Maria A. Wimmer

A European perspective towards online one-stop government: the eGOV project

Abstract e-Government reflects current visions for public administrations towards modernization and reorganization. Therefore, online one-stop Government targets the improvement of customer-to-government interactions. It provides electronic public services of distinct public authorities to citizens and businesses in a customer-oriented manner from a single point of access. The customer-oriented approach towards online one-stop Government further offers online public services 24 h a day from anywhere in an easy-to-use and simple way according to the customers’ needs. Structuring public services around citizens’ life-episodes and businesses’ specific situations represents such an approach. To speed up innovative developments in the field, the European Commission has provided substantial funding. eGOV is such an EC-funded project that aims at developing an integrated platform for realizing online one-stop Government. Key innovations of eGOV are: a global access point to enter different governmental services and information at distinct levels of public administration and with different devices; and the development of online one-stop Government process models. To develop an integrated one-stop Government platform, different requirements have to be fulfilled. Here, an holistic development approach provides an important guideline to address different aspects impacting advanced one-stop Government systems. With such an holistic approach, despite the technical developments, integrated process models for online public service delivery are put forward. Furthermore, the legal aspects framing one-stop Government developments and the social impacts of such developments for different user groups are investigated.

Integrated Service Modelling for Online One-stop Government

One-stop government is an important development within the current initiatives of e-government. It refers to a single point of access to electronic services and information offered by different public authorities. Online one-stop government requires all public authorities to be interconnected and that the customer (citizen, private enterprise or other public administration) is able to access public services by a single point even if these services are provided by different public authorities or private service providers. It further requires that the customer be able to access these services in a well-structured and understandable manner meeting his/her perspectives and needs. Developing a national one-stop government portal calls for an integrated service modelling that requires a holistic reference framework. This paper discusses the general requirements for one-stop government. It then introduces the requirements for providing electronic public services in a one-stop platform. This is followed by an inv...

Electronic business invading the public sector: considerations on change and design

Electronic Business (e-Business) is a powerful guiding vision for the transformation which the commercial and governmental sector have to undergo. Compared to Commerce, obviously, Government is lagging behind. Yet, for the public sector the rampant success of e-Commerce has acted as a stimulus prompting to raise the engagement in e-Business. Change occurs far and wide and becomes a topic of reflection not only on Business and Government, but also on design. Here, we can only highlight some issues and so, just three issues are treated: impacts on Government; transfer of concepts and systems; consequences on the design of administrative systems.

e-Government at a Decisive Moment: Sketching a Roadmap to Excellence

e-Government has become both: a vision and the world we live in. With information as the lifeblood of modern society, the enabling potential of information technology is recognised sufficiently in its full extent. So e-Government has become a guiding vision that provides a comprehensive view of citizen demands and their fulfilment in administrative processes. Moreover, Government has turned into e-Government: thus all – agencies, citizen and enterprises – draw heavily on increased use of information, on more sophisticated service provision, on a creative and thorough redesign of existing administrative processes, and on innovative forms in assisting governance.

Trends in electronic government: managing distributed knowledge

Electronic government (e-government) is as a guiding vision for public administration. It stands for using the Internet, for re-engineering administrative processes, for achieving a virtual administration. It stands also for supporting an active participation of the citizens in democracy. Modern telecommunication infrastructures provide the basic means for co-operation over time and distance. In this way e-government involves many locally and temporally dispersed human actors and machine agents that hold knowledge required in performing administrative work. The challenge for e-Government is to find a successful way of re-engineering and distributing the administrations knowledge. Theoretical and practical insight is provided into various perspectives influencing knowledge management for e-government. These perspectives need to be integrated in a comprehensive approach to develop e-government strategies and systems.

