Adegboyega K. Ojo

Enabling development through governance and mobile technology

The impact of mobile technology on governance and development has attracted significant interest in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for Development and Electronic Governance communities. There is growing consensus that governance mechanisms must complement access to technology to achieve greater impact on development. However, few or no rigorous research exists to show how such mechanisms can support the delivery of mobile services to vulnerable groups. This study fills this important gap by first providing a conceptual framework, based on the Choice Framework and the Structuration Theory, to elaborate on the relationship between ICT, governance and citizen capabilities. Second, the framework is applied to analyze livelihood needs of 45 women head porters interviewed in Accra. Third, as all women under study have access to mobile phones, we determine which governance mechanisms are needed to support the delivery of mobile services to them. Results show that three governance mechanisms enable the contribution of mobile technology to meeting the livelihood needs of this group: 1) updating financial and telecommunication regulations to enable the provision of mobile-based services e.g. mobile microfinance, to vulnerable groups; 2) mobilizing local communities in the production of local contents; and 3) engaging non-governmental organizations in building capacity of government agencies in mobile service delivery and in training vulnerable communities in effective use of mobile technology to access information and services critical to their needs. We conclude by discussing the use of the Structuration Theory along with the Choice Framework to shape development processes based on citizen needs and by discussing the applicability of our framework to similar vulnerable groups.

Conceptualizing Electronic Governance Education

Responding to the issues of complexity, relevance, cost and risk of Electronic Governance (EGOV), we witness a specialization of the roles responsible for EGOV development and operation, professionalizationof the personnel playing such roles, and utilization of the EGOV services and information to fulfill citizen needs. In order to build competencies required by such(managerial, professional, technician and user) roles, education becomes a key success factor, and a growing variety of EGOV learning opportunities emerges. However, lacking conceptual underpinnings for EGO education, the discovery, analysis and integration of such opportunities is difficult. To address this need, the paper develops a theoretical construct for EGO education, applies six measures to this construct: who-- learners, why -- roles, what -- competencies, how --programs, where -- schools, and when -- prerequisites, and validates it through a landscaping exercise focusing on EGOV university programs.

Whole-of-government approach to information technology strategy management: building a sustainable collaborative technology environment in government

The Whole of Government (WG) approach is increasingly seen as an imperative for delivering coherent and integrated policies, joined up and seamless services, and integrated program management in government. Although no generic WG framework currently exists, there are reported cases of WG initiatives by different governments. Grounded in existing theories, frameworks and cases related to inter-organizational collaboration, collaborative Electronic Government (EGOV) and joined-up government, this article describes how to build a collaborative IT Strategy Management (ITSM) environment based on the WG approach. The article first develops a WG model to identify the enabling elements for the WG approach. Next, it identifies the necessary conditions for creating a collaborative ITSM environment in government, applies the WG model to synthesize a set of generic requirements for implementing the WG approach, and presents a WG ITSM toolset to support the implementation. Finally, the generic WG-ITSM requirements are used to analyze a case study involving the WG-ITSM development in a city government. Based on the case study, the validity of the WG model and generic WG-ITSM requirements as well as the usefulness of the toolset are discussed. The article closes with the recommendations for the WG-ITSM practice and for further development of the WG framework.

Improving Government Enterprise Architecture Practice--Maturity Factor Analysis

Recognized as a critical factor for the whole-of-government capability, many governments have initiated Enterprise Architectures (EA) programs. However, while there is no shortage of EA frameworks, the understanding of what makes EA practice effective in a government enterprise is limited. This paper presents the results of empirical research aimed at determining the key factors for raising the maturity of the Government Enterprise Architecture (GEA) practice, part of an effort to guide policy-makers of a particular government on how to develop GEA capabilities in its agencies. By analyzing data from a survey involving 33 agencies, the relative importance of factors like top management commitment, participation of business units and effectiveness of project governance structures on the maturity of the GEA practice was determined. The results confirm that management commitment and participation of business units are critical factors, which in turn are influenced by the perceived usefulness of the GEA efforts.

