Electronic Government

In common understanding, Electronic Government focuses upon relatively simple transactions between identifiable customers (citizens, enterprises), on one side, and a multitude of government organisations in charge of particular activities, on the other. Attention is chiefly directed to Electronic Service Delivery. If the promise of e-Government as the principal key to modernising government is to be kept, this concept has to be broadened so as to include the full enabling potential of IT, as well as the complex reality of government and public governance. There is encouraging political support for e-Government, yet implementation problems could inhibit further success.

In the Netherlands, the development of integrated public service delivery has been an important topic for over a decade. Despite the investments, the results are meager. In the literature, an overwhelming and contradictory amount of conceivable problems is mentioned that can explain these lagging results. Four case studies were carried out to find out which of these problems are most pressing in the particular context of integrated public service delivery. These are found to be: (1) indistinct and subdivided responsibilities, (2) focus on the autonomy of the own organization, and (3) insufficient scale. Given these problems, and given their different importance in the four cases, it is argued that the effective development of integrated public service delivery in the Netherlands requires more centralization.

European neighbors wondered at Germanys relatively slow start into Electronic Government. With a certain anxiety they had looked at this nation of eighty millions with its five million of public employees — the level of entire countries like Norway, Finland or Denmark. Consequently Europe was not surprised that Germany in 1997 took over a pole position presenting the first law on digital signature, an important element for Electronic Government purposes. But it turned out that this early law meant only a pre-dawn. It turned out that Germany — as it is undoubtedly big — needed much time and energy to get itself in motion. The presumed “giant” evolved to be a specter of mostly isolated actions and projects. Since two years — beginning with a memorandum on Electronic Government triggered by the two major IT associations — there are more and more actors striving for joint action. German Federal Government set up the program “BundOnline2005” putting comprehensive targets and respectable money into the necessary transformation of government processes, aiming at — as Chancellor Schroeder stated — “not citizens but data have to run”. A public-private initiative “D21” is backing jointly strategies. Germany now appears to reach necessary pace to play the expected visionary role as well as to overcome the obstacles every innovative infrastructure at the beginning is confronted with.

The overall objective of this network of excellence is to train the BRAINCHILD change masters, champions and activists (called “Chief Knowledge Officers) in knowledge management for local administrations,. Applying the action learning method for a C.K.O. Graduate Course, a pilot group of C.K.O.’s will develop at the same time the strategic roadmaps for future applied research in Public Admin e-Work & Next Generation KM Systems. After validation the C.K.O. Graduate Course will be offered on a large European scale to the members of the founding BRAINCHILD networks (Telecities & Elanet) of advanced local authorities. The course will have official accreditation, from ecKM - Groupe ESC Marseille Provence and other participating academic institutes.

Dutch central government has, like many other governments, set high aims to offer government services on line. In 2002 about 25% of all services should be online. Because over 60% of all government services are provided by local governments, the challenge is to help these relatively less powerful local government organizations to realise this ambition. Local governments have to operate in an environment where investing in e-government is not evident. To overcome the problems they encounter in improving (online) government services new forms for organizing the service delivery emerge. This paper explores the problems local governments encounter in improving their transactional (online) service delivery and investigates the organizational solutions that arise to overcome these problems. The central question will be to what extent the new organizational forms contribute to the central government aims to realise the high e-government ambitions.

Ongoing modernization of the public sector, gray-zone/ semi-public organizations, and virtual/ teleworking/ Internet use are among the organizational features that need consideration for reorganizing the work processes using information systems. Although politics is not to be ignored, organizational and institutional changes alter the face of the public sector and pave the road for what we call Public Sector Process Rebuilding (PPR).

e-citizenship is used as a term for participation of citizens in e-technologies. This includes all levels of e-government as well as e-commerce. However, e-government and e-commerce exhibit quite different characteristics. Whereas e-commerce has the clear target to intensify usage and turnover, e-government seeks its goals in availability and comfort not in augmented frequency. This paper discusses some aspects resulting from these facts using the Austrian approach as a model.

The discussion on electronic voting has so far mostly focused on technical issues, mainly concerning security and privacy. This paper reports an empirical study on how the symbolic values of democracy, as manifested in the act of voting, are considered by e-voters. The study found that the voters in a student election in actions as well as in stated views gave priority to convenience over security and privacy. They voted electronically from home despite uncertainty about the security of the technical system. We argue that this is an indication that the view of the principles of democratic practices will change, and that what might be called an “e-practices mode of thinking” will to some extent prevail over a “rigid democracy mode”.

A new technological standard, called ‘Web services’ has recently made its first appearance in the Web technologies arena. Our question here is: what is the role of Web services for eGovernment? In the present contribution, the concept of ‘political value chain’ is introduced and the process of value reconfiguration is illustrated, evidencing one of the potential roles of IT on administrative activities: the facilitation of ‘citizen value’ creation activities connection. A brief illustration of the Web services technology is then given, finally exploring its potential for e-Government activities and the related research issues.

