Chain Action - How Do Countries Add Value Through Digital Government?

This study examines how countries develop and benefit from Digital Government (DG). The literature proposes various conceptualizations of the value-adding logic of DG, but the benchmarking practice is not responding to such proposals. For instance, the United Nations’ E-Government Survey combines the readiness and uptake indicators and fails to cover any impact indicators; thus, its diagnostic value is limited. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a new assessment scheme based on the DG value chain concept and pursue the question: how do the world countries add value in this chain? Reassembling the UN’s e-Government Survey indicators and the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, we examine how the 191 UN Member States converted their readiness into uptake and uptake into impact over the 2014-2018 period. The results rank the countries concerning their performance along the DG value chain, identify hotspots, and calculate the valu

Towards Synthetic and Balanced Digital Government Benchmarking

Reliable benchmarking is essential for effective management of the government digitalization efforts. Existing benchmarking instruments generally fail to support this target. One problem is the diversity of instruments, resulting in a split image of digital progress and adding ambiguity to policy decisions. Another problem is disconnect in assessing progress between digital and traditional “analog” governance, lending support to a dangerous idea that countries can compensate for lack of progress in their governance systems by simply digitalizing them. This paper provides a path to addressing both problems by: aggregating relevant indicators of the World Economic Forum’s Network Readiness Index (NRI) to obtain a single synthetic measure of digital government, balancing this measure with progress in analog governance using World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), calculating new measures for the latest editions of NRI and WGI, and discussing results. Technically, the paper applies multidimensional linear ordering and factor analysis

Developing and Harnessing Software Technology in the South: The Roles of China, India, Brazil, and South Africa

Software technology is gaining prominence in national information technology (IT) strategies due to its huge potential for socioeconomic development, particularly through the support it provides in the productive sectors of the economy, delivery of public services and engagement of citizens. In growing numbers of developing countries, software technology is also being leveraged for income generation from digital services and products. For instance, in recent years, India, Chile, the Philippines, Brazil, China, and Indonesia have emerged as important global players in the offshore software services industry, with India and China standing out as leaders. Cooperation between developing countries (south-south) in the area of software technology has also been growing; particularly in the application of software technology to agriculture, public administration and governance (e-governance), transportation and the society (knowledge society). The paper presents the current state of software technology in the south and specifically, the maturity of the software industries in China, India, Brazil, and South Africa (CIBS). It establishes profiles of different regions based on the level of education, quality of research and availability of e-infrastructure and e-applications for determining the potential of these regions in terms of growth and competitiveness in the global software industry. Further complementary analysis of country profiles produced country clusters, helping to identify potential collaboration scenarios for advancing software capacity in the south. Finally, the paper discusses how CIBS can pivot regional or inter-regional cooperation in software technology in the south.software technology, software industry, south-south cooperation, China, Brazil, India, South Africa

Extending message-oriented middleware

Different types of middleware exist to facilitate the integration of software running on heterogeneous computing platforms. Message Oriented Middleware (MOM), for instance, enables the interaction between heterogeneous applications by exchanging packets of structured data (messages) through communication channels. The core responsibility of a MOM is asynchronous delivery of messages from senders to receivers, as well as management of the corresponding message queues. However, realistic software applications need many more messaging functions, for instance functions to enable auditing, encryption, tracking and transformation of messages. Such functions should be clearly provided by the underlying MOM and not implemented and re-implemented by applications themselves. In this paper, we present an approach for extending the core functionality of a MOM. In particular, we investigate how such extensions can be configured and combined, to ensure correct delivery of messages.II Workshop de Ingeniería de Software y Bases de Datos (WISBD)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Extending message-oriented middleware

