model Driven Architecture and metamodels are some of the resources to provide such independence.

Gradually, e-Governance emerges as theory of informatized societal management. It is supposed to start by defining its (i) objectives, (ii) scope, (iii) concepts and models, (iv) key problems, methods and solutions and (v) definition of performance (vi) quality assurance. The present paper is focused on (v) and (vi), in an attempt to put into discussions a possible list of about twenty indicators for eG performance and a number of specific activities and measures for quality assurance.

Electronic government transaction services may offer a potential of increased efficiency and quality with the minimum cost in the way the public administration deals with its customers. Recent reports show that this is far from reality, as eGovernment projects seem to be failing to deliver. Within that context, an ongoing doctorate programme investigates the risk classification of eGovernment services and explores how a multi-perspective risk assessment framework may assist towards the management of such projects. This article presents the prototype version of the framework. Additionally, this paper describes an initial field investigation that was necessary to validate the prototype framework, a discussion on risk in eGovernment, as well as the risk taxonomy that is used to support the prototype.

The paper discusses the need for more research on the adoption of public e-procurement and what factors influences this adoption. A number of European countries have developed and implemented solutions for public e-procurement at a national level. Despite major initiatives from state level and claims of reduced cost through wider choice and higher efficiency these have been adopted to a less extent than expected by the public sector in some of the countries. Lack of adoption may be due to a number of reasons. Technical problems, costly solutions and competing electronic marketplaces (Somasundaram 2004b) are causes often suggested. Henriksen et. al. (2004) suggests that decentralisation of purchasing power conflicting with centralised solutions may be an important cause in Denmark. In Norway, the governemnts project manager for implementation of e-procurement suggests lack of organisational change as a cause for lack of adoption (Computerworld 2004). We need to identify the reasons for the lack of adoption so that public spending is not wasted. We suggest that institutional theory may help understand the different attitudes towards adoption, and that community goals expressed as concern for the regional business community may be an important institutional factor. The paper outlines a research agenda and presents a tentative research model and a design to test this. The study itself will start early autumn 2004, and preliminary results will be available late 2004.

Governmental reform has been on Switzerland’s political agenda since the 1970s. In the 1990s, the ideas of NPM (New Public Management) spread quickly within the Swiss public sector. From the mid 1990s, the three levels of government also began experimenting with electronic government. Ten years later these experiments have matured and Switzerland is regularly ranked among the top countries for the implementation of electronic government. It is possible to link these eGovernment experiments and projects to some of the ideas and promises of NPM, such as customer orientation, seamless interaction between levels of government, businesslike management, and better transparency of public affairs. By means of ten examples, this paper illustrates how eGovernment has become one of the most meaningful agents of government transformation and modernisation at the beginning of the 21st century, at least in Switzerland.

This paper presents a model for analyzing divides. The model is based on earlier research on the divide and includes: physical access, autonomy of use, know-how and motivation. Depending on the type of digital divide and the local situation, rectifying efforts must address the most crucial factor, which could be any of the four.

Digital divides have become an important issue that attracts a great attention of almost every country in the world and major international organizations. However, few or none of the previous researches have taken into account both domestic and international digital divide issues at the same time and offered an integrated view to structurally illustrate these issues from various aspects. The goal of this paper is to propose an integrated framework for assessing and analyzing domestic and international digital divides of a country or a group of countries. Situations of digital divides in Taiwan, three other industrialized economies in southeastern Asia, and four northern European countries are examined and compared based on the framework. Related e-government strategies for bridging the divides are also discussed.

This paper reports on content analysis performed on a local government initiated web site: demokratitorget.no. The expressed purpose of this web site is to increase citizen participation by using a discussion forum. This research reports on activity prior to the local and regional elections in the autumn of 2003. In order to analyse the content of the political discussions, it was necessary to develop a categorization scheme. Content is analysed based on scope, type of contribution, and intention. The results show that the primary use was to raise and comment on political issues. The discussion forum was also used to promote party political viewpoints, and to ask questions. The discussion forum generated only a few new ideas that could be translated into political decisions. On this basis, strategies for increased citizen influence are discussed.