Information and Communication Technology (IT) is one of the most magic forces. It heavily affects people’s daily life, learning and work, even the working style of the government in civil society. IT will make sure that each individual in the society can common share other’s knowledge and ideas. By means of IT, people can collaborate with each other without limitation of time difference and geographic location. It will help people to exploit their potential and accelerate the development of the society. Also IT can bring large challenges, such as innovation, productivity and efficiency, in front of enterprises, firms and government. They will face the competition not only in the special local area, but also all over the world.

The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration conducts a research program Program for an Ontology-based Working Environment for Rules and regulations (POWER). In this research program that was started in 1999 and is sponsored by the European Commission (E-POWER) since September 2001 an ICT-based methodology has been developed that enables the formalization of legal sources and finally the design of legal knowledge-based systems. The fullscale POWER-method however although much less time consuming than normal software design methodologies is still too elaborate especially if we want to apply this method in legal drafting or policy making processes. We therefore created the POWER-light version, a variant of the POWER-method that helps to improve legal quality and can be used with relatively little effort and in short time. Although the POWER-light version lacks many of the advantages of the regular POWER-method (e.g. its verification, simulation and knowledge-based component generation abilities) it offers a first step. The POWER-light approach offers the tools to get the best possible legal quality given the time restrictions.

The potentials of the information and communication technology become more and more important for the optimization and support of the administrational work processes. The Saarland state government sets a special focus on the usage of the new technologies within the public administration and attaches value to it in the context of a global E-business strategy.The presented document gives a short overview on the implementation of an intranet as a platform for ministerial comprehensive communication.

The present paper presents some trends in educational activities for central and local government in France. It describes briefly the main characteristics of a brokerage platform used to import and export digitalized educational materials while protecting intellectual property rights.

This paper addresses the issue of long-term preservation of and access to digital government information. We show how the preservation process is enhanced by storing an infrastructure-independent representation of the raw data, together with a model dependency graph (an executable graph of database view mappings). This allows for the design of decision-support tools and services for improving government transparency and promoting citizen access to eGOV data. A case-study, the Florida Ballots Project, is used to illustrate the approach.

Effective e-government requires cultural change, the incorporation of inter-organizational teams, identification and evaluation of knowledge management assets, and incorporation of facilitating information and communication technologies. Government services must harness this range of information resources. Several governments in the Caribbean have recognized the importance of consolidating and exploiting their dispersed knowledge resources. The objectives of e-government are being analysed with a view to determining the most appropriate means of delivering services via electronic means. The paper examines particularly communication with citizens over the Internet, the delivery of Internet based government information, and aids to the citizenry in using these new facilities. Telecentres located in libraries and community centres, in Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean, demonstrate the early development of facilities for enhancing government communication with citizens over the Internet, and interaction between citizens and those providing services

In this paper we present the technical approach followed in the InfoCitizen project. Its novel approximation to Public Administration necessities lies in the combination of Web Services as providers and Intelligent Agents as consumers of public services. The distributed nature of a Web Service network requires a similarly distributed architecture, that in turn requires an assurance of availability and transparency achieved with the use of Intelligent Agents.

A survey was conducted on behalf of e-Forum among 150 high ranking officials involved in e-government development in all 15 European Union countries. The results provide a unique pan-European examination of perceptions of officials driving the process of shifting towards what is generally referred to as ‘e-government’. Issues covered in the survey include authentication techniques, financing e-government investments, benefits and fears among citizens, businesses, administrations and government, barriers and facilitators, priorities within the adminstrations.

In this paper we show the methodology we used to build a prototype for One-stop Government. We started by defining ten simple use cases, and then we developed scenarios, business rules and sequence diagrams for each of them. This work was based on a conceptual model for One-stop Government we developed in a previous research. We also explain why the use cases and the scenarios proved very helpful for the conception and the development of the prototype. Last we show the software architecture, based on distributed components, and the operation of the prototype with a few examples.

This paper reports on the requirements analysis for one-stop government. It is focused on the work that was done in the analysis phase of the eGOV project — an EU project with the goal to develop an integrated platform for realizing online one-stop government — which is presented as a case study. Different types and sources of requirements are described. Furthermore the user-survey for the eGOV project is dealt. The paper concludes with some of the insights gained from the requirements analysis.

Aiming to provide a platform for collaboration across agencies and to design appropriate IT support for the variety of administrative processes and decision making, concepts need to go beyond current approaches in business process modelling as well as workflow and record management. Drawing on these approaches, we suggest to focus on the unique tasks and activities of each actor involved and to present the relation of each individual contribution to the overall process as something tangible in order to support flexibility in the execution of administrative processes.

Practical examples of the public administration are discussed, in order to show the fact that business process management does not only serve the purposeful reorganization of administrative expirations but transports at the same time processes of organizational learning in the sense of Governance. Under the signs of e-Government there are above all the capability to cooperate and to act under on-line conditions, which must be learned by coworkers and administrative organizations. It is reported on a Virtual Community, which is used as instrument both for the business process management and for e- Governance.

This paper presents a proposal for an XML Standard for legal sources in the Netherlands. The standard intends to provide a generic and easily extensible framework for the XML encoding of the structure and contents of legal and paralegal documents. It differs from other existing metadata schemes for legal documents in two respects; It is language-independent and it aims to accommodate uses of XML beyond search and presentation services.

The development of e-government in the Netherlands shows two different worlds. The large national organisations implement Electronic Service Delivery (ESD) fairly successfully, while municipalities are slow to adopt ESD. This is a pity, since municipalities account for over 70% of the public services. They are expected to implement ESD on their own although they lack the necessary resources and distributed development is inefficient. In this paper we address the role of municipalities in the real and virtual world and argue that development of electronic (local) public services may be organized on a larger scale, depending on the type of service in question.

Administration 2000 is the first solution that combines legacy applications of different local administrations in order to offer a One-Stop Shop solution to citizens and private enterprises. The solution uses the Internet technology for a high secure and modern Intranet application and will be extend to a real Internet application later. The solution follows consequently the so called life event approach and also integrates services from private companies that belong to the specific life events. Besides the implementation of new technology the solution requires a paradigm within the public administrations and its business processes. In most cases the solution requires new contracts among the participating administrations and can lead to a change of the respective laws that define responsibility and process of the services.

The largest multimedia project of the national government— MEDIA@Komm—has now run for almost two years. Over the course of time, the model municipalities and other German local communities have gained experience with the design of legally binding on-line transactions and the use of electronic signatures, and they have made progress with virtual town halls and the e-government project. The following article shows the results achieved in the MEDIA@Komm municipalities and considers the experience, obstacles and unsolved problems which have arisen in designing business processes without discontinuity of media in many German towns and cities. Also, as an important result of the accompanying research on MEDIA@Komm, it describes the central factors for success in the creation of virtual town halls.

This paper reports a case study of Knowsley Metropolitan Borough’s response to the UK Government’s White Paper ‘Modernising government’ [1]. It provides unique data on user behaviour in relation to electronic public service delivery through public access kiosks and highlights some of the issues relating to the ‘digital divide’, the reduction of social exclusion. It offers a perspective on the uses for which customers perceive public access kiosks to be valuable and indicates barriers to kiosk use for other functions. Some of the messages reflect issues that have been debated in consumer responses to e-commerce and communication over the Internet. This is important because it suggests some consistency in the public reaction to IT-based service delivery, irrespective of the platform.

In this paper we shall present the results of the change management in the European research project FASME (Facilitating Administrative Services for Mobile Europeans). First we shall compare the original objectives as they had been described in the Technical Annex with the achieved results. Second we shall highlight those issues of change, which were responsible for the success of the project. Only after the prototypical development of a product was abandoned and replaced by basic research on holistic solutions for interstate e-government, the already achieved progress became visible to the participants and a true interdisciplinary co-operation emerged. Concluding from this experience, we shall draw some conclusions for future e-government projects.

The reform impulse, which in the last years characterised the Public Administration of all the word, underlines the necessity to join legislative changes with process and change management. In more recent years, the attention to process oriented change management techniques has also emerged in the public sector, through attempts to draw from private sector, searching for new methodologies and managerial approaches that could satisfy the need of organisational innovation. The article aims to present a successful case related to the application of an e-government experience in Italy in a local context: the development of a centralised desk for issuing building permits, grouping twenty-two villages in north-eastern. This experience represents a best practice which could be transferred in many other context.

In the past few years the establishment of e-government has been given numerous new impulses. Totally new horizons have been opened both on the level of information and communication technologies, especially by the Internet, and on the level of administrative processes by new methods and tools applied in process design. But nevertheless especially e-government is faced with much more difficulties and opposition in its implementation than its counterpart in business, namely e-business, which in turn meets difficulties that are anything but small. E-government looks back upon more than 40 years of history [[1],[2],[3],[4]], and the recipes for success that have been presented are often older than the people who today are in charge of implementing them. The present article tries to show that in approaches to e-government that are merely limited to the technological and the administrative process level many immanent fields of tensions remain unconsidered.

