Electronic Government

Disaster management always needs to strike a balance between preparedness and flexibility. The challenges of industrial crisis information management are manifold, out of which we address the question: How to create the best possible information sharing solution for a given environment and crisis situation? This ongoing design science research has identified essential components to be assembled in an ‘information sharing kit’, including description of informational needs, data model, categorization of ICT components, and guidelines for kit usage. All of these can and should be further developed towards a localized crisis information sharing kit, on the basis of which specific information sharing solutions can be set up in order to create information marketplaces for response and recovery whenever crises occur. Insights from this research are expected to inform disaster preparation in practice, especially in ICT empowered community settings such as smart cities, and to identify more clearly the (research) needs for standardization in disaster-related information management and integration.

There is some consensus among researchers that the first urban civilization labeled a ‘city’ was Sumer in the period 3,500–3,000 BC. The meaning of the word, however, has evolved with the advancement of technology. Adjectives such as digital, intelligent, and smart have been prefixed to ‘city’, to reflect the evolution. In this study, we pose the question: What makes a ‘Smart City’, as opposed to a traditional one? We review and synthesize multiple scientific studies and definitions, and present a unified definition of Smart City—a complex concept. We present the definition as an ontology which encapsulates the combinatorial complexity of the concept. It systematically and systemically synthesizes, and looks beyond, the various paths by which theory and practice contribute to the development and understanding of a smart city. The definition can be used to articulate the components of a Smart City using structured natural English. It serves as a multi-disciplinary lens to study the topic drawing upon concepts from Urban Design, Information Technology, Public Policy, and the Social Sciences. It can be used to systematically map the state-of-the-research and the state-of-the-practice on Smart Cities, discover the gaps in each and between the two, and formulate a strategy to bridge the gaps.

Smart cites are rapidly gaining momentum but our understanding of their underlying management framework has to a large extent been unexplored. Under the different initiatives within the label of smart cities, there is no systematic understanding of how city decision makers manage the configuration of resources and processes within the dynamic urban environment. This research in progress paper develops a research agenda on the capabilities of smart city management by synthesising the findings of 72 papers. Further to consolidating the enabling aspects of technology and data as key resources is smart city development, the review leads to the identification of dynamic, operational, cultural and management capabilities. The paper concludes by discussing the value of this approach for future work in the area of smart cities.

The integration and interoperability of e-government systems, and information sharing is essential in transforming governments to “smart governments” that deliver services to enhance the socio- economic inclusion and the quality of life of its citizens. The aim of this doctoral study is to understand institutional barriers to e-government integration, interoperability and information sharing preventing governments from transforming to smart governments. The study is an interpretive case study, using South Africa as a unique case of a developing country which has adopted the “smart” agenda. Findings will contribute to theory through advancing knowledge in the new research area of smart government as well as contributing to practice through generating applicable knowledge on digital transformation in the public sector.

In this contribution we discuss the characteristics of what we call the fourth generation of public sector service channels: social robots. Based on a review of relevant literature we discuss their characteristics and place into multi-channel models of service delivery. We argue that social robots is not one homogenous type of channels, but rather breaks down in different (sub)types of channels, each with different characteristics and possibilities to supplement and/or replace existing channels. Given the variety of channels, we foresee challenges in incorporating these new channels in multi-channel models of service delivery. This is especially relevant given the current lack of evaluations of such models, the broad range of channels available, and their different stages of deployment at governments around the world. Nevertheless, social robots offer an potentially very relevant addition to the service level landscape.

For the last decade e-government research has underlined the importance of an external user perspective in public e-service development and there have been numerous attempts to provide guidance and directions for government agencies in this matter. Individual research studies show little progress in this matter, but a more generalisable picture of the current state of external user inclusion is missing. The aim of this paper is to provide a better and more generalisable understanding of Swedish government agencies’ current practice of external user inclusion in public e-service development. In order to do so, we have interviewed Swedish government agencies regarding their perceptions on external user inclusion. Our findings show mixed results regarding attitudes towards and current practice of external user inclusion. It is clear that organisational size and previous experience of public e-service development matter. At the same time challenges such as a general lack of resurces and a lack of time are seen as general barriers, regardless of agency level and size.