The enabling potential of IT for reengineering administrative processes and service delivery will not be realized to any greater extent if basic problems of change management are neglected. There are numerous barriers to implementing innovative structures, represented e.g. by strategic deficits, not involved politicians, or organizational resistance. Micropolitics is a promising approach to clarify these issues. This contribution describes a framework based on distinguishing different micropolitical arenas, in each of which a different set of actors play different types of micropolitical games.

This paper describes PARMENIDES, a system which facilitates structured debate about government policy.

A representative sample of Australian web sites was investigated for its responsiveness to a request from a citizen, their accessibility, public outreach, privacy and security, among other characteristics. This research study shows that Australian e-government web sites lack a customer orientation, that is, web sites that tailor their services and tools towards the customers’ needs. Only a small percentage of web sites provided content in alternative languages (a limitation in a country that is characterised as multicultural), and a great majority of web sites did not respond to a simple e-mail of a citizen. Australian e-government websites are performing very well with almost 96% all examined websites posting a clear privacy policy. In terms of security 62% of the web sites provided clear statements reassuring a citizen’s concern for security.

An essential aspect of every e-governmental environment is the privacy of data handled by public administration bodies using electronic means. In order to audit the privacy compliance of data processors with data protection regime, various data protection bodies have developed appropriate practices, methods and methodologies. Unfortunately, the scene for privacy audits is far from being idyllic. The goal of this paper is to present the audit approaches adopted by various data protection bodies in public administration domain, provide a detailed review and set criteria useful to create a comparative framework for these approaches. The criteria forming the framework have been selected according to key findings of a research conducted by auditors of Hellenic Data Protection Authority (HDPA).

The past years a general acceptance emerges that the real added value of e-government developments should be realized in chain integration and network cooperation rather than within separate government organizations. The focus of research is shifting towards the conditions under which network cooperation can arise and prosper. In this article we examine the role that trust plays between potential network partners while creating network cooperation. This is done in a case study about a successful, inter-organizational ICT solution in the Dutch social security sector. The case suggests lines of action that might help other governments to succeed in realizing E-government network cooperation.

This paper is engaged in research in security, peculiarities and implementations of security requirements within governmental structures. Based on three interaction points (citizen to government C2G, government to government G2G and government to citizen G2C) appropriate examples were chosen, security implementations analyzed and special attributes investigated. It points out some restrictions and difficulties while building up a secure public system.

The idea of smart cards used in public administration has been developed to disseminate e-communication between citizens and public authorities as well as to secure more control for a state over a citizen (citizen surveillance). Except of traditional identification tools they are to include a digital certificate useful in e-banking, e-transaction, e-voting etc. However, the exercise of services of non-public bodies employing PKI for digital citizen (ID) cards may cause concerns of illegal abuse on data gathered on a card and illegal activities may abuse privacy of a data subject. Especially when according to existing law they have been accessible only to public administration bodies. Citizen card is a combination of cryptography elements and an electronic signature. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that a card structure depends on a secret key issuer that defines the range of access to all its components. That is why an issuer must properly protect not only public interest but the private interest of a card holder as well.

The paper discusses the results of a survey about the actual situation of ICT and its implications in the Italian E-government scenario. The investigation is part of a larger research effort promoting and evaluating holistic approaches for Local Public Administrations. The research focus is about the mutual dependencies between normative aspects and ICT solutions, evaluated on small and medium Municipalities even with no remarkable aptitude to innovation. The research findings depict the strength and weakness of the current tendency to stress only one dimension in innovation, like technology in front-office services or normative in bureaucratic procedures.

Unnoticed for quite some time, electronic Government (e-Government, e-Gov) projects have only recently been observed to induce changes to government business processes. So far, the strategic approaches and objectives pursued in such projects have not been studied. In the private sector, business process change (BPC), in turn, has been widely practiced and researched. In this exploratory study, the existing literature on BPC-related strategic approaches and objectives is used as a point of reference for assessing the scope and scale e-Gov-induced BPC. On a grand scale, the strategic approaches and objectives were found very similar to those used in the private sector, although they differed in many details. The existing knowledge it is concluded can help inform and guide e-Gov projects with a BPC impact.

