Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Modern governments using innovative ICT have become an increasingly important factor of competitiveness and growth in the European Information Society. Public institutions are forced to improve their operation to become more efficient and effective. As a consequence, modern ICT heavily impacts and forms Government activities in cooperating and interacting with their constituencies. The use of ICT is expected to enable performance of business processes, integration of back-office systems among public (and private) sector, and provision of fully customized and personalized electronic services to the different stakeholders. To investigate what kind of research is needed to spur innovation in the public sector, the European Commission has funded eGovRTD2020, a specific support action in the 6 Framework Program of IST. This contribution introduces the roadmapping methodology developed in the course of the project. Its application is exemplified with the description of a future research theme for advancing eGovernment towards innovative governments in 2020.

The emerging research area of e-Government is gradually moving towards a level of maturity on the back of increasingly rigorous empirical research. Yet, there has been little theoretical progress and a cumulative tradition is not emerging. We argue that a principle reason for this is a lack of shared understanding about basic concepts and entities amongst scholars in the field. Specifically, the entities that form the bedrock of e-Government research, such as “Government” and “Citizen” are conceptualized at a very general level of abstractions and treated as homogenous groups. We argue that existing models and frameworks fail to see the vast differences that exist between categories of these entities. Without a finer grained conceptualization, comparison of findings across different research studies is not possible and thus transfer of knowledge between different projects is difficult. This is a fundamental obstacle in developing a cumulative tradition. Based on an examination of the literature, we propose categories of “Government” and “Citizen” at a finer grain and discuss implications for both practice and research that stems from our conceptualization.

Public sector innovations have been comprehensively studied from a managerial (New Public Management, NPM) as well as technological (Electronic Government, eGovernment) perspective. Here, much research work took a single-organisational managerial stance while little was investigated into corresponding public-sectoral innovation and diffusion processes. At this point, a political science view understands the embeddedness of public-sectoral innovation processes in the surrounding politico-administrative system. Therefore, we seek to investigate into public sector innovations in terms of identifying politico-administrative system dynamics which shape the process of their emergence and diffusion. In order provide empirical evidence, we analyse the Japanese case by the means of a series of qualitative-empirical expert interviews. We demonstrate how decentralisation reforms open up innovation potential for local governments, by which means the central government still holds strong influence on innovation and diffusion processes, and which possible paths of eGovernment and NPM innovation manifest as a result.

This paper provides a brief overview of a research project exploring citizens’ views of e-government and e-governance (the pilot study was reported at DEXA 2006). The following research propositions were investigated: i) egovernment users are motivated by generic benefits offered by the Web, such as convenience and information provision, rather than democratic engagement; ii) users and non-users perceive moderate value in using e-government for knowledge acquisition and communication, but little value as a vehicle for democratic dialogue, iii) frequent users are more positive than other groups. All three research propositions are supported, suggesting that it may be difficult to engage citizens online in participatory democracy. Employing the phrase of the London Underground, we suggest that there is a Gap between e-government and e-governance that must be ‘minded’ (paid attention to). Governments should not assume that the former will morph smoothly into the latter by political will alone.

The core content of action research (AR) is being able to solve organisational problems through intervention and to contribute to scientific knowledge. The main emphasis when discussing AR has been on the “research part”. In this paper we focus on “action part” of AR in order to generate rigorous research, to solve local problems and to deal with evident dilemmas in AR. Action elements are addressed by situations in a project on one-stop government e-service development. As a result of the analysis action is illustrated. Action elements: action, actor, motive, space, time are analysed together with roles. The paper also shows a need to understand initiation, problem and situation addressing as an ongoing process in an AR project. A breakdown in the project is also highlighted and situations where problems discovers the action researcher and vice versa.

The EU is currently modernizing customs legislation and practices. Main pillars in the new vision are an intensive use of IT (Customs becomes e-Customs), partnerships between Customs administrations and businesses (G2B), and collaboration between national Customs administrations (G2G). But how to design new customs control procedures? Very little theory exists, and an inspection of current procedures shows that they are vulnerable to fraud, and thus badly designed. Therefore we identify a need for developing theory for the design of government control procedures. Some research has been done on designing inter-organizational controls in B2B transactions. In this paper we argue that with certain modifications control principles used in B2B are also suitable for the Government-to-Business context, and we present a conceptual model for designing government controls in G2B, based on earlier work of Bons. We use a study on customs procedures for the export of agricultural goods from the EU to Russia as a proof of concept.

In this paper a domain specific process modelling method for public administrations is presented. The public sector is facing an increased service level demand from citizens and companies which comes along with reduced financial scope. Higher process efficiency as well as time and cost savings are required to cope with this challenge. However, reorganisation projects in public administrations with established generic process modelling methods could only identify limited reorganisation potential and just led to small local improvements [1]. Therefore, we have created the domain specific modelling approach PICTURE. The PICTURE-method applies the domain vocabulary to efficiently capture the process landscape of a public organisation. Thus, PICTURE creates process transparency and is able to detect holistic reorganisation potentials within the entire administration.

Two of the most active research fields in information technology nowadays are Internet Services Portals used by governmental organizations and Interoperability Patterns for achieving the seamless cooperation of heterogeneous existing systems. When referring to e-Government applications in Local Administrations, the above mentioned research fields have to be tackled, as the resulting systems need to be functional, easy to implement and maintain, capable of interconnecting with back-office systems and citizen and employee friendly.This paper shows that the conceptualization, design, implementation and maintenance of Municipality Service Portals can be standardized, following a specific methodology. Piloted in a Greek Municipality with almost 50,000 citizens and 3,000 businesses, the methodology comprises of (a) rapid process modeling with the use of BPMN-aware modeling tools, (b) CCTS-based data modeling (c) step-by-step adaptation of Content Management, Citizen Relationship and Workflow Systems, (d) SoA-enabled interconnections with back-office applications and (e) overall guidance based on Service Composition taxonomies.

Modelling life events is a task of a crucial importance and a first necessary step towards supporting resolution of a particular life event on the active e-government portal. The use of reference models as templates for building life-event models promises savings in time and costs of the modelling process. At the same time, using reference models can increase the quality and accuracy of the established models. The paper proposes a complete set of life-event reference models at different abstraction levels that allows for modelling and implementing virtually any life event. The types of reference models range from a general one that provides template for any life-event model, to reference models specialized for establishing models of a specific life event in a specific country or a region or tailored to a set of specific user circumstances and needs.

Life event portals are considered as the core element of the overall egovernment software infrastructure. Active life event portals are the most advanced incarnation of such portals able to process concrete life events related to specific citizen needs. Despite several realisation of ’supposed to be’ active life event portals, there is still a challenge how to design such portals to: a) assure their flexibility, b) easy integration with existing e-government infrastructures, c) be compliant with the law regulations, d) apply well defined SOA standards and existing components.

As a step forward to satisfy the above requirements, we propose an architecture for active life event portals based on generic workflow approach. This SOA based architecture benefits from the most promising technologies and is compliant with the recent relevant standards. A first verification of this architecture has been done in the EU OneStopGov project aiming at implementation of the one-stop government concept.