Georgia’s achievements in public sector modernisation have been lauded, since 2004, for their ability to increase transparency, fight corruption, ease the way of doing business and improve public service delivery to citizens. Information Communication Technology (ICT) played an important role as an enabler of public sector reform. Despite this, research into the Georgian model of governance and inter-governmental cooperation is extremely limited. Similarly, literature reviews have, in recent years, pointed out limitations in the understanding of technology use in public service delivery and, particularly, the role governance, cross-governmental decision making, and cooperation play when introducing ICT solutions and online services to citizens. As part of a larger qualitative, multi-country comparison, this article analyses the Georgian approach to electronic governance (eGovernance). The analysis highlights the influence of politically motivated and driven public sector reforms underpinned by ICT use for better service delivery, transparency and a fight against corruption in the period 2004–2012. Despite early success in relation to ICT infrastructure, standards and roll-out to key enablers, the article finds that the electronic government (eGovernment) eco-system is fragmented and that the use of public and private online service (eService) is limited, despite high internet penetration and usage. The key barrier found is the lack of an effective governance and inter-governmental cooperation model to improve cooperation between government actors (e.g. data collection, quality and reuse, shared infrastructure, systems and service), build on existing infrastructure and enablers to optimize the value-added of earlier investments – particularly in relation to electronic identity management (eID), digital signatures (eSignature) and eServices. Georgia would benefit from a more formalized approach to ICT related programmes and projects by considering an IT-implementation model to effectively manage risk, improve benefit realization and link individual key performance measurements (KPI) to those of the eGovernment strategy and action plan.

There are various models and frameworks describing the nature of e-services in the public sector. Many of these models are based on previous conceptualizations and have evolved over time, but are first and foremost conceptual creations with weak empirical grounding. In the meantime, practitioners in the field have continued to further develop e-services, and new advancements in technology have enabled new solutions for e-services. In the light of advancements in practice, and the limitations seen in current conceptual work concerning public e-services, we identify a need to refuel the conceptual discussion on e-services in the public sector by empirically investigating how e-services can be manifested in practice. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the possible variations of e-services in practice, and to discuss this variation in relation to the conceptual representation of the phenomenon. Based on qualitative interviews with employees involved with e-service development and provision at a large governmental agency, we illustrate that an ‘e-service’ can take on many different forms within an organization; ranging from downloadable forms, to complicated self-service systems that require expertise knowledge and IT-systems with specific processing capacity. The notion that all services mediated through a website can be understood under one general umbrella term, without further categorization, needs to be challenged.

The shadow economy can be defined as economic activities that escape detection in the official estimates of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). A larger size of the informal sector poses a significant challenge for policymaking as it reduces the reliability of official estimators and increases the likelihood of adopting ineffective policies. Furthermore, the shadow economy may also influence the allocation of resources. The phenomenon is particularly important in the developing world. This paper aims to investigate a possible contribution of e-Government (eGov) to mitigate the problem of the shadow economy. We argue that the implementation of eGov will allow the government to reduce the administrative burden costs, reduce tax evasion, and allow citizens to act as whistle-blowers, all of which may eventually lower the size of the shadow activities. Since the implementation of eGov corresponds to the stage of infrastructure development in the Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), the diffusion of eGov also requires particular threshold points by which the impact can only be seen. We investigate the data of 147 countries during the period 2003–2013, where the data on estimated shadow economy (based on [1]) and eGov index (based on [2]) are both available. We found that increasing the eGov index significantly reduces the size of the shadow economy. Moreover, the marginal impact is greater in the developed and higher income countries. This sheds a light on the importance to achieve a sufficient level of critical mass in eGov infrastructure before countries are able to reap the benefits of the initiatives.

Networking and collaboration, at different levels and through differentiated mechanisms, have become increasingly relevant and popular as an effective means for delivering public policy over the past two decades. The variety of forms of collaboration that emerge in educational scenarios makes it hard to reach general conclusions about the effectiveness of collaboration in general and of inter-institutional networks in particular. The university environment is particularly challenging in this respect as typically different agendas for collaboration and competition co-exist and are often promoted by very same entities. Although no ‘one-fits-all’ model exists for the establishment of a network of universities, the prime result of the research reported in this paper is that the concept of such a network is a most promising instrument for delivering specific services within the high education universe. In this context, the paper discusses the potential of these networks for the design of educational programmes for the GCIO (Government Chief Information Officer) function and proposes a set of guidelines to successfully establish such networks.