In a report recently completed for the European Commission on the reorganisation of government back-offices, eight major strategy options currently being pursued within the most advanced European eGovernment initiatives are identified and analysed as representing successful approaches in applying ICT to government. A clear and direct relationship was found between the benefits derived from digitising government back-offices and improvements in quality and transparency for users of eServices.

Considerable hype often surrounds the potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web. This hype extends to governmental use of the web for the delivery of information and services electronically 24 hours per day/seven days per week (a.k.a., electronic or e-government). For example, Fountain (2001) argues that use of the web will literally transform government, especially by integrating governmental information and services in ways hitherto unimaginable. It will also reduce paperwork, decrease costs, and promote greater governmental efficiency and effectiveness. These and other claims about e-government are often made with great enthusiasm and optimism but with scant empirical data to back them up. In this paper, I apply a dose of what Pippa Norris (2001) calls cyber-realism to the actual results of use of the web by grassroots or local governments in the U. S. I begin by reporting findings from two surveys of American local governments conducted in 2000 and 2002 (D. Norris, Fletcher and Holden, 2000; Holden. D. Norris and Fletcher, 2003; and D. Norris and Moon, 2004 forthcoming). Next, I present data from focus groups that I conducted in late 2002 with COIs and other top officials of 37 city and county governments from across the U.S.

There is general agreement that spatial data and Geographic Information (gi) systems are important components of e-government infrastructure, both at central and local levels. However due to the complexity of the issue some fundamental problems have not been solved so far. In this paper the current state of gi system implementation is reviewed and technology neutral architecture of a gi system based on xml and recommendations for implementation of such a system is described.

A spatial application-integrating infrastructure (PAI) is presented. Many utilities can use PAI to integrate a variety of spatial database, systems and business processes. PAI consists of integrating bus, adapter services, metadata database, PAI mediator and PAI Toolkit. PAI Toolkit is composed of a series of API and web services. Integrating Bus is a group of domain-oriented encoding standards and communication protocols; Adapter Service encapsulations are recommended as a good solution to integrate existing applications or systems; metadata database is the key unit of “PAI”, which manages all data and services and shields heterogeneity and distribution of spatial data and services; PAI mediator is positioned to manage metadata and update spatial data online; the terms used in metadata are defined in OWL; all data and protocols are encoded in XML; Web service can operate with each other using SOAP protocol.

According to [1], eGovernment is defined as the use of information and communication technology in public administrations combined with an organizational change and new skills in order to improve public services and democratic processes and strengthen support to public policies. eGovernment has been defined as a priority in the eEurope 2005 Action Plan. However, many barriers and obstacles need to be overcome and sizeable investments are needed. Change processes in organization and culture are slow: it can take several years until the combined investment in information and communication technology, organization and skills deliver the full benefits. Strong political leadership and commitment is needed, guided by a long-term vision on the contribution of the public sector to Europe in the knowledge society. Forward thinking and innovation should be accompanied with concrete deliverables and results in the shorter term. The eGovernment initiative puts pressure on authorities to provide services online and accessible to the citizen. In turn, this necessitates improved information sharing between departments and joint working with other agencies and administration levels. As it is mentioned in [2], the most common eGovernment application is clearly oriented to provide citizens with access to information.

The geographic information is the information that describes phenomena associated directly or indirectly with a location with respect to the Earth surface. Nowadays, there are available large amounts of geographic data that have been gathered with different purposes by different institutions and companies. Furthermore, the volume of this information grows day by day thanks to important technology advances in high-resolution satellite remote sensors, GPS, databases and geoprocessing software notwithstanding an increasing interest by individuals and institutions. Even more, it is possible to georeference complex collections of a broad range of resource types, including textual documents, real-time acquired observations, legacy databases of tabular historical records, multimedia components such as audio and video, and scientific algorithms.

Fire service is one of the most important fields in e-government of Korea. In this paper, we introduce a pilot project for fire service currently operated at Daegu Fire Headquarter. For the project, we develop several components related to fire service and an emergency 119 system integrated with GIS technology. It supports information sharing between related organizations and mobile fire facility management. The system provides real-time information of fire service via Web. The developed system is efficiently used for fire extinction and rescue action, and will be also applied to other local fire service systems and extended to nationwide fire service system.