The vCRM is one of the eGovernment applications, which was awarded by the European Commission’s eGovernance Competition 2001. [1 eGovernment] It is the only workflow application within the Vienna City Administration, which handles tasks administration wide and not like the standard procedures within a department. It deals with all comments, complaints, requests, which are not routine eGovernment processes and have a specific legally defined procedure. It deals not with requests that are designated to a specific department. One main advantage of this procedure is, that the officer in charge may easily adjust the workflow according to the specific need of the case. It is one of the finalists of the Global Awards for Excellence in Workflow [2 WARIA 2002]

The present work is about the first results of SOSECO, a publicprivate company operating in the southeast of Italy, created by Servizi Locali SpA and the Municipality of Castrignano, in cooperation with the University of Lecce (Engineering School and Law School). The goal of SOSECO is to improve the management of local taxes and to enhance the relationship between Citizens and Public Administration.

The E-MuniS (Electronic Municipal Information Services — Best Practice Transfer and Improvement) Project aims to improve the best practices of the European Union municipalities regarding the use of information technology in municipal administration working processes and services to citizens and to transfer those results to South-Eastern European municipalities in particular from the Balkan region thus integrating it to the EU municipal network. The project consortium involves as participants couples of local municipality—IT-company partnerships from EU countries and from South East European countries. Within the project solutions for an e-municipality office (as back-office system) and prototypes of e-services to citizens and business (as front-office system) will be developed and implemented.

e-Government (e-G) raises specific technical, and also managerial problems. The managerial ones are particularly important for the transforming socio-economic systems. Recent experience of Romania in this field is shortly presented. Key managerial requirements are derived from the e-G business requirements. The proposal of orienting the back-office reengineering implied by e-G also on enforcing virtuous societal closed circuits and minimizing vicious ones is formulated.

Interaction of citizens and private organizations with Public Administrations can produce meaningful benefits in the accessibility, efficiency and availability of documents, regardless of time, location and quantity. Although there are some experiences in the field of e-government there are still some technological and legal difficulties that avoid a higher rate of communications with Public Administrations through Internet, not only from citizens, but also from private companies. We have studied two of the technological problems, the need to work in a trustful environment and the creation of tools to manage electronic versions of the paper-based forms.

The current process to deal with disaster mitigation has a number of drawbacks that can be solved using web technology. The basic problem is that there is a unidirectional and asynchronous flow of information among the different agents involved in a disaster mitigation procedure. This situation often results in a lack of coordination in the resources provision and in a useless assistance. In this paper we introduce ARCE, a web based system envisaged to cope with the lack of synchronism among assistance requests and responses in a multinational environment as the Latin-American Association of Governmental Organisms of Civil Defence and Protection is. ARCE makes uses of role-based access policies (RBAC) and information flow mechanisms to offer an efficient and reliable communication channel.

The paper is composed by two parts. The objective of the first part is to define a new approach to the innovation process in the Public Administration. In fact, in more recent years, the attention to process oriented change management techniques has also emerged in the public sector, through attempts to draw from private sector, searching for new methodologies and managerial approaches that can satisfy the need of organisational innovation. KIWI project analyses these techniques in one of the public management processes, the Knowledge Management. The second part of the paper is more related to the new IST tools that should be used to improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of non-profit organisations. In particular, the project aims at developing innovative, user-relevant, wireless technologies which make the relationship between PA and citizens easier.

E-Government can be defined as “carrying out government business transactions electronically”. One aspect of e-government are online law documentation systems. In the Austrian Federal Dataprocessing Center (Bundesrechenzentrum), we have two online law documentation applications under development and support: Electronic custom-law documentation system (EZD) and electronic tax-law documentation system (ESED). EZD has been running since 1995, ESED is currently in a prototype state. The customer of both systems is the IT-section of the ministry of finance. These two applications have been developed especially for the use in the administration and are available for the staff in the Austrian government intranet. In the concrete paper, we will discuss technical and organisational aspects of the online tax-law documentation system ESED which in the first step will be used in the tax department of the ministry. The ministry of finance is responsible for ESED project management. Bundesrechenzentrum is responsible for the technical realisation of ESED.

E-voting is not the same as e-democracy it is however a tool with the potential to help distribute rights in the voting process. The process may well prove to be a new ‘killer application’ for the Internet and a suitable authentication tool for voting security. A previous model outlined by the authors based on the use of voting smart cards and the Internet is expanded detailing concerns at the operational level and providing alternative solutions for security and the rigors required for voting scrutiny.

At first, important features of the current situation of citizens’ participation in political procedures such as reasons for political apathy, political reactions with new ways of direct participation and the increase of communication- based means of participation are summarized. In the second part, “information”, “consultation” and “active participation” are described as main components of non-organized citizen communication which must be embedded into users’ and administrations’ environment not only technically, but also economically, legally, organisationally, motivationally, and politically. Two case studies illustrate opportunities given by online-participation and underline the requirements to use online participation as a supplement, not as a replacement of traditional participation and to combine the advantages of various online and offline ways of citizens’ involvement in a multi-channel approach.

The idea of deliberative democracy is to facilitate broad and deep public participation in systematic, constructive discourses about legislation and policy issues, so as to enhance the legitimacy, efficiency, quality, acceptability and accountability of the political process. By discourse support systems we mean groupware designed to support structured, goal-directed discourses. The paper discusses the importance of discourse support systems for deliberative democracy, provides a brief overview of the Open Source Zeno system and mentions several e-democracy pilot applications of Zeno, including the DEMOS project of the European Union.

Reflecting on the European Commissions stated aim to broaden democracy this paper examines the nature of e-participation and considers concepts of democracy and issues surrounding citizen participation in pubic affairs. The paper describes how citizens are engaging with government and with each other about policy related issues that concern them, using technology specially designed for the purpose. The paper describes a case study of electronic participation developed for the Environment Group of the Scottish Executive in Summer 2001. Using the empirical data from this study the paper explores best practice guidelines for governments who wish to engage citizens in policymaking. The difficult task of addressing the requirements of all stakeholders, i.e. government, civil society organizations (CSOs) and citizens in designing the technology is discussed. The use and moderation of the electronic tools over the engagement period is assessed. Finally, the paper considers how the use of electronic tools can be monitored and their impact on citizen participation and the decision-making of government be assessed.

The right of citizens to high-quality e-Government services makes one-stop service offerings an essential feature for e-Government. Offering onestop services presents many operational implications; an one-stop service provision (OSP) architecture is needed that, by means of a layered approach, provides facilities to refer to, invoke and combine e-Government services in a uniform way, in the context of cross-organisational workflows. Although enabling technologies for all the layers of such an architecture are quickly evolving (XML, WSDL, UDDI, WFMS et al) two major issues that need to be solved are (a) abstracting the heterogeneity of the e-Government services that need to be integrated and (b) identifying an appropriate style for cross-organisational workflow control, somewhere in between the fully centralised and peer-to-peer extremes. This paper presents an abstract layered OSP architecture, identifies some major enabling technologies and briefly discusses those two issues.

In November 1999, the Regione Emilia-Romagna administration (RER) launched the Regional Telematic Plan (RTP), an initiative to increase the awareness of ICT at the different levels of the public sector, to foster their utilization and to allow better services for the small and medium sized enterprises and the citizens. The lead purpose of RTP is to increase the economic competitiveness of the regional enterprises having better served and ICT conscious citizens. We present the main findings after two years of experience.

Although form-based services are fundamental to e-government activities, their widespread does neither meet the citizen’s expectations, nor the offered technological potential. The main reason for this lag is that traditional software engineering approaches cannot satisfactorily handle all of electronic services lifecycle aspects. In this paper we present experiences from the Greek Ministry of Finance’s e-services lifecycle, and propose a new approach for handling e-service projects. The proposed approach has been used successfully for extending existing services, as well as developing new ones.

Recent experiments shows that internet voting is not the political blessing that lots of politicians had hoped it would be to solve the non-ending legitimation crisis modern societies are going through. Our article focuses on four questions about internet voting to stress some experimental results and important remaining questions. We would like to insist on the lack of studies trying to apprehend how people trust these new electronic voting systems and how do they cope with the end of the voting rituals.

In this short paper we describe the architectural concept of a Citizen Digital Assistant (CDA) and preliminary results of our implementation. A CDA is a mobile user device, similar to a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). It supports the citizen when dealing with public authorities and proves his rights— if desired, even without revealing his identity. Requirements for secure and trusted interactions in e-Government solutions are presented and shortcomings of state of the art digital ID cards are considered. The Citizen Digital Assistant eliminates these shortcomings and enables a citizen-controlled communication providing the secure management of digital documents, identities, and credentials.

This paper briefly describes functionality and customisation support of the system called WEBOCRAT, which is being developed within the EUfunded project Webocracy (IST-1999-20364 “Web Technologies Supporting Direct Participation in democratic Processes”). The WEBOCRAT system represents a rich set of communication supporting tools that will bring public administration closer to citizens, making it more accessible and more accountable.

The AIDA Consortium has a clear structure based on the objectives of the project. It includes: •one leader in internet security: INFONOVA•one big hardware equipment manufacturer: HP•two universities: Politecnico di Torino working on the application side and Technical University of Graz, working in cryptography and software research•An innovative telecommunication-applications company with great know how in market access: I&T•Four organizations willing to support the design process and to implement and validate the services and technologies. Euro Info Correspondence Center Ljubliana, Ministry of economic affairs of Slovenia, Mestna Obcina Celje,

This paper reports on some of the recently completed work of the EU-supported Prisma project examining the best of e-government experience across Europe in relation to technology, organisational change and meeting the needs of the user (citizens and business). Future work of Prisma involves developing scenarios of change over the next ten years, building future-oriented best practice models and providing comprehensible and useful tools for practitioners and researchers to guide their decision making and research priorities respectively. Apart from examining e-government and e-governance generally, Prisma is also examining six service areas in detail: administrations, health, persons with special needs (the disabled and elderly), environment, transport and tourism.