Health sector institutions’ websites need to act as effective web resources of information and interactive communication mediums to address the versatile demands of their multiple stakeholders. Academic and practitioner interest in health sector website assessment has considerably risen in recent years. This can be seen by the number of papers published in journals. The purpose of this paper is twofold to further establish the field. First, it offers a literature re-view on hospitals’ websites assessment. Second, it offers a conceptual framework to address the website assessment issue in health sector. The proposed assessment framework focuses on four main criteria: content, technology, services, and participation being evaluated by the use of several indicators. Academics, hospital practitioners, public officials and users will find the review and the framework useful, as they outline major lines of research in the field and a method to assess health institution websites.

While work with benefits realization requires organizational learning to be effective, emphasis on organizational learning is hard to find in benefits realization studies. To remedy this research gap, we study how organizational learning theory can contribute to improve benefits realization processes. A qualitative approach was used to gain in depth understanding of benefits realization in an ICT healthcare services project. We found that individual learning is present, but organizational learning has not been given explicit attention neither in the project nor in the literature of benefits realization management. We argue that the individual learning in the project forms an excellent basis for organizational learning, i.e., in the form of organizational structures, routines, and methods for benefits realization.

The paper aims to contribute to the development of an e-Government capabilities repository. The purpose of this repository is to increase the level of success of the e-Government projects and initiatives. The results are based on an examination of a multidisciplinary body of knowledge, an iterative structured methodology and a comparative in-depth case study performed in two Canadian public administrations. We analyzed the data to identify the presence or absence of the capabilities, the evolution of these capabilities and their interrelationship. We proposed a preliminary knowledge repository of e-Government capabilities composed of 4 interdependent categories: the strategic capabilities, the project capabilities, the business capabilities and the technological capabilities.

Today’s increasing connectivity creates cyber risks at personal, organizational up to societal level. Societal cyber risks require mitigation by all kinds of actors where government should take the lead due to its responsibility to protect its citizens. Since no formal global governance exists, the governmental responsibility should start at the national level of every country. To achieve successful management of global cyber risks, appropriate alignment between these sovereignly developed strategies is required, which concerns a complex challenge. To create alignment, getting insight into differences between national cyber strategies, is the first step. This, in turn, requires an appropriate analysis approach that helps to identify the key differences. In this article, we introduce such an analysis approach based on social contract theory. The resulting analysis model consists of both a direct and an indirect type of social cyber contract between governments, citizens and corporations, within and between sovereign nations. To show its effectiveness, the proposed social cyber contract model is validated through an illustrated case examining various constitutional rights to privacy, their embedding in the national cyber strategies and how their differences could cause potential barriers for alignment across sovereignties.

During the last years e-governance is being implemented in many countries. Within the same country, the level of achieved results can vary significantly between sectors. The implementation of e-governance in Republic of Moldova has had a good start, but some stagnation in the implementation of the e-governance agenda is registered. In the educational sector, the implementation is still at the low level. This practical paper surveys the e-tools in the educational sector of the Republic of Moldova, thus revealing the e-governance level of the sector. By comparing with the usage of IT tools in the Swedish educational system, and identifying the benefits and issues met during their development, it proposes a way for future implementation of the e-governance agenda in the educational sector in Moldova. While Moldova as a country has extensive Internet coverage, Sweden was choose for the comparison because of its Internet coverage plus its focus on furthering the skills of its workforce and also the considerable efforts of e-governance agenda implementation.

In this paper, we examine the policy documents that define the Norwegian policies on language use in the public sector, with an emphasis on how ICT is mentioned as a tool for creating a public sector language citizens find easy to understand. Norway and other countries have had a series of projects aimed at making the public sector use plain language in their communication with citizens. We present two example cases of successful plain language use and one less successful case, and discuss these cases using the lens of new institutional theory. We argue that the institutional context of change and user-centricity have had a major impact on the success of our example cases.

The challenge of providing the infrastructure of public services in the less developed regions of Brazil has mobilized the Brazilian government in the quest for new and creative approaches that can reduce the major inter-regional disparities in the country. One of the initiatives implemented include access to the financial system, since, by way of example, such access is almost non-existent on Marajó Island in the state of Pará in the Brazilian Amazon. To change this reality, an innovative e-government project is the itinerant bank branch installed in a boat, named Agência Barco, to serve the riverine populations of regions with low population density, transportation difficulties and limitations in access to information and communication technology (ICT). Thus, the main objective of this research is to identify how the financial inclusion indicators have been influenced by the work of Agência Barco on Marajó Island from the ICT standpoint. The results obtained led to the conclusion that Agência Barco has been able to attend the needs of access to financial products and services demanded by the population of Marajó Island, as well as identify opportunities for broadening financial education and inclusion through this e-government venture.