This paper describes an architecture which can be used to access geographic information from mobile devices with limited display and processing characteristics, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) or Mobile Phones. The information may come from different sources leading to an interoperable solution.M-GIS obtains geographic information from sources described using Geogxraphy Markup Language (GML) from one or more Web FeatureServers allowing an access independent from its format or physical location, as long as the information is according to the specification.Using XSLT, GML is transformed to a graphical format in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) which can then be manipulated in the mobile device. M-GIS follows a client/server architecture and the client application was developed using Java Mobile Information Device Profile technology.The results enable us to conclude that the mobile system, designed and developed with the use of open standards and representation formats to access geographic information, is a viable solution with some limitations. The main limitations of this approach have to do with the amount of information which the client can, at the moment, accommodate.

To improve the distributed spatial recovery by means of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), a Distributed GIS-Application (SIGETAM) has been designed. This application is focused on recovering and making spatial analysis, throughout Spatial Analyzer Module (SAM). SAM contains several spatial and mathematical models that have been designed and implemented for detecting landslides and flooding areas. Users can make an analysis to recover the spatial data from different sites, using a specification based on Extensible Markup Language (XML), which is represented by Document Type Definition (DTD). Spatial data are stored into a spatial database. Moreover, all spatial processes are executed in the server application to improve the performance of the spatial analysis. SIGETAM is an application that has been developed to be used by the government of Tamaulipas state, Mexico. This application helps in the decision making process to detect risk areas.

The revision process of a Municipal Master Plan has a sequence of several steps that are to be executed. One of these steps, public discussion, is of great democratic importance as it allows citizens to actively participate in the management of the municipality through proposals and public debates taking place at a specific time and location in accordance to a previously published agenda.With such a process running at Oporto’s municipality, and with the aim of reaching as much citizens as possible through the removal of spatial and temporal constrains, an effort was made to develop an electronic service for citizens, to complement the usual methods of public participation. In this paper we present the results of such service.

The protection and enhancement of the environment is the main aim of most environmental decision-making processes, and the use of geographic information as well as public participation can improve the quality of both the processes and the decisions. The current paper describes the use of geographic information in environmental decision-making and gives an overview over the various approaches to public participation. Finally, the methods and techniques is illustrated by experiences from practical wind turbine planning in Northern Jutland County, Denmark.

Geographical Information System (GIS) plays an important role in e-government applications once that all government information has a geographic dimension – a street address, a transportation road, a river, a city, a state and so on. GIS apart from contributing for data integration from different data sources, enables data visualization using maps, which enhances the system usability and can help the decision-making process. This paper describes a web GIS framework that provides fast and easy deployment of e-government applications. The framework is validated by the realization of a substantial application of a Brazilian state, which contains data about health, education, industry, human development index and other socio-economic data.

Self-regulation emerges as very important form for regulating different aspects of the electronic domain, and is advocated by current regulatory initiatives. Equally, the special laws and regulations are created to address e-governance issues. The paper suggests and analyses the possibilities of transferring elements of self-regulation model to the broader domain. The limitations of such transfer, as well as disadvantages thereof, which interestingly have many similarities, are analyzed, along with the practicality of applying self-regulation successfulness tests to measure governmental regulation of e-governance. In order to support the theoretical arguments, the empirical analysis of the ISP self-regulation in the Baltic’s on the issues of Internet content is made. Conclusions are drawn on the necessity for co-existence of governmental regulation and self-regulation, in order to facilitate the overall success of the e-governance legal framework.

The Spanish government has been supporting several initiatives oriented to develop the Information Society in Spain during the last years. This paper reviews the main ongoing projects as well as the established legal framework in Spain. Special attention is given to España.es, a two years (2004-2005) strategic plan to promote the access to electronic services to all citizens. The current situation of these works is analysed.

After a lengthy and wide-ranging debate, the Tuscany Region (Italy) has promulgated the framework law on “the promotion of electronic administration and of the information and knowledge society throughout the regional system. Regulating the Tuscany Region Telecommunications Network”; (L. 26 January 2004, n. 1). This is the first example of Regional legislation in the area after the reform of the Constitution.

This paper presents the basic characteristics and main activities of the LEFIS Network (Legal Framework for the Information Society), which is comprised of various teaching and research centres, companies and associations. The primary and complementary objective of LEFIS is to make legislative proposals and prepare education modules designed to put into action the professional training required to perform the activities of public and private institutions and firms that are engaged in the creation and implementation of legal decisions and social and industrial standards directed at governance of the knowledge based society.

In the modern constitutional state, law and justice should coincide closely. This is one of the fundamental requirements of democracy. The principal way in which we pursue, articulate and realize justice is to draft and enact legislation. Laws are codes that impose obligations in various ways. Juridification is however decreasing our possibilities to know and understand the law. Without a good systematics legislation is like a jungle where we do have difficulties to orientate. The authors main message in this paper is to point out the importance of information law as a new tool when planning information systems for egovernment. If we keep a close eye on the position of information networks as a part of society’s infrastructure, the legal assessment of information systems and electronic services is unavoidable. And this assessmenti is ineffective without modern legal dynamic systematics.

The article provides discussions about teaching programs of e-governance, review of Master’s study programme “E-governance administration” providing curriculum of this program, the summary of the experience of the first teaching year of the program.

In the autumn of 2004 two higher educational programs in e-government will be starting up at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. Each will be the first of its kind in Scandinavia, and both will be offered as net-based education. The interdisciplinary group of researchers developing the educational programs sees the co-construction as the beginning of an active network of competence around higher education, R&D in the e-government area. Participatory Design, as well as ideas about e-government as ongoing co-construction, have inspired us in our work with developing the educational programs.

ICTs have become extraordinary tools employed by State governments for improving the quality, the rapidity and reliability of services provided to private citizens and firms, with the aim, in the long-term, of achieving the goals of the Information Society. The human factor is essential for the structural and organizational development of the labour-intensive world of the public administration. Digital literacy initiatives are, therefore, the major tool for promoting innovation in the various fields of the country’s economic and social life and for moving towards the development of the Information Society, as recognized in various political and legislative documents.

In the wake of e-government new qualification requirements arise for users, managers, decision makers in public administration. The need is met through seminars, e-learning and training on the job. But observing an increasing dependency of public administrations on external consultancy and analyzing the tasks in e-government one gets the impression that there are qualification requirements for which educational programmes are more appropriate, especially coping with the complex issues of an integrated organization and technology design.

Austria is one of the leading countries in the field of electronic identity. The Austrian Citizen Card System is presently going live; the next step is to inform the citizen about the functionalities and advantages, as well as on how to use the card. On authority of the Federal Chancellor’s Office, the Danube University has developed an e-learning tool that will be made available to all Austrian households. The target group is the citizen rather than the early technological adopter, and the aim is to explain the use of a citizen card rather than the technical background. The main pedagogical method therefore is to reduce technical complexity to an absolute minimum. This e-learning tool is positioned to be one piece of a sophisticated e-government communication strategy.

For over 15 years Fabasoft has been a European leader in standard software for Document Management Systems and Workflow Management, in particular electronic filing and archiving. This paper shows the efforts in e-Government from the software producer’s view. Making e-Government standard software includes the task to find the best solution to international and national requirements on functionality, standards and guidelines. E-Government forms an essential part towards modern administrations as it embraces the optimization of intra-authority processes, of the interfaces between the authority entities, citizens and companies, and of inter-authority processes thus leading to the realization of the information society. The tasks complexity results from the authorities’ different ways of accomplishing their tasks, from their communication partners like citizens, companies and other authorities and from complex social and legal frameworks.

In this paper, we propose a detailed object model for the execution phase of the public service provision. The model is part of our general effort to model the domain of the governance system, and to present a coherent Government Enterprise Architecture (GEA). It is based on two higher-level GEA object models, which were developed as part of our previous work, and remains compatible with them.