CITATION is an innovative software platform designed to facilitate access to administrative information sources by providing effective information structure, indexing and retrieval. CITATION improves electronic government services, ensuring that citizens have easy and direct access to essential public data and promoting online interaction between citizens and government. It targets the improvement of administration services offered by governments and therefore the creation of “smart” and flexible government structures that will be able to provide their citizens with precise and personalised information.

The introduction of information society technologies (IST) in administrative processes poses a range of problems of technical, legal and human nature, that need to be properly addressed for the evolution to be successful. Some of these problems (and a few solutions) are reviewed in the scope of replacing paper-based traffic tickets by smart cards.

The Visual Admin project aims at creating an eGovernment solution that makes easier for citizens and businesses to interact with administration. Considering administration activities from the perspectives of both “customers” (citizens and businesses) and administrations, Visual Admin intends to provide citizens and businesses with an global online view on information relevant to them. It also intends to organise the flow of information between administration services for handling customers’ cases, and to act as a portal for getting access to relevant online information services. The current paper focuses on the requirements identified in the early months of the Project and presents the rationale of the platform under development.

The European Commission launched the eEurope initiative on 8th December 1999 with the adoption of the Communication ‘eEurope — An Information Society for all’. The initiative aims at accelerating the uptake of digital technologies across Europe and ensuring that all Europeans have the necessary skills to use them.

In this paper we analyze the requirements posed by the Infocitizen project that attempts to make feasible the realization of a pan-European view for public service provision. The requirements are analyzed based on the project aims of conducting electronic transactions in multi-agent settings- e.g. multicountry involvement- in a transparent as possible manner for the citizen. Transparent public services provision for the citizen is posed as the requirement that both the inputs needed for the delivery of a service as well as the outputs produced by the service are respectively given and received in a transparent as possible manner for the citizen. That is, the citizen will only need to provide the input that cannot be automatically accessed from its relevant source and also the consequences of the delivered service will be automatically propagated to its relevant destinations. In order to achieve such intelligent provision of public services the forms of knowledge that need to be employed are also discussed.

Business enterprises face significant obstacles in their quest to interact with public administrations and governments across Europe, such as bureaucracy, ambiguous procedures, functional disintegration, vague authority structures and information fragmentation. The recent trend towards the delivery of electronic services by governments (“e-government”) and the development of integrated and customer-oriented mechanisms (”one-stop government”) are efforts to overcome these problems. However, all related efforts focus on the national scene of each country and do not address the needs of businesses when they enter into cross-border processes. This paper presents the objectives, the overall approach and the architectural model of the CB-BUSINESS project, which aims to develop, test and validate an intermediation scheme that integrates the services offered by government, national and regional administration agencies as well as commerce and industry chambers of European Union and Enlargement countries in the context of cross-border processes.

Whilst e-Government provides many opportunities for local authorities to serve citizens more effectively, it also runs the risk of widening the digital divide and making non-IT users second-class citizens. AVANTI aims to address this problem by focusing on people who cannot or think they do not want to be involved in the Information Society. To enable and encourage these citizens to interact electronically, we are developing a user friendly on-screen assistant to serve their needs and help turn the vision of universal Internet access for all into a reality.

Tele-democracy is becoming increasingly important for local authorities in Europe. The EURO-CITI project aims to specify, develop and evaluate an integrated platform for two tele-democracy services, namely televoting for opinion poll petitions and tele-consulting. The technical developments are divided into those for operators at local authorities and those for citizens. The platform empowers operators at local authorities to initiate a call-forvote on a local problem, to dynamically set-up secure networks of cities and initiate a call-for-vote on common problems, to monitor voting results and extract statistical information, etc. Regarding security and privacy, authentication/ authorization solutions are proposed and a Public Key Infrastructure is specified. The trial sites for the EURO-CITI platform are three European cities, namely Athens, Barcelona and London Borough of Brent.