The blockchain technology, including Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, has been adopted in many application areas during recent years. However, the main attention has been on the currency and not so much on the underlying blockchain technology, including peer-to-peer networking, security and consensus mechanisms. This paper argues that we need to look beyond the currency applications and investigate the potential use of the blockchain technology in governmental tasks such as digital ID management and secure document handling. The paper discusses the use of blockchain technology as a platform for various applications in e-Government and furthermore as an emerging support infrastructure by showing that blockchain technology demonstrates a potential for authenticating many types of persistent documents.

Advanced architectures for business-to-government (B2G) information sharing can benefit both businesses and government. An essential choice in the design of such an architecture is whether information is shared using a thick or a thin information flow. In an architecture with a thick flow, all information is shared via a shared infrastructure, whereas only metadata and pointers referring to the information are shared via the shared infrastructure in a thin flow architecture. These pointers can then be used by parties to access the information directly. Yet, little is known about what their implications for design choices are. Design choices are influenced by the properties of the architecture as well as the situation in which B2G information sharing takes place. In this paper, we identify the properties of architectures with a thin and thick flow. Next, we determine what this implies for the suitability of the architectures in different situations. We will base our analysis on the case of the Shipping Information Pipeline (SIP) for container transport. While both architectures have their pros and cons, we found that architectures with a thin flow are more suitable when non-standardized, and flexible sharing of sensitive information is required. In contrast, we found that architectures with a thick flow are more suitable when in-depth integration is required.

Digital infrastructures (DI) that support information exchange related to international trade processes (here referred to as Digital Trade Infrastructures (DTI)) have been seen as an instrument to help address the trade facilitation and security challenges. Data pipelines can be seen as an example of a DTI. Data pipelines are IT innovations that enable the timely provision of data captured at the source from different information systems available in the supply chain. Using the pipeline companies can share information with authorities and enjoy trade facilitation in return. The benefits of such data pipelines have been showcased in demonstrator settings. However, outside the controlled environment of demonstrator installations, the adoption and growth of these DTIs has been limited. The benefits based on purely implementing the data pipeline are limited. Combining data pipeline capability with Coordinated Border Management (CBM) has potential to articulate more clear benefits for stakeholders and push further investments and wider adoption. In this paper based on the FloraHolland trade lane related to exporting flowers from Kenya to the Netherlands we discuss a data pipeline/CBM innovation. Through the conceptual lens of DI (examining architectural, process and governance dimensions) we demonstrate the potential benefits of data pipeline/CBM innovation and the complex alignment processes between business and government actors needed for the further adoption. From a theoretical point of view we enhance the understanding regarding the governance dimension of such data pipeline/CBM innovations by identifying four type of alignments processes involving businesses and government actors nationally and internationally. As such the paper contributes to the body of research on DI and more specifically DTI. Form a point of view of practice, the insights from our analysis can be used to better understand other data pipeline/CBM innovation alignment processes in other domains as well.

Demographic, economic, social and other datasets are often used in policy-making processes. These types of statistical data are opened more and more by governments, which enables the use of these datasets by the public. However, statistical data needs often to combine different datasets. Data cubes can be used to combine datasets and are a multi-dimensional array of values typically used to describe time series of geographical areas. While Linked Open Statistical Data (LOSD) cube software is still in an initial stage of maturity, there is a need for evaluation the software platforms used to process this open data. Yet there is a lack of evaluation methods. The objective of this ongoing research paper is to identify functional requirements for open data cubes infrastructures. Eight main processes are identified and a list of 23 functional requirements are used to evaluate the OpenCube platform. The evaluation results of a LOSD platform show that many functions are not automated and need to be manually executed. We recommend the further integration of the building blocks in the platform to reduce the barriers for the use of datasets by the public.