Inherent complexity of the e-Government application domain is also reflected in the workflows of e-Government service provision. This paper reports on how some real examples e-Government service workflows were modeled in a simple and structured fashion by recognizing and re-using recurring segments. Such an approach, drawing from current workflow modeling trends, presents important potential to facilitate e-Government workflow modeling by enabling systematic and rapid design of new service workflows, as well as progressive construction of a repository of e-Government workflow segments that could also host best practice workflows.

Two basic questions are investigated in this contribution: 1) How can we explain the value generation process in the public sector? 2) What is the potential role of Web services technology in this process? Our approach has been to make use of the process theory on business value generation developed by Soh and Markus (1993), adapting the original framework of analysis to the public sector. According to these authors, IT can generate business value through a three-phase process: conversion, use and competitive deployment. We focus on the first stage of the model, where IT expenditures are converted into IT assets. The role of Web services technology in this conversion process is then depicted, evidencing some implications connected to its adoption in e-Government (e-Gov) projects. The analysis is intentionally limited to the intra-organizational level (i. e. we do not consider inter-agency systems) and to the first phase of the value generation process. In the future it may be possible to delineate a more complete picture of the e-Gov value generation process and the potential role of the Web services technology.

The Netherlands puts much effort in establishing itself as a modern country and as one of the leading countries in the information age. At the same time, however, it has been losing its position as a forerunner in the electronic delivery of public services. This is mainly due to the fact that most public services are delivered at the level of the Dutch municipalities. At this level eService development is almost stagnant because of a) lacking municipal resources and limited potential benefits and b) a reserved, soft attitude by central government which has adhered to the Dutch institutional principles of municipal autonomy and the consensus model. In recent years, however, we see some developments which may help to solve the existing stalemate and may indeed bring the Netherlands back on track.

Electronic Government (eGovernment) has been seen as the silver bullet for modernizing public administrations over last few years. But fact is that the broad variety of eGovernment initiatives results in an evenly heterogeneous picture regarding the quality of eGovernment services provided. Within an international context differences in eGovernment quality may result from nationally specific factors such as e-readiness, legal restrictions, existence of a nation-wide eGovernment strategy, and so forth. But what are the factors which have influence on eGovernment success and which do not result from national characteristics? In order to answer this question we conducted an empirical study in the northern German region “Muensterland”. The goal of this article is to present this empirical study. Internal data from 56 and external data from 70 local municipal administrations was gathered and analyzed with regard of the question: What are eGovernment success factors?

We present information integration features underlying the ICONS knowledge repository supporting data extraction from a variety of heterogeneous sources, such as structured data (i.e. relational data bases), semi-formatted data (i.e. XML, HTML files), text documents (i.e. plain text files, word processor files, PDF files), binary data (i.e. image files, audio files). The principal challenge is to insert and maintain integrated data objects within the structure of the ICONS repository data model defined in the Knowledge Schema. We discuss the ICONS Knowledge Schema, ICONS Concept Glossary and the advanced graphic interface features supporting storage and manipulation of the integrated heterogeneous information artefacts, access to external data sources with the use of a generalized wrapper architecture, and advanced information categorisation based on machine-learning techniques. The ICONS information integration capabilities are illustrated by a running example.

An electronic registry is the main mechanism for the official distribution of public records, which are created within the framework of administrative procedures and business transactions. The encoding of public records within a registry is realized according to a certain format to facilitate information management. However, these formats do not refer to semantics, which are considered essential for: a) the description of the administrative procedures, and b) efficient information retrieval. This paper aims to provide a digital library architecture for the encoding of public records and administrative procedures. It introduces the usage of semantic tools for the management of knowledge within the proposed integrated system.

Public administration’s legacy systems are not networked. Therefore early e-government applications are not so effective. For a substantial reorganisation shared registers and databases are necessary but privacy is also to be obeyed. The framework of the Austrian E-Government Act balances both requirements and establishes a basis for efficient back office processes. First implementations generate benefits.