Building theoretical foundations for electronic governance benchmarking

The success of the electronic governance (EGOV) benchmarking has been limited so far. Lacking a theory to integrate existing conceptualizations has made the acquisition and sharing of knowledge produced by different benchmarking exercises difficult. In order to address this problem, this paper: 1) explains the nature of the EGOV benchmarking activity though a wellestablished theoretical framework - Activity Theory, 2) applies the framework to carry out a mapping between a number of existing EGOV benchmarking conceptualizations, 3) develops an unified conceptualization based on these mappings and 4) validates the resulting model though a real-life national EGOV strategy development project. The use of the Activity Theory in the paper has enabled defining and relating initial dimensions of the EGOV benchmarking activity, and mapping the dimensions present in existing conceptualizations. This not only created a unifying theoretical basis for conceptualizing the EGOV benchmarking activity but allowed learning from and integrating existing conceptualizations. The work impacts on the EGOV benchmarking practice by enabling a logical design of the activity, and contextually correct understanding of existing EGOV benchmarking results with respect to their intended usage.

Mobile governance for development: strategies for migrant head porters in Ghana

A promising strategy to promote good governance is harnessing the opportunities provided by the use of mobile phones, widely accessible to most segments of the society, for delivering public information and services and for decision-making by government. This paper investigates the design and implementation of mobile governance (MGOV) strategies for development (MGOV4D). Specifically, it presents an MGOV4D strategy framework to support mobile Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for development (MICT4D) projects in meeting their development objectives. The paper consists of four parts. First, it presents a framework for determining the governance and related MGOV requirements for MICT4D initiatives. Second, it applies the framework to determine the MGOV4D requirements for a concrete case study of migrant head porters -- local micro-logistic service providers from Ghana, involving the use of mobile phones to meet the porters livelihood needs. Third, based on the identified requirements, it presents a set of MICT4D initiatives that could be developed into MGOV4D programs to address the requirements. Fourth, it synthesizes the MGOV4D strategies that can support the inclusion objectives for the head porters and similar vulnerable groups. In the conclusions, the paper discusses how these results can support policy efforts for achieving the Millennium Development Goal 1 -- Poverty Alleviation, and 3 -- Gender (specifically Women Empowerment).

Mining Collaboration Opportunities to Support Joined-Up Government

Governments strive to achieve improvements in delivering public services, developing and implementing public policies, responding to crisis situations, and optimizing the use of public resources, among others. Achieving such goals requires collaboration across different levels and functions of government, and across public and private sectors in a Joined-Up Government. Establishing such collaboration requires information on prospective participants including their goals, resources, processes and services. Such information is rarely available in structured forms e.g. in databases, but instead scattered over government portals, publications and other textual sources. This paper proposes the use of semantic text mining for extracting collaboration-related information (focusing on government collaboration) from unstructured data sources. The proposed solution applies natural language processing techniques supported by the relevant domain and process ontologies. It consists of three steps: 1) extracting process-related information from textual sources, 2) creating process ontology instances from extracted information and 3) mining shared and integrated processes based on process instances and the service goal hierarchy in the domain ontology. The paper describes the rationale of and approach adopted in this research, the progress achieved in implementing step 1, the challenges encountered and how we intend to address them in pursuing subsequent steps.

Mining service integration opportunities towards joined-up government

Service integration is central to joined-up government initiatives and requires information on the collaborators and the services they offer, roles of different actors, the resources required, and their goals (individual and shared). These information are largely available in unstructured forms on government portals, publications and other textural sources. This paper explores semantic text mining for extracting service-related information from such sources using Natural Language Processing techniques supported by Service-Oriented Process Ontologies. Our solution framework consists of the following steps: (1) creating domain and service-oriented process ontology, (2) extracting service-related information from textual sources based on the ontology, and finally (3) mining relationship among the services based on the extracted information in Step 2 linked with a pre-defined hierarchy of service delivery goals specifying the objective(s) to be achieved among the orchestrated services. We describe our approach to these tasks and discuss the progress of the work, our experiences and the challenges encountered so far.