Governments are creating and maintaining increasing amounts of data, and, recently, releasing data as open government data. As the amount of data available increases, so too should the exploitation of this data. However, this potential currently seems to be unexploited. Since exploiting open government data has the potential to create new public value, the absence of this exploitation is something that should be explored. It is therefore timely to investigate how the potential of existing datasets could be unleashed to provide services that create public value. For this purpose, we conducted a literature study and an empirical survey of the relevant drivers, barriers and gaps. Based on the results, we propose a framework that addresses some of the key challenges and puts forward an agile co-production process to support effective data-driven service creation. The proposed framework incorporates elements from agile development, lean startups, co-creation, and open government data literature and aims to increase our understanding on how open government data may be able to drive public service co-creation.

In the public sector, big data holds many promises for improving policy outcomes in terms of service delivery and decision-making and is starting to gain increased attention by governments. Cities are collecting large amounts of data from traditional sources such as registries and surveys and from non-traditional sources such as the Internet of Things, and are considered an important field of experimentation to generate public value with big data. The establishment of a city data infrastructure can drive such a development. This paper describes two key challenges for such an infrastructure: platform federation and data quality, and how these challenges are addressed in the ongoing research project CPaaS.io.

Since its inception, open government data (OGD) as a free re-useable object has attracted the interest of researchers and practitioners, civil servants, citizens and businesses for different reasons in each target group. This study was designed to aggregate the research outcomes and developments through the recent years towards illustrating the evolutionary path of OGD portals, by presenting an analysis of their characteristics in terms of a maturity model. A four-step methodology has been followed in order to analyse the literature and construct the maturity model. The results point out the two greater dimensions of OGD portals, naming traditional and advanced evolving within three generations. The developed maturity model will guide policy makers by firstly identify the current level of their organisation and secondly design an efficient implementation to the required state.

Analysis of the U.S. government response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 remind us that inter-governmental and intra-governmental communication plays an important role in effective response to disaster. Hurricane Katrina highlighted the lack of information sharing across levels of government and sectors and showed that such gaps in sharing contribute to slower and uncoordinated response and insufficient deployment of resources. The response to Hurricane Sandy was much more effective because of the lessons learned from Katrina about cross-boundary information sharing but problems still existed. The conclusion that more complex and severe incidents require more coordination and information sharing across levels of government and functional agencies makes it increasingly important to increase information sharing capability as part of EM. This paper presents the argument that the unique and important opportunity of leveraging OGD in this regard requires continued attention and investment in ways that maximize value in the form of more effective and efficient emergency response efforts.

In this paper, we discuss the topic of governmental transparency, and more specifically in relation to Open Data. We look at governmental transparency in terms of channels, benefits, context, directions, etc., and we argue that there is an emergence of new intermediaries in the domain of governmental transparency, made possible mainly through information and communication technology. We then use the concept of public utility to integrate transparency and open data in a larger governmental perspective and we give a few examples of the use of open data to that effect. We propose an approach to support proactive transparency based on Open Data, based on a “lens” to be used to analyse transparency and open data in given contexts.

E-government is a strong focus in many developing countries. While services can technically benefit from solutions developed elsewhere, organizational development and user trust and acceptance are always local. In Least Developed Countries (LDCs) such issues become more dramatic as services are transformed quickly from traditional manual procedures to digitized ones copying models from developed countries. One of the most critical trust issues is privacy protection; e-government services must be developed in balance with citizens’ privacy views.To understand how to design trusted services in an LDC this study investigates information privacy concerns, perceptions of privacy practices, trust beliefs and behavior intentions towards using e-government services in Rwanda. The study was conducted by means of a survey (n = 540).A majority of the respondents had a considerable level of trust, and a positive view of the effectiveness of service providers’ privacy practices. Most respondents expressed positive intentions towards using e-government services. Still, a majority of the respondents expressed considerable privacy concerns. Men were more concerned than women and reported a higher reluctance to use e-government service. As this study is one of the few studies of privacy, trust and adoption of e-government in LDC, it contributes to broadening the context in which such issues have been researched.

Taking a closer look at current research on e-government diffusion shows that most studies or conceptual works deal with citizens as one broad mass that is not further described or divided into smaller subgroups. Such efforts are mainly limited to the digital divide discourse and distinguish at most between haves and have-nots or younger and older parts of the population. Understanding why and how citizens use public online services also requires an understanding of how different segments of the population react to IT in general as well as to e-government in particular. To date, no meaningful attempts to develop such an e-government user typology have been undertaken. Therefore, the study at hand aims at developing a user typology for the e-government context. To this end, we chose an explorative design and conducted a qualitative interview study in Germany in 2016 with 18 respondents from all age groups. We qualitatively analyzed the sample regarding usage behavior, variety of use, and e-government specific uses and perceptions. Our research reveals six user types differing in quality and quantity of use with regard to internet-based technologies in general and e-government services in particular. Understanding how different populations perceive e-government and contextualizing their behavior can help explaining why some citizens are making advanced use of e-government while others widely ignore these services.