The concurrence of various developments makes access to, as well as ownership, use and commercialisation of information held by the public sector a challenge for public policy, particularly in Europe. Underlying are trends and issues at different levels: technical (digitisation, Internet), political (EU policies, democratic deficit), social (digital divide, access to services), and economic (expanding information economy, European information industry). The paper points out some key issues of public sector information policy, illustrates these with empirical evidence and outlines policy initiatives at EU level. One conclusion is that up to now the emphasis has been on the commercial rather than citizen rights aspects of public sector information and that a balance of policy priorities has yet to be found.

The Bulletin of Public Information (BIP) has been introduced by the Polish law in 2001 year as the mandatory manner of the official information publication on the web sites. This law put the publications obligations on the all administration units and on many enterprises.What is fundamentally important that information is collected in a standardized and documented manner in predefined points, which are well represented in the geographical information systems. Moreover, the same collection of information is measured in different times in a given point. In this way, a huge amount of a spatial, dynamic data is collected in the public databases.The collected public data can be used in modeling of a variety of activities in the Region and in their parameterization. Such parameterization of the region which is based on the reliable data gives a chance to reach the objectivity standards. It is particularly important in evaluations and comparisons of the region’s activities at the national and European level. For example, new e-government services could be designed and objectively evaluated in this way.

In order to address the gap in e-government research focused on information for businesses, Nomisma-NET has engaged in a study focused on the role of online public information in business development in Italy, as well as in other European countries and in the USA. The paper presents the methodology for analysis of portals and web-sites that supply public information for businesses, in particular small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The analysis is carried out on two tracks: static and dynamic. The objective of the research is to analyse different sites and countries’ models in supplying online public information in terms of access, content availability and degree of relationality.

E-government can be regared as a construction site. Thus the overall success is strongly determined by the tangible progress that takes place in regional development projects. The workshop “regional developments in global connection” documents such actual advancements and considers them in the framework of global trends in e-government.

Malaysia has taken a gigantic decision by transforming itself from industrialization into an unknown territory of knowledge economy. Therefore it is important to establish a test bed to justify on the successfulness of leapfrogging onto this new bandwagon. Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) project is the major project in the country and has been established to test this. The question is, can Malaysia achieve its dream in creating successful implementation of information systems when information systems history was full of catastrophe? This paper will discuss the findings of mapping triangle of dependencies model by Chris Sauer in order to foresee whether Malaysia has the potential to achieve successful implementation of information systems. Finally, through this investigation, we are able to outlined external influences that can nurture the continuity of information systems dependencies in Malaysia and embedded it as external factors of Sauer’s model.

The Philippine Commission on Elections (COMELEC) has acknowledged that the absentee vote can very well decide the final outcome of the close 2004 presidential elections. However, the absentee voter registration system has procedural and technological problems that can lead to allegations of fraud. These are the problems that COMELEC must address as it gets ready to proclaim the next president of the Philippines. Furthermore, evaluation of the absentee voter registration system now will help COMELEC prepare for the next major election in 2007.

This paper is a continuation of a profound international study carried out in 2002 concerning eGovernment[1]. Seven countries of the OECD were examined. Not only eGovernment policies and organizational components were taken a closer look at but also front- and back office realisations. Despite the fact that each country is developing own eGovernment facilities, there are many similarities [2,3]. In this article we examine whether these international trends also count for Belgium. We focus on both the federal and the Flemish eGovernment policies.

Nowadays, uunfortunately, most of the countries are still in the early stage in the shift to providing governmental services online. How to start providing e-Government is a question that no one can give a unique answer to. It depends on the economical, legal, social, and political situation in particular country, often requiring major changes in organization and legislative regulations. In this paper we try to formulate such a strategy, based on the experience gained when developing and implementing it for a Social Security Organization in Greece.

The Bhoomi e-government project of Karnataka is fast gaining recognition as one of the best-implemented projects in India. As of this writing, the Bhoomi model of digitizing land records and implementing a system of easy access to records, for verification and changes, is being adopted by the Government of India to replicate on a nationwide basis. This follows a felt need by the government to improve services for the bulk of India’s over 1 billion population that is engaged in agriculture. The Bhoomi project is designed for the computerization of land records and all operations that surround it, such as, obtaining a copy of a land record, correction of errors on a land record, the mutation of land records, etc. The process was initiated in 1991 and to date about 20 million land records have been digitized covering the land holdings of some 6.7 million farmers in the state. Bhoomi kiosks are now located in all 177 taluks (a division of a district) of the state’s 27 districts.