Transaction services that enable the on-line acquisition of information, the submission of forms and tele-voting, are currently perceived as the future of E-Government. The deployment of these services requires platform independent access and communications security as a basis. This paper presents the methodology, network infrastructure and software kernel, which are used to achieve these objectives in the context of the EURO-CITI project. Well-known and established technologies such as SSL/TLS and IPsec are used. The internal design of the EURO-CITI Security Manager (ESM) kernel is discussed. This kernel is an advanced software platform, residing within EURO-CITI hosts. ESM supports the transaction services discussed in this paper but also takes provision for future services in the E-Government domain

Public transaction services (such as e-forms) although perceived the future of e-government have not yet realised their full potential. E-forms have a significant role in e-government, as they are the basis for implementing most of the twenty public services that all member states have to provide to their citizens and businesses. The aim of the SmartGov project is to specify, develop, deploy and evaluate a knowledge-based platform to assist public sector employees to generate online transaction services by simplifying their development, maintenance and integration with already installed IT systems. This platform will be evaluated in two European countries (in one Ministry and one Local Authority). This paper outlines key issues in the development of the SmartGov system platform.

Evolution of e-Government is drifting. On the one hand, e-Government systems shift from information via communication and transaction systems to integrated systems. On the other hand, a partial trend from G2C and G2B systems towards G2G systems is observable. Different needs are to be met to build best practice solutions in the fields of G2C, G2B and G2G.

The new technological advances should be accessible to the citizen, achieving this purpose through the development of informatic tools that speed up services’ rendering by the Administrations, taking into consideration the security aspects in these communications. The European AEQUITAS Project aims to develop an Informatic Tool that shall, via TCP/IP networks, allow secure communications and transmissions of electronic documents between juridical operators, using electronic signature and certification. The herein paper, describes in detail this Project, that can be encapsulated within the so-called Networked Government

Public Portals as common entry points to public services are becoming key elements of the future e-government infrastructure. In most countries, recent research in further development of public portals has been very intensive; however, approaches to the design of portal architecture and organization are still very diverse. In this paper, we will present current results of the research in progress aiming to develop prototype of an intelligent Life-Event Public Portal. We are focusing on the methodological aspects of the knowledge-based Life- Event Portals, which can provide much more efficient provision of e-services than conventional e-portals.

The New Public Management initiative in the 90’s had a tremendous impact on the principles of public administration. Cost transparency and customer orientation have become strategic goals. The public sector is still in motion: eGovernment is a new trend that also progresses the idea of customer orientation. International studies document that eGovernment has become a well known phrase in many countries worldwide. There are, however, significant differences in their respective development. Many administrations use the internet technology just to provide information1. The opportunity to generate additional revenues through integrative IT-solutions is rarely used2. The challenge of performing additional tasks within a declining budget forces governments to develop new ideas in order to increase revenues or to reduce costs. This could be a future business for administrations. In the past, most administrations tried to realize e-government by establishing their own website. Current initiatives concentrate on transactional aspects trying to connect specialized systems with the web. Strategic concepts focusing on architecture and service portfolios are becoming more and more important3. In addition to the political and administrative part of eGovernment, there is also a commercial aspect of services. In particular those commercial services associated with payment processes require and demand integrated transactions.

In a quest to modernise their activities and underpin their publicprivate partnerships, many governments around the globe have initiated their local eGovernment programmes. In this regard, best-practice, emerging Information Communications Technology (ICT) and e-business potential are leveraged to provide 24*7 access to online public services, ranging from online tax forms, to online voting. Whilst much may have been achieved towards developing and supporting one-stop shop to a range of online government services, more research is required, for instance, to provide a seamless integration and interoperation of these services, their integration with legacy systems, and risk management strategy. Based on an ongoing research focused on risk modelling and analysis of eGovernment web services, this paper introduces a categorisation of the main generic risk factors. The paper only elaborates on the first two categories of the risk factors and develops a set of potential success factors for eGovernment.

In Germany, eGovernment stagnates more than it progresses towards the electronic era of administrations. Lacking deployment strategies and acceptance problems concerning Smart Cards hinder its progress, resulting in a great gap between the targets and the actual state of eGovernment. This article describes a method for the stepwise introduction of electronic signatures placed on Smart Cards in public administrations and gives an approach for the deployment of eGovernment.

EGovernment is commonly approached with a technical emphasis. In contrast to this perspective, we will take eGovernment into consideration as a phenomenon of communication. Our perspective is based on the assumption that the introduction of eGovernment has to be concomitant with a process of discussion in order to have lasting effects on a society. In contrast to the internet, eGovernment is approached more pragmatically through the public discourse. This line of argumentation will be highlighted by analysing the Swiss media discourse on eGovernment.

The paper presents an initial guide for the construction of codes of practice for e- government

UK Online is a centralised initiative which attempts to structure the nature of Government- citizen interaction, part of which is to expand notions of “citizen involvement” using technological approaches. The UK Online initiative lies within a general process of “modernisation” that is driven by the UK Government’s White Paper Modernising Government1. We suggest that this project — along with other UK e-Government projects — which advertise a avowedly neutral strategy of developing ICT in government actually involves an attempt on the part of Government to structure and control a new space that is opened up.

The birth of the modern network society and the strengthening of the idea of the constitutional state in Europe have occurred largely at the same time. This juxtaposition, although more accident than design, obligates us to examine from the legal perspective the tension between the array of opportunities (e.g., convergence) and new risks which the network society brings and the legal effectiveness of the constitutional state. The prevailing attitude towards data security offers an illuminating example of the new encounter between technology and law. A look at legislation and legal practice in this area reveals a variety of approaches. I present these and go on to argue for a position whereby data security can and should be assessed in terms of fundamental rights. We have a right to data security in the information infrastructure. At the same time, it must be pointed out that, if we are to avoid the potential risks involved, data security must quite literally be security, whereas legal regulation strives for certainty. When we attempt to forestall risks, the degrees of security and certainty needed at any given time should, in the final analysis, be assessed from the standpoint of fundamental rights.

This paper applies Legal Design, a new field of inquiry, to discuss the form and contents of an E-Learning environment recently implemented by the Canton of Zurich (Switzerland) to enhance the training and development of public administration staff. It is argued that there is a need to visualise this environment more effectively. Working from basic notions of Legal Design and EGovernment, the paper uses a set of clearly defined text visualisation rules and a multi-stage procedure adopted from visual communication to visualise one key module of the learning environment with a view to achieving a greater degree of iconicity and thus to meet established didactic and mnemotechnic criteria more successfully.

The article provides theoretical analysis of e-governance steps in Lithuania, based on comparative analysis of conceptual documents, strategies and plans, also draws conclusions on shortcommings thereof, and practical analysis of the issue. Existing two theoretical concepts of e-government in Lithuania are examined against selected theoretical and methodological criteria, while practical evaluation of e-governance steps in Lithuania is measured by experimental research of internet communication quality between citizens and government in Lithuania. In particular the research is targeted at websites of different public institutions and their feedback to citizens.

Citizen Cards serve as a central item in e-Government for the identification of the acting persons. Establishing the model of a Public-Private- Partnership, the Citizen Card will not be uniform, produced and issued by a public authority in Austria, but consist of diverse chip cards, issued by public or private organisations. These cards can be used for e-Commerce as well as in legally binding electronic communication with the administration. In this paper we discuss the basic requirements all these cards must meet, and present a typical e-Government session (a citizen applies to any authority using a signed XML form and web transport, and in return receives the official and legally binding decision of the public authority.)

The purpose of the SAD (system for automated privacy check) project was, to scan public websites to explore, if there are any procedures or information found, which may potentially violate the privacy of the users. The criteria were to define, which information may indicate privacy relevance. To avoid misuse of the system, their where actions to be implemented. The system should support responsible persons with hints to potentially critical information.

The manner in which a legislature votes is similar to a threshold signature scheme, and the power to sign legislation is similar to possessing shares to sign. The threshold k denotes the quorum number, the minimum number of legislators required to be present in order for legislature to be passed. Here we discuss techniques to ensure a secure electronic legislature.

Security is widely acknowledged as one of the most important aspect for a successful e-Government implementation ([1], [2], [3]). Every month, new vulnerabilities and attacks are discovered and published. New security standards, patches, “fashionable” abbreviations pop up almost daily. How should a user trust the security and integrity of an e-Government portal in such an environment? This contribution starts with an overview of the technical as well as social aspects of security for an e-Government portal. They are introduced one by one and it is shown how to tackle them by emphasizing their drawbacks as well as their differences to the better-known world of e-Business. The paper finishes with by pointing out the requirements for the next generation e- Government platforms by proposing a simple and uniform approach security in its whole picture.

We present the general knowledge management model typical for central as well as local government agencies pre-requisite for successful implementation of knowledge management initiatives. We show that knowledge management systems comprising intelligent workflow management features are necessary to provide sufficient level of support for administrative knowledge processes. We conclude with a brief presentation of the ICONS project aiming at providing a KMS platform for e-government.

New applications such as Virtual supply chains or E-government stress importance of application integration in heterogeneous environments. Workflow based approach is particularly interesting for public administrations, which traditionally tend to have hierarchic streamlined processes. We present a model for interworkflow complex service execution where control and coordination is performed by a supervisor workflow hub.

The planning and subsequent nationwide implementation of Egovernment service provisioning is faced with a number of challenges. Initiatives are confronted with a highly fragmented ICT-architecture that has been vertically organized around departments and with hardly any common horizontal functionality. It is anticipated that in the long run, an architecture based on generic, standardized components in the form of Web services will lead to a more flexible provision of government services over electronic channels. This paper reports on the use of a simulation environment for communicating the advantages of such a component based approach to ICT decision makers within local government.