Thorsten Falk

e-Government Success Factors

Electronic Government (eGovernment) has been seen as the silver bullet for modernizing public administrations over last few years. But fact is that the broad variety of eGovernment initiatives results in an evenly heterogeneous picture regarding the quality of eGovernment services provided. Within an international context differences in eGovernment quality may result from nationally specific factors such as e-readiness, legal restrictions, existence of a nation-wide eGovernment strategy, and so forth. But what are the factors which have influence on eGovernment success and which do not result from national characteristics? In order to answer this question we conducted an empirical study in the northern German region “Muensterland”. The goal of this article is to present this empirical study. Internal data from 56 and external data from 70 local municipal administrations was gathered and analyzed with regard of the question: What are eGovernment success factors?

Semantic Business Process Modelling and Analysis

The objective of this chapter is to describe and evaluate an approach for the automated analysis of business process models. Business process models have become a valuable tool for decision makers. To be helpful in decision making the information in the process models has to be prepared for a managerial target group. Modeling of business process landscapes leads to a huge set of data about an organization. To extract the decision relevant information from this fact base can be supported by automated analysis mechanisms. However, the automated analysis of business process models is a complex task due to challenges of processing natural language statements as part of the models. In the chapter we introduce a class of process modeling languages, the semantic building block-based languages that enable an automated analysis of their resulting models. Based on a comprehensive literature study, we identified different deviations and conflicts that usually arise in business process modeling projects. We show that semantic building block-based languages can help avoiding these conflicts. Based on the domain-specific language PICTURE we demonstrate with a case study that building block-based languages can be used for automated process analysis in practical project settings.

Priorisierung von Geschäftsprozessen für die prozessorientierte Reorganisation in öffentlichen Verwaltungen

Seit Beginn der 90er Jahre hat sich die Ausrichtung der unternehmerischen Tatigkeit an Geschaftsprozessen in zahlreichen Bereichen und Branchen der Wirtschaft immer mehr etabliert. Staatliche Einrichtungen, wie z. B. offentliche Verwaltungen, waren jedoch bis vor wenigen Jahren von diesem Trend ausgenommen.

Selecting Processes for Co-designing eGovernment Services

Public administration has been confronted by a series of new demands on the one hand and has been forced to cost and staff cuttings on the other hand. There is a conspicuous trend towards growing individualization, whereby there are increasing demands by individuals on the state, to provide solutions to a variety of problems. Simultaneously, in the context of national and international competition, efficient and effective state activity and support for entrepreneurial activities in a region or country are becoming an increasingly decisive factor in location decisions. For some years, the term ‘eGovemment’ has been universally proposed as a way of closing the public administrations’ modernization and performance gap (Budaus and Schwiering 1999).