Integrating e-government public transactional services into public authority workflows

Documents submitted by citizens through electronic services, deployed in the context of e-government, must usually undergo processing by some organisational information system in order to complete the citizens’ requests and for the reply to be returned to the citizen. The integration, however, of the e-service delivery platform and the organisational information system is often hindered for a number of reasons, including security considerations, platform diversity or idiosyncrasies of legacy information systems. In this paper, we present a generic method for providing seamless communication between the two platforms, enabling the full integration of documents submitted through electronic services into the organisational workflow, thus leveraging the quality of services offered to citizens and facilitating e-service development and operation. © 2004 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd