Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Information systems have been mostly used to enhance the efficiency of administrative procedures in the local government sector as well as the central government sector. Information systems also help to improve transparency of civil affairs. The OPEN (Online Procedures Enhancement from civil application) system in the Seoul metropolitan government of South Korea has helped to achieve transparency in the civil administration by preventing unnecessary delays and unjust handling of civil affairs on the part of civil servants. The focus of this study is an administrative informatization at the level of the local government, not at the level of the central government. This paper, therefore, examines the success factors of the OPEN system, i.e., the powerful leadership of the city government, the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and citizens’ attitudes. In addition, this paper analyzes some barriers to the development of the OPEN system and its existing problems.

In Denmark a major eGovernment project is on its way. By January 2007 a structural reform of government will reorganize all counties and municipalities. More than 1 million employees will be affected, and all public IT systems will have to change. In 2003 a kind of pilot study for this upcoming structural reform including both eGovernment and organisational change was undertaken. Five municipalities and a county on the Island of Bornholm merged. In this paper I report from an in-depth interview study of the merging process. My analysis focuses on organizational change and the implications for eGovernment. I conclude by identifying three main hindrances. Finally the implications and learning for the upcoming structural reform is discussed.

Issues related to technology, including diffusion, acceptance, adoption, and adaptation, have been the focus of research for different disciplines including Information Systems (IS), System Dynamics, Psychology, and Management Science. Of all research conducted and models developed to study technology related issues, the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) stands out as most prominent, particularly in the field of IS. However, technology acceptance research has been relatively limited in its application to the public sector. Therefore, there is a concurrent need to develop and gain empirical support for models of technology acceptance within the public sector, and to examine technology acceptance and utilization issues among public employees to improve the success of IS implementation in this arena. In this paper we present a more comprehensive, yet parsimonious model of technology acceptance and suggest testing it both in public and private sectors to help understand the similarities and differences (if any) between the two sectors.

E-government changed the way government thinks and functions. All over the world, government tried to get the benefits of e-government. Some of the efforts were successful and some failed. The paper made a comparative study between policy and practice of e-government in Bangladesh and India. The paper identified the causes of success in India and failure in Bangladesh. At the end, suggestion has been provided, so that Bangladesh could learn from the experience of India.

Although the digital divide issues have attracted global attentions, literature surveys still show no significant progress towards evaluating effectiveness of the digital divide strategies and projects for bridging the gaps. The objective of this paper is to improve the performance measurement method for digital divide strategies by adapting the balanced scorecard approach. A structured framework is presented to integrate the balanced scorecard perspectives and digital divide dimensions for guiding the development of effective performance measurement indicators and an associated dictionary. Also provided are examples of using the indicators in some government agencies to demonstrate the flexibility and usefulness of the adapted balanced scorecard approach.

Interoperability has been identified as a major issue to be addressed by every e-government agency. An interoperability framework aims to provide the basic standards that every department which is relevant for the e-government strategy implementation should adopt. Criteria for selection and inclusion of standards in an interoperability framework are crucial, since they influence the utility that the framework delivers to the e-government agencies. This paper identifies and compares the policies of the main e-government agencies in the definition of these criteria and it checks the policies against the practice that they exhibit in the actual interoperability frameworks.

We present a collaborative-application to the National Center of Disaster Prevention in Mexico (CENAPRED), which is focused on helping in the decision making process during the radiological disasters, related to “Laguna Verde” nuclear plant. This application coordinates the activities of External Plan of Radiological Emergency (PERE) that has been generated for this purpose. In addition, the application is based on a Geographical Information System (GIS) into a collaborative architecture to support the interaction from several entities, which work with special training groups in a virtual reality environment. The architecture consists of a collaboration model and it generates a schema of components to find out the independence and standardization of the system so that it can be implemented in any GIS-platform.

In this paper we present a feasibility study we conducted in a German county in order to assess the potential of a legal knowledge system in the domain of family law. The goals of this project were to describe the actual work processes, to propose optimized processes if needed and to develop a prototype. Our study was based on interviews, on two test cases submitted to clerks and on an online questionnaire. We identified potential problems both in terms of productivity and quality of administrative decisions and demonstrated that it is possible to optimize work processes using a knowledge management solution consisting of a legal rule-based system and a knowledge-sharing component.

Electronic government allows a broad range of citizens to access governamental information and services, as well as to participate in the government decision-making process. On the other hand, it imposes a higher challenge on a web designer to avoid digital exclusion. Before proposing guidelines to design e-gov sites, it is important to have objective methods to evaluate their quality. Traditional inspection methods do not cover the specificities of e-gov sites. This work proposes an extension of Nielsen’s heuristic evaluating method, applied to the information, services and citizens’ participation categories. Broad accessibility, interoperability, security and privacy, information truth and precision, service agility, and transparency are added. The g-Quality method was instrumental as an objective evaluation form. It was applied to 127 Brazilian e-gov sites. The extended method found more problems, resulting in more negative ratings than the Nielsen’s original method. The Brazilian public sites quality level was determined by using the g-Quality method, producing positive results.

This paper is based on a research project presently carried out by the European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA). The Ministry for Public Service in Luxembourg has requested EIPA to conduct a report on “Organisational Changes, Skills and the Role of Leadership required by eGovernment” to provide a basis for discussions during the EU Presidency of Luxembourg in the eGovernment working group of the European Public Administration Network (EPAN) in the first half of 2005. The report should provide some input for the recommendations to be agreed upon by the Director-Generals responsible for public administration in the EU by the end of 2005. The report will be finalised in June 2005.