Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The field of e-Government (e-Gov) is still in the phase of finding and defining its research agenda and its accepted research standards and methods. How does e-Gov research differ from traditional public management information systems (PMIS) research? Also, to what extent does e-Gov represent a new tradition of research in terms of the subject area and the research paradigm? To what extent does government change through e-Gov? While one group of e-Gov researchers emphasizes the transformational impact of e-Gov on the business of government, others have squarely questioned this assertion. This paper contributes to the debate and to the definition of the research agenda by discussing various dimensions of organizational transformation, and how they relate to the phenomenon of e-Gov. It suggest that e-Gov, at least in the short term, has the capacity to transform the business of government in mode rather than in nature.

Should back office integration in e-government seen as a top down project management problem, emphasising strong leadership, or as a governance problem, focusing on organizing cooperation between information domains? A comparison of four Dutch case studies, shows that successful back office integration is being perceived as managing a process of creating a shared understanding between actors. Although project management methods identify risks in several environments, these environments are not neutral but loosely and closely related arenas with competing rationalities. Essential is the mutual recognition of core values and the interdependency between them (win-win). Interdependency can only be recognized, if actors focus on the nature of the problem and not on the allocation of competences and costs and benefits. Trust and external pressure are favouring cooperation. Moreover, it is important to anticipate on a changing political agenda. Project management methods are not obsolete, but they operate well in a stabilized environment.

With the widespread deployment of e-government systems in developing countries, and also their high failure rates, it is important to understand the complex processes that underlie successful implementations of large-scale information systems. MIS theory has explicated the nature of conflict in the design of information systems and the reasons why systems are resisted by stakeholders. In this context, it is important to have a nuanced reading of stakeholders in the e-government systems domain to understand the origin of conflict and resistance to such systems. This paper develops a framework for stakeholder groups and uses this to analyze conflict and resistance in four case examples of implemented e-government systems in India.

E-government is defined as an application of IT to government services and it is a global phenomenon and public servants around the world are adopting novel ways to leverage IT to better serve their constituents. In this paper, we proposed a g-CSI model that has two major contributions to overcome the weakness of the existing CSI models that not suitable for the e-government. First, the g-CSI model that measures customer satisfaction for government should have a difference in that for private sectors, and the e-government operates on the Internet environment. We suggest the g-CSI model for e-government suitable to the Internet environment. Next, using a feature weighting and a feature positioning, we can extract the improvement points to enhance the level of customer satisfaction.

Due to the fragmented nature of governments, governmental services are delivered by cross-agency service-delivery processes. Accountability for these cross-agency service-delivery processes is especially challenging, as it is unclear who is accountable for the whole cross-agency process. Unclear accountability relationships lead to untransparent processes. In this paper, we investigate literature on accountability, derive a framework for accountability of cross-agency service-delivery processes, and propose several initial mechanisms and guidelines for ensuring accountability of these processes.

Recent policy initiatives have advocated a Citizen Relationship Management (CzRM) strategy in conjunction with e-government to respond to the challenges facing public agencies. CzRM promises higher service quality at lower costs. CzRM was originally a private sector business strategy, part of the “entrepreneurial” paradigm that was applied to the public sector in the mid-1990s. This paper deals with four concerns: the assertion that transformation of citizens into customers has damaging effects on democratic governance and public administration; the existence of digital divides; accountability-issues; and the role of consultants as intermediaries. Finally, the change in citizens’ wants and views about government may be caused by more fundamental changes happening in the American society. Despite the mentioned concerns, CzRM is feasible, but it should occur with an awareness of the raison d’être of the public sector, and that government has a role in securing both the quality and equality of government services.

This paper reports and analyses a case where a Decision Support System (DSS) was used in a local government for the purpose of arriving at a decision on a complicated and politically infected issue the City Council despite years of effort had failed to sort out. It was assumed that a strict and open method would make the grounds for the decision clearer, and that people would accept a clearly motivated decision even though they personally preferred another solution. The project was also intended as a test of new methods for potential adoption into normal practices. The analysis shows mixed understanding of, and mixed belief in, the method. While generally happy with the project work, also this time the Council failed to make a decision as constituency concerns eventually overruled the rationality of the arguments in the decision making council. The case raises issues of both the potential for DSS in a political context and the nature of political decision making. In particular we conclude that DSS use has to be carefully crafted but swiftly executed, and more than a one-off effort as a change process is involved.

One of the challenges citizens and businesses face in interacting with governments for entitled services or compliance services is to find the right set of regulations and rules that are applicable for them. Very often the regulations and policies that determine the applicability of specific services are implemented and provided by separate government agencies, thus scattered in different Web sites and documents and are hard to be identified. In addition, the regulatory rules and government policies change often, making it harder to maintain the applicable services. In this paper, we present an integrated policy ontology of distributed regulatory rules and policies to support the discovery of applicable regulations and services. We present an ontology-guided annotation and extraction of policy rules from Web source documents. To support the dynamic changes in regulatory and policy rules, we developed a method of automatic updating the policy ontology by monitoring the source text documents. We describe a prototype eligibility verification system that verifies eligibility for various welfare government services. The eligibility rules and policies are extracted from different government websites to enrich the policy ontology. The eligibility rules and policies are monitored, and automatically updated, should any changes occur.

Austria has made a great leap forward with e-government into the top group in Europe over the past three years. The paper examines how far the usage of services keeps pace and what kinds of impacts are observable. It finds that in Austria the take-up of services among enterprises has made enormous progress to one of the highest in the EU. Usage growth is strongest in advanced, transaction-related services, although there is still much potential to raise the usage among citizens in a socially balanced way. Impacts are identified in quantitative as well as qualitative terms: they include cost savings, increased efficiency and accelerated processing times of case handlings (exemplified among others by win-win situations in the finance and foreign trade sector), improved service and information quality, but also some adaptation problems and reorganization needs.

It is accepted that public administrations may benefit from eGovernment initiatives. Unfortunately, for various reasons recent reports show that eService projects fail on a grand scale. Potentially speaking, proper risk-modelling techniques could be employed to assist in this situation. A current doctorate research programme looks at the relevance of a risk-modelling tool engaged at the pre-proposal phase of eGovernment projects in the UK. This article describes a research strategy that is found on scenario-guided focus group workshops that aims to supply the doctorate’s questions with adequate answers. One such workshop recently took place in the UK, where eGovernment practitioners working at the Edinburgh City Council participated. The paper presents the fruitful results from that workshop, which were about the relevance of a risk-modelling tool at the business case stage of a potential eService project for the local government. It is hoped that this research document may contribute and assist parties involved in the development and research of eServices for the government.