Electronic government, or e-Government, is the use of information and communication technology in the public sector. As a research field, it is characterized as multi-disciplinary with heritage from both the information systems and public administration fields. This diverse background may be beneficial, but it may also result in a fragmented theoretical base and conceptual vagueness. This paper applies decision theory to e-Government to tie a number of theoretical and practical concepts together. In particular, five concepts from decision theory (i.e. objectives, stakeholder inclusion, weighting and resource allocation, risk analysis, and outcomes assessment) are compared with counterparts in e-Government. The findings have both theoretical and practical implications. First, they add to and unite e-Government theory. Second, practical methods for operationalizing the theoretical concepts are proposed. This operationalization includes using a holistic approach to e-participation throughout decision processes.

The evaluation of systems or artifacts as “outcomes” of software engineering (SE) projects has been a focus of study in SE-related research for quite some time. In recent years, evaluating artifacts, for example, mobile applications or websites has become more important, since such artifacts play increasingly critical roles in generating revenues for businesses, and the degree of artifact effectiveness is seen as a competitive factor. With the TEDS framework/procedure a novel and comprehensive approach to systematic artifact evaluation and comparison had been presented a few years ago, whose effectiveness and analytical power in comprehensive and highly detailed artifact evaluations and comparisons was empirically shown; however, despite its demonstrated capability TEDS still proved to be time and resource consuming like other evaluation approaches before. In order to overcome these constraints and provide evaluative feedback more quickly to developers and service providers, TEDSrate, a Web-based evaluation tool employing the TEDS framework/procedure, was developed. The tool was tested with two real-world organizations, the City of Seattle Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and the Seattle Sounders Football Club. The tests suggest that the highly configurable TEDSrate tool can fully implement and administer the TEDS framework/procedure and, at the same time, provide instantaneous, cost-effective, comprehensive, and highly detailed artifact evaluations to both developers and service providers.

Understanding public value creation through electronic services is a complex and important research problem. Recent attempts to understand electronic services value from the citizen perspective suggest that dividing service delivery in several stages could be a valuable approach to understand ways in which information technologies support value creation when providing electronic services. Therefore, we propose the use of this process model as a tool to analyze and define public value creation through electronic services. We show the potential value of the model using birth certificate requests as a hypothetical example. We conclude the paper by describing how we are applying the model to our current research.

The paper explores the patterns and factors of e-governance development in ineffective institutional settings. Although it is assumed that most of e-projects in such countries failed, we argue that in some contexts such initiatives can survive in the hostile environment and achieve relatively positive results, leading to limited institutional changes. We adapt the pockets of effectiveness framework in order to analyze the Our Petersburg portal (St. Petersburg, Russia). Our findings suggest that such electronic “pockets” may emerge as a deliberate policy of the political elite in an attempt to make institutions work properly. The key factors of such projects’ success relate to agency, namely the political patronage and control, policy entrepreneurship, as well as organization autonomy and the power of the initiative.

The following paper presents the results of the outcome evaluation of StartBiz; an online tool for start-ups in Switzerland. StartBiz is provided by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) and allows start-ups to enroll with trade registers, VAT, social insurances and accident insurances without any additional fees directly via the internet. The outcome evaluation was required to learn about generated benefits for start-up companies that have used StartBiz so far. At the same time, the evaluation was aimed at providing decision-makers in the SECO with strategic information for their future e-governmental activities (esp. planned expansion of StartBiz to an electronic One-Stop-Shop for small and medium sized enterprises). The paper contributes to the debate of evaluating e-governmental activities by emphasizing an outcome orientation based on the assessment of quantitative benefits. It underlines the advantages but also the disadvantages of such a focus for future outcome evaluations in the field.

This article shows the results obtained with a model to assess the digital maturity of a government at country level. The model is based on maturity model concepts with focus on the digital strategy of the country. The application of the model to public agencies shows the weaknesses of the digital strategy that should be improved as country, but more interesting is the correlation that exists between the ICT investment in a public agency and its maturity.