Different types of middleware exist to facilitate the integration of software running on heterogeneous computing platforms. Message Oriented Middleware (MOM), for instance, enables the interaction between heterogeneous applications by exchanging packets of structured data (messages) through communication channels. The core responsibility of a MOM is asynchronous delivery of messages from senders to receivers, as well as management of the corresponding message queues. However, realistic software applications need many more messaging functions, for instance functions to enable auditing, encryption, tracking and transformation of messages. Such functions should be clearly provided by the underlying MOM and not implemented and re-implemented by applications themselves. In this paper, we present an approach for extending the core functionality of a MOM. In particular, we investigate how such extensions can be configured and combined, to ensure correct delivery of messages.II Workshop de Ingeniería de Software y Bases de Datos (WISBD)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Interdisciplinarity in Smart Sustainable City education: exploring educational offerings and competencies worldwide

More and more higher education institutions are offering specialized study programs for current and future managers of Smart Sustainable Cities (SSCs). In the process, they try to reconcile the interdisciplinary nature of such studies, covering at least the technical and social aspects of SSC management, with their own traditionally discipline-based organization. However, there is little guidance on how such interdisciplinarity should be introduced. In order to address this gap, this paper identifies 87 SSC-related study programs from around the world and analyzes their disciplinary and interdisciplinary coverage. The analysis classifies programs and competencies, the former using text mining and clustering algorithms, the latter using Bloom’s taxonomy and correlation analysis

Digital Government Evolution: from Transformation to Contextualization

Abstract: The Digital Government landscape is continuously changing to reflect how governments are trying to find innovative digital solutions to social, economic, political and other pressures, and how they transform themselves in the process. Understanding and predicting such changes is important for policymakers, government executives, researchers and all those who prepare, make, implement or evaluate Digital Government decisions. This article argues that the concept of Digital Government evolves towards more complexity and greater contextualization and specialization, similar to evolution-like processes that lead to changes in cultures and societies. To this end, the article presents a four-stage Digital Government Evolution Model comprising Digitization (Technology in Government), Transformation (Electronic Government), Engagement (Electronic Governance) and Contextualization (Policy-Driven Electronic Governance) stages; provides some evidence in support of this model drawing upon the study of the Digital Government literature published in Government Information Quarterly between 1992 and 2014; and presents a Digital Government Stage Analysis Framework to explain the evolution. As the article consolidates a representative body of the Digital Government literature, it could be also used for defining and integrating future research in the area. Keyword

DESIGNING NEXT GENERATION SMART CITY INITIATIVES - HARNESSING FINDINGS AND LESSONS FROM A STUDY OF TEN SMART CITY PROGRAMS

The proliferation of Smart Cities initiatives around the world is part of the strategic response by governments to the challenges and opportunities of increasing urbanization and the rise of cities as the nexus of societal development. As a framework for urban transformation, Smart City initiatives aim to harness Information and Communication Technologies and Knowledge Infrastructures for economic regeneration, social cohesion, better city administration and infrastructure management. However, experiences from earlier Smart City initiatives have revealed several technical, management and governance challenges arising from the inherent nature of a Smart City as a complex Socio-technical System of Systems . While these early lessons are informing modest objectives for planned Smart Cities programs, no rigorous developed framework based on careful analysis of existing initiatives is available to guide policymakers, practitioners, and other Smart City stakeholders. In response to this need, this paper presents a Smart City Initiative Design (SCID) Framework grounded in the findings from the analysis of ten major Smart Cities programs from Netherlands, Sweden, Malta, United Arab Emirates, Portugal, Singapore, Brazil, South Korea, China and Japan. The findings provide a design space for the objectives, implementation options, strategies, and the enabling institutional and governance mechanisms for Smart City initiatives

Messaging infrastructure for Electronic Government: background, rationale, objectives

Electronic Government applications aim to deliver efficient, seamless, customer-focused services to the public using various distribution channels. One of challenges in building such applications is the requirement to rely upon preexisting, often heterogeneous government applications. In order to enable communication between such applications, middleware software is required. In this paper we present a research line for formal specification and development of programmable message-oriented middleware, a foundation for infrastructure development for Electronic Government.Eje: Ingeniería de software y base de datosRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI