One-Stop Government Portals

E-government is seen as a promising approach for governments to improve their service towards citizens and become more cost-efficient in service delivery. This is often combined with one-stop government, which is a citizen-oriented approach stressing integrated provision of services from multiple departments via a single access point, the one-stop government portal. While the portal concept is gaining prominence in practice, there is little known about its status in academic literature. This hinders academics in building an accumulated body of knowledge around the concept and makes it hard for practitioners to access relevant academic insights on the topic. The objective of this study is to identify and understand the key themes of the one-stop government portal concept in academic, e-government research. A holistic analysis is provided by addressing different viewpoints: social-political, legal, organizational, user, security, service, data and information, and technical. As an overall finding, the authors conclude that there are two different approaches: a more pragmatic approach focuses on quick wins in particular related to usability and navigation and a more ambitious, transformational approach having far reaching social-political, legal, and organizational implications

Thirst for business value of information technology

For years information technology (IT) has helped companies improve organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Today’s IT plays a more strategic role in building capabilities for sustaining and creating competitive advantages. The increasing importance of IT has led many organizations to integrate it into their daily operations. To justify the ever-increasing spending on IT, organizations have been searching for evaluation methods to prove the business value of IT. However, this is a challenging undertaking, as there are contradictory answers to questions on whether it is worthwhile to pay substantial sums for IT. To gain insight into the reasons behind the contradictory answers, this paper first reviews conflicting research results of past studies on IT business value. It then explains the term IT productivity paradox. Last, it provides five reasons why IT business value is not fully reflected in the way business managers expect it to be