Knowledge Management in Electronic Government

The free movement of persons is a concept that has been settled on a European strategic level. In reality there are still a lot of steps to be followed in order to achieve this ambitious goal of mobility. Both the complexity of and the problems encountered in pan-European administrative processes interfere this aim. Interferences can be Knowledge Management (KM) specific (decentralization, implicitness, non-reusability, creation of process knowledge) as well as KM non-specific problems (linguistic, legal, document handling, cultural problems). To solve these problems both administrative processes have to be made transparent to the citizen and the knowledge about these processes has to be managed. Thus, public administrations must interact seamlessly vertically (Europe, nation, region, municipality) as well as horizontally (between countries) with each other. This implies not only the use of standards but also the interoperability of process systems. Coping with the above mentioned problems a solution requires Knowledge Management. As public administrations are in strongly heterogeneous legal environments a centralised and harmonised solution is not feasible. In this article a possible solution is described that has been developed in the European research project “InfoCitizen”. Within InfoCitizen a Distributed Knowledge Repository and an intelligent agent-based Architecture is identified as an appropriated approach. InfoCitizen is a “proof-of-concept” project in which a Distributed Knowledge Repository and an agent platform are core concepts. The experiences and intermediary results of the successfully ongoing project are presented. 1 Citizens’ Mobility in Theory and Practice In 1985 free movement of persons was decided in the Schengen Agreement. Being integrated into the EU Treaty with the Treaty of Maastricht in 1993 it aims at increasing the mobility of work forces inside the European Union (EU). [1] This enhanced mobility should improve the flexibility of the employment market inside the EU. The lack of mobility of work forces causes significant macroeconomic damages on the employment market and the current situation should therefore be improved. [2]

Ontology for an e-participation virtual resource centre

E-participation has become an important topic of research and development. DEMO-net, an EC-funded Network of Excellence within the 6th Framework Program of the EC, investigates this field of research and practice. To provide the knowledge gathered in the project in a structured way to different audiences, a (virtual) centre of excellence shall be developed and implemented. Such a knowledge portal shall serve as a central entry point for the various stakeholders to a) learn about the field e-participation and its characteristics from a scientific perspective, b) to provide an instrument to further structure the field, c) to thematically cluster projects and knowledge, and at the same time d) to provide a practical instrument for the users to overview the projects and knowledge in the field. The virtual resource centre shall enable stakeholders to find relevant information and knowledge on e-participation in an effective way. To structure that information and to provide it in a reasonable way, an e-participation ontology seems to be a proper concept. The contribution will introduce a draft of the e-participation ontology, which is being developed among partners in the project. The ontology is based on scientific findings which have been developed along the first periods activities in the project.

Future e-Government Research: 13 Research Themes Identified in the eGovRTD2020 Project

E-government research has become a recognized research domain and many policies and strategies are formulated for e-government implementations. Most of these target the next few years and limited attention has been giving to the long term. The eGovRTD2020, a European Commission co-funded project, investigated the future research on e-government driven by changing circumstances and the evolution of technology. This project consists of an analysis of the state of play, a scenario-building, a gap analysis and a roadmapping activity. In this paper the roadmapping methodology fitting the unique characteristics of the e-government field is presented and the results are briefly discussed. The use of this methodology has resulted in the identification of a large number of e-government research themes. It was found that a roadmapping methodology should match the unique characteristics of e-government. The research shows the need of multidisciplinary research.

Processes in e-Government – A Holistic Framework for Modelling Electronic Public Services

Recently, process modelling and process reorganisation have been recognised as being of utmost importance for making e-government implementations success. Due to the high complexity of governmental processes and organisational structures, appropriate modelling methodologies and tools are, however, not really available yet. In our contribution, we describe the needs for a comprehensive Business Process Management methodology and toolkit targeted for the public sector. We present a solution to support public administrations in the reorganisation and re-engineering of administrative processes towards online service provision.

A holistic approach for providing security solutions in e-government

E-government is now at a stage where effective and secure online transaction services have to be provided, yet initial security is primarily technical. Many technical concepts and tools have been developed in the scope of e-commerce. Applying these to the scope of e-government needs careful investigations. Security aspects do not, however, only concern technical aspects. The particular security needs of e-government must also be established from a non-technical viewpoint, and differentiated from the scope of e-commerce. This presents a unique challenge regarding processes, judicial factors and strategies. In this contribution, we suggest a holistic concept that integrates security aspects from the strategic level down to the data and information level in order to address different security aspects in a comprehensive way.