Governments in many countries have been implementing e-government for the purpose of better service delivery to citizen, better environments for businesses, and more efficient and transparent public administration. However, most implementations of e-government have provided temporary approaches rather than holistic view for citizen-oriented service level. In this paper, we intend to suggest three main directions that must be taken for better e-government in the future.

The objective of this paper is to describe and analyze the implementation of the Swedish e-Government policy. The problem to be solved by the government is to avoid problems and hindrances for rapid implementation. The Swedish government has not set up any quantitative goals for the implementation. Instead the government has used indirect methods of national framework agreements. The Swedish Agency for Public Management (Statskontoret) has made a procurement of a framework agreement of infra-services. The private market shall under a framework agreement offer e-services as ASP-solutions that will facilitate rapid implementation of e-Government in national-, regional- and local authorities. The intention by this is to lower the government’s initial investments for implementation of the e-services and instead pay for use of the services.

Government agencies with a need to create emergency management applications within time constraints may find attractive the flexibility of the web services paradigm. The ACE-GIS project has the goal of providing a platform to allow software developers to compose WS applications which include discovery and processing of geographic information, critical to decision-making where location is of prime concern. This brief paper describes the architecture developed and a representative use case.

We report on research aimed at gaining an improved understanding of how issues such as language, literacy and previous exposure to technology affect citizens’ ability to access government services of different complexity via ordinary telephony. We discuss user interface issues in conditions of low literacy and where previous exposure to technology is low. The results are based on field experiments with citizens using a real government application. The experimental set-up is described and the experimental procedure and results reported.

Emergent technologies have the potential to broaden democracy by facilitating conventional interactions between electors and authority, but this aim can also be achieved through facilitation of public participation in decision making. This work proposes the use of a framework for engaging local government agencies, stakeholders and citizens in societal decision processes through technology.

This paper describes a concept of municipal information systems envisioned as a generic architectural framework consisting of multilayer distributed software components and services, accompanied by a knowledge based repository and a set of standards for integration and interoperability. The main benefit of the proposed MIS architecture lies in its flexibility and adaptability to technological and organizational changes stemming mainly from the synergetic utilization of emerging IT initiatives.

Trade unions (TU) seem to adapt very timidly and slowly to e-democracy. Electronic and networked communications challenge trade unions to develop new organizational methods of servicing their members’ needs. Workers access their own e-mail in the workplace. The use of corporate intranet by TU of private as well as of public sector is becoming a legal possibility in many countries. More over, some national or international trade unions, as Connect in Great-Britain, “//syndikat” in Switzerland, a new international federation called “Union Network Organization” since 2000, are on-line and use ICT (Information and Communication Technology) to build networks with affiliates. This paper analyses these transformations and their reality in a society which both connects people and destroys social links at the same time. First, it presents the state of electronic communications’ use by trade unions: the legal aspects and the apparition of new unions. Second, it examines the capacities of ICT to support trade union activities and, especially as a support to voting in professional elections.

The new challenge for PAs is based on the exploitation of their knowledge resources in order to improve internal processes and to offer better services. This brief contribution suggests that a useful approach to knowledge issue in PAs lies in the analyses of the dynamic coordination of intangible assets produced near CoP’s borders.

Interpretation of the law is important in the administrative decision-making process in local municipal planning, which is a co-operative process. Local mobility also plays an important role. A study of work practice highlights the need to take this into account when designing support for decision-making processes.

One of the central ideas of E-Government is to facilitate access to public agencies using the aid of ICT. But technology is just one element. Many E-Government projects have to cope with the integration problems related to inter-administration processes. This is what “One-stop-administration” means. The change management of this integration work is a demanding challenge. In a three years project that was scientifically supported by the CRP-Gabriel Lippmann, the Luxembourg Register of Companies was fundamentally transformed from an antiquated paper-based administration into a modern private organisation. At the same time, first steps towards the realisation of a “one-stop-administration” for enterprises were taken. This article will deal with the experiences won and problems faced in this project.