Privacy in transformational government (t-government): an investigation of citizens' privacy preferences and perceptions

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Innovative public governance through cloud computing: Information privacy, business models and performance measurement challenges

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze challenges and to discuss proposed solutions for innovative public governance through cloud computing. Innovative technologies, such as federation of services and cloud computing, can greatly contribute to the provision of e-government services, through scaleable and flexible systems. Furthermore, they can facilitate in reducing costs and overcoming public information segmentation. Nonetheless, when public agencies use these technologies, they encounter several associated organizational and technical changes, as well as significant challenges. Design/methodology/approach: We followed a multidisciplinary perspective (social, behavioral, business and technical) and conducted a conceptual analysis for analyzing the associated challenges. We conducted focus group interviews in two countries for evaluating the performance models that resulted from the conceptual analysis. Findings: This study identifies and analyzes several challenges that may emerge while adopting innovative technologies for public governance and e-government services. Furthermore, it presents suggested solutions deriving from the experience of designing a related platform for public governance, including issues of privacy requirements, proposed business models and key performance indicators for public services on cloud computing. Research limitations/implications: The challenges and solutions discussed are based on the experience gained by designing one platform. However, we rely on issues and challenges collected from four countries. Practical implications: The identification of challenges for innovative design of e-government services through a central portal in Europe and using service federation is expected to inform practitioners in different roles about significant changes across multiple levels that are implied and may accelerate the challenges' resolution. Originality/value: This is the first study that discusses from multiple perspectives and through empirical investigation the challenges to realize public governance through innovative technologies. The results emerge from an actual portal that will function at a European level. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

COBRA framework to evaluate e-government services: A citizen-centric perspective

E-government services involve many stakeholders who have different objectives that can have an impact on success. Among these stakeholders, citizens are the primary stakeholders of government activities. Accordingly, their satisfaction plays an important role in e-government success. Although several models have been proposed to assess the success of e-government services through measuring users' satisfaction levels, they fail to provide a comprehensive evaluation model. This study provides an insight and critical analysis of the extant literature to identify the most critical factors and their manifested variables for user satisfaction in the provision of e-government services. The various manifested variables are then grouped into a new quantitative analysis framework consisting of four main constructs: cost; benefit; risk and opportunity (COBRA) by analogy to the well-known SWOT qualitative analysis framework. The COBRA measurement scale is developed, tested, refined and validated on a sample group of e-government service users in Turkey. A structured equation model is used to establish relationships among the identified constructs, associated variables and users' satisfaction. The results confirm that COBRA framework is a useful approach for evaluating the success of e-government services from citizens' perspective and it can be generalised to other perspectives and measurement contexts. Crown Copyright © 2014.PIAP-GA-2008-230658) from the European Union Framework Program and another grant (NPRP 09-1023-5-158) from the Qatar National Research Fund (amember of Qatar Foundation

One Stop Government: Stalled Vision or a Matter of Design? – Empirical Findings from Social Services in Germany

In this paper we present selected results of a \ broader research project that inter alia aims at \ designing and specifying one stop government for \ parents of children with special needs facing a \ significantly high bureaucratic burden. Particularly, \ we refer to findings from two focus groups: parents \ of children with special needs and public \ administration staff. Both groups show different \ attitudes and perceptions towards new models of \ access to public services. Whereas the parents \ supported the designed approaches, the public \ administration staff rejected them. Thus, we analyze \ the meaning of these reactions for the design of onestop \ approaches as well as the ways to integrate \ differing attitudes and perspectives into egovernment- \ design. The article closes with final \ remarks on the usefulness of empirical-based design \ research, more precisely Action Design Research, in \ the context of e-government

The futures of Canadian governance: Foresight competencies for public administration in the digital era

Abstract Evidence?based practice has advanced in public administration, with increasing reliance on social research and population sampling in decision making. Yet the evidence?based turn risks marginalizing the value of strategic foresight and futures competencies in informing policy and planning. Where evidence enables policymakers to select the best near?term course of action, future outcomes are inferred and projected, and not determined by past evidence. Foresight provides a necessary competency for defining and investing in the right direction of future policy and action, by articulating future problematics with multiple foresight methods. While social and technological futures cannot be precisely predicted, future scenarios and prospectuses can be designed to inform options and trajectories for intervention and new policy. The emerging area of digital?era governance is examined, where complex scenarios for future policies are based on present evidence (such as trends) and informed speculation to formulate policies and options in dynamically changing societal contexts

A Holistic Framework to Evaluate E-government Systems

Evaluation of e-government systems is difficult duty since it involves many perspectives that complicate enumerating itsbenefits. Although the literature has reported several e-government evaluation frameworks, several shortcomings still exist inthe previous work. The objective of this paper is to propose a formative and holistic framework to remedy the currentresearch gaps. The formative position of the evaluation framework ensures the objectives achievement and the holistic sideensures completeness and continuity of the evaluation process. The framework can be used as a template for researchers andpractitioners to assess e-government projects. We demonstrate the applicability and practicability of the framework byapplying it to the Korean Government-for-Citizen (G4C) project

Concepts for Modeling Smart Cities

The rapid increase and adoption of new Information Technologies (IT) in Smart Cities make the provision of public services more efficient. However, various municipalities and cities deal with challenges to transform and digitize city services. Smart Cities have a high degree of complexity where offered city services must respond to the concerns and goals of multiple stakeholders. These city services must also involve diverse data sources, multi-domain applications, and heterogeneous systems and technologies. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an instrument to deal with complexity in both private and public organizations. The paper defines the concepts for modeling Smart Cities in ArchiMate, guided by a design-oriented research approach. Particularly, the focus of this paper is on the concepts for modeling city services and underlying information systems which are added to the EA metamodel. The metamodel is demonstrated in a real-world case and validated by Smart City domain experts. The findings suggest that these concepts are essential to achieve the Smart City strategy (e.g., city goals and objectives), as well as to meet the needs of different city stakeholders. Furthermore, an extension mechanism allows addressing the alignment of business and IT in complex environments such as Smart Cities, by adjusting EA metamodels and notations. This can help cities to design, visualize, and communicate architecture decisions when managing the transformation and digitalization of public services

IT Mediated Customer Services in E-Government: A Citizen’s Perspective

Despite the vast amount of research conducted and knowledge accumulated to explain the adoption of electronic public services, the issue of how to design high quality e-government Web sites remains an unresolved and relatively understudied topic. This study aims to address this theoretical and pragmatic gap by differentiating service content from service delivery in prescribing technological solutions for enriching the service quality of e-government Web sites. Grounded in Ives and Learmonth’s [1984] Customer Service Lifecycle, this article explicates a series of functional specifications that may be superimposed onto basic government transactions to enhance the overall functionality of e-government Web sites. It also articulates six interface design principles that are pertinent to addressing citizens’ expectations associated with the delivery of public services via the Internet channel. Together, the resultant dimensions depict a comprehensive set of IT-enabled content functionalities and interface design principles that may direct future research into fully interactive and executable e-government services. Practitioners could also benefit from the utilization of these content and delivery dimensions both as a reflective mirror to isolate inadequacies in e-government Web site designs, and as a benchmarking mechanism to assess the level of maturity of existing public e-services as compared to other leading exemplars