Dimitris Gouscos

A general model of performance and quality for one-stop e-Government service offerings

Abstract This paper introduces a framework and methodology for establishing indicators and metrics in order to assess the quality and performance of one-stop e-Government service offerings. The set of quality and performance indicators and metrics proposed has been derived in an outcomes assessment approach, based on the perspectives of e-Government service providers and end-users and following a goal-question-metric line of work that departs from some key quality and performance benefits. A methodology that employs the proposed framework to set improvement targets according to alternative scenarios is presented, and a strategy is elaborated for analyzing root causes of potential quality and performance shortcomings and undertaking appropriate countermeasures. Some results of application in a real case study, in the context of an EU-funded R&D project, are also provided. Finally, recommendations are given about usefulness of the proposed approach for e-Government service providers, as well as policy and decision-makers, and directions of future work are discussed in order to enhance the conceptual coverage of this approach, while at the same time not compromising its simplicity of application and generality of purpose.

Revisiting public information management for effective e‐government services

Governments are employing modern information and communication technologies to serve society better. Raising the effectiveness and quality of government services is not only a matter of new technologies; it also involves clear vision and objectives as well as a sound business strategy. Information systems need to support internal work within a government’s boundaries, serve customers through digital interfaces and leverage digital relationships among social partners. To implement such systems, preparatory work is required in both organization and technology. A new public information management philosophy underlies this significant revamping of the value propositions made to customers. The ongoing enrichment of the Greek Ministry’s of Finance e‐services follows an ICDT‐like business logic. A key factor of all these advances is the re‐orientation of information systems for customer‐centric service.

An Approach to Offering One-Stop e-Government Services - Available Technologies and Architectural Issues

The right of citizens to high-quality e-Government services makes one-stop service offerings an essential feature for e-Government. Offering one-stop services presents many operational implications; an one-stop service provision (OSP) architecture is needed that, by means of a layered approach, provides facilities to refer to, invoke and combine e-Government services in a uniform way, in the context of cross-organisational workflows. Although enabling technologies for all the layers of such an architecture are quickly evolving (XML, WSDL, UDDI, WFMS et al) two major issues that need to be solved are (a) abstracting the heterogeneity of the e-Government services that need to be integrated and (b) identifying an appropriate style for cross-organisational workflow control, somewhere in between the fully centralised and peer-to-peer extremes. This paper presents an abstract layered OSP architecture, identifies some major enabling technologies and briefly discusses those two issues.

A Methodological Approach for Defining One-Stop e-Government Service Offerings

This paper reports some methodological guidelines for categorizing administrative services on certain typological characteristics (informational vs. transactional content, acquaintance vs. operational usefulness, local vs. hyper-local value), defining one-stop service offerings and ranking their interest from an end-user as well as service integration perspective.

Socializing E-governance: A Parallel Study of Participatory E-governance and Emerging Social Media

This chapter has a twofold objective: (a) to identify the factors that underlie an attempt to “socialize” (i.e., make more inclusive, collective, and peer-to-peer) citizen participation and governance in a Web 2.0-like fashion, and (b) to investigate the potential of social media as new and more inclusive forms of participatory e-governance. To this end, taxonomies, objectives, critical factors, and barriers of e-participation are discussed in Section 1, with a view to synthesizing some key recommendations for successful e-participation projects. Section 2, on the other hand, discusses the advent and potential of social media and provides an overview and examples of using them for e-participation and e-governance services. The chapter concludes (Section 3) with a short discussion about the potential, in light of current developments, of applying social media to the service of e-participation not only as enabling technologies but also, and most importantly, as a reference for new participatory process models.

Blending Social Media with Parliamentary Websites: Just a Trend, or a Promising Approach to e-Participation?

This chapter discusses how social media use can enhance interaction between citizens and parliaments. The presence of parliamentary institutions in Europe and the Americas in social media is researched and quantitavely assessed. A specific question, on the citizen side, is to what extent social media is used by parliaments for informative purposes only, or for more substantial forms of citizen feedback. The ways in which parliaments can change to use social media for transparency and citizen engagement are therefore investigated. This chapter contributes to the research on using social media to enhance transformation of public bodies and citizen participation for democratic governance.

MaTourA: multi-agent tourist advisor

MaTourA is a tourist advisory system about Greece that is being implemented in the parallel constraint logic programming language ElipSys. The purpose of MaTourA is to facilitate the work carried out in travel agencies by providing an interactive way to construct personalized tours, select predefined package tours and handle the underlying touristic information. The system has been designed as a set of high-level interacting agents. In this direction, the ElipSys language was extended with the appropriate features to support the development of multi-agent systems.

Can Open-Government Models Contribute to More Collaborative Ways of Governance?

The Greek political landscape and the way public administration and political procedures are performed is an ideal field of study of the enabling potential of the Internet to foster new, dynamic forms of democracy, introducing open and “citizen-friendly” forms of government mainly by functioning as a horizontal communication channel allowing polyphonic discussions as well as one-to-one dialogues.

Digital games for entrepreneurial learning, innovation and creativity: examples and evaluation criteria

This paper introduces a some good examples of digital games freely available on the web that can be used as educational tools supporting entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity skills b an evaluation framework for identifying such examples. To this end, in the first part of the paper, indicative examples are provided for digital games purposed for entertainment and/or learning, drawn from the broad array of online available business games. In the second part of the paper, the examples provided are evaluated along three dimensions: a generic dimension related to digital-games based learning (DGBL) aspects; and two more specific dimensions, focused on the innovation/creativity and entrepreneurship skills that can be encouraged (and gradually exercised and learnt) through gameplay. The final objective of this evaluation is twofold: firstly, to locate similarities, differences, strengths and weaknesses of the games currently available, that can help identify specific needs for digital games-based entrepreneurial learning material; and secondly, to provide a set of findings and issues that need to be considered while developing (or repurposing) digital games for entrepreneurial learning.

A participatory architecture for taxation and budgeting

This paper is positioned at the intersection of two important fields: e-taxation services and Participatory Budgeting (PB). E-taxation has traditionally been considered to be a solution to the bureaucracy and non-transparency of tax filing and payment; however, it does not account for the way in which taxes are used. In addition to evaluating the availability of public funds, PB includes decisions on fund allocation. Our approach combines these two important aspects of taxation and fund allocation in a unified e-participation scheme, where the entire life cycle of public funds collection and spending is transparent. This approach incorporates software tools and operational workflows that give citizens a holistic view of how public funds are collected and used.