CHAPTER 1

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_______________________________________

ELECTRONIC
GOVERNMENT

Introduction to the Domain

HANS J. SCHOLL
 
 
Electronic government (EG) is a domain of action and study addressing
“the use of information and technology to
support and improve public
policies and government operations, engage citizens, and provide
comprehensive and
timely government services” (Scholl, 2007b, p. 21).
EG is a multidisciplinary domain of study. Core disciplines that
contribute to this domain comprise various
strands of computer science
(e.g., human-computer interaction—HCI for short), the information
sciences,
traditional information systems (IS) research, administrative and
organizational sciences, political science,
sociology, and psychology,
among others. In this domain, few phenomena and objects of study, if any,
are “owned”
by any one discipline (Scholl, 2007a, p. 74). Hence,
monodisciplinary research undertakings in EG generally
produce partial
results and need to be integrated into the greater scheme of inquiry.
As in other multidisciplinary research endeavors, such integration poses a
number of known and new problems. For
example, what counts for an
accepted standard of inquiry in one discipline might not enjoy an equivalent
or even
any standing in another discipline (Scholl, 2007b). Consequently,
the integration of EG research results across
participating disciplines
requires an inspired dialogue, particularly in cases where scientific
paradigms differ.
Disciplines that are committed to “hard” and “quantitative” standards of
inquiry find it easier to understand and
integrate their “pure” and “applied”
research results across their disciplinary boundaries. Similar observations
have been made for research traditions that are mainly “soft” and
“qualitative.” However, when it comes to
bridging the gulf between “hard”
and “soft” sciences, the dialogue between disciplines, if any, is challenging.
EG is no exception to this experience (also known from other integrative
sciences such as information sciences)
(Scholl, 2007b).
Yet over the years, the community of EG scholars has developed a
remarkable interest in and a capacity to
appreciate research results from
“across the gulf.” At EG conferences and in EG publications, research from
all
four quadrants (“hard/pure,” “hard/applied,” “soft/pure,” and “soft/
applied”) is presented side by side, with
this book serving as a case in point.
Some scholars have criticized the “lack of clarity and lack of rigor”
(Heeks
and Bailur, 2007), low standards, and theoretical shallowness of much EG
research (Grönlund, 2005, 2006;
Heeks and Bailur, 2006; Norris, 2005),
suggesting that standards be taken from one discipline or another to
govern
the EG research enterprise (Scholl, 2007b).
However, as an integrative academic endeavor, EG has virtually
established academic pluralism as standard. The
enormous speed with
which EG practice has unfolded on all levels of government, in all
branches, and around the
world, has produced a plethora of new practical
and research challenges. Those challenges, however, transcend
disciplinary
boundaries and involve practitioners and academics from fairly diverse
professional
and disciplinary backgrounds in practical projects (Delcambre
and Giuliano, 2005; Scholl, 2007a).
In other words, the complexity encountered in practice helps drive the
study domain toward integration and
cross-disciplinary understanding.
While the integration of disciplinary results in a multidisciplinary
(comparative and interpretive) fashion represents one level of integration, a
higher level of integration would
result if the research designs were
integrated between participating disciplines. This higher-integrated
interdisciplinary type of research has not shown up in numbers in EG.
Interestingly, while some scholars bemoan a
certain lack of “rigor” in
portions of EG for reasons discussed previously (Grönlund, 2005; Heeks
and Bailur,
2006), numerous practitioners attest that EG research in general
has a very high relevance to practice. Due to
its multidisciplinary nature,
the domain is unlikely to produce any unifying grand theory of EG.
However, as an
integrative academic endeavor, EG has much to offer not
only to practice but also to its participating
disciplines and to the movement
toward interdisciplinarity in scientific research (Delcambre and Giuliano,
2005).
This volume conveys the multidisciplinary nature of EG. Its
contributions also mirror and represent the rapid
development of EG in both
academia and practice (Heeks and Bailur, 2007) since its early beginnings
in the
mid-1990s. EG, which the U.S. National Science Foundation refers to
as “digital government,” has produced a rich
account of domain-specific
knowledge with over 2,600 peer-reviewed contributions between 1997 and
2009.
Major academic publishers (Emerald, Elsevier, IOS Press, Springer,
Taylor and Francis, and others) have dedicated
journals and monograph
series to EG. The leading scholars in the domain regularly meet at three
major annual
conferences: (1) the Hawaii International Conference on
System Sciences (HICSS) hosts a dedicated EG track; (2)
the Digital
Government Society of North America holds the annual “dg.o” conference,
and (3) the Europe-based IFTP
(International Federation of Information
Processing) EGOV conference. All three EG tracks and conferences have a
near decade-long track record and together produce some 90 to 100 peer-
reviewed research papers per annum. For
the past decade, the body of EG
knowledge has grown at a steady annual rate. While the study domain of
EG is far
from reaching maturity, it is now well beyond a state of early
infancy. This book showcases current EG research
and represents a
snapshot of the state of the domain. However, it cannot and does not claim
to cover this
multifaceted and wide domain in its entirety.
When we use the acronym EG, we usually refer to electronic government
as the academic study domain. In
circumstances where this may be
misleading or confusing, we will also use the acronyms EGR for academic
electronic government research and EGP for electronic government
practice. Further, we will use EGIS to refer to
electronic government
information systems, as opposed to ECIS for e-commerce information
systems, or IS for
multipurpose information systems.
The following acronyms have been established in the EG literature, and
we use them accordingly in this volume:
G2G for government-to-
government, G2B for government-to-business, G2C for government-to-
citizen, G2E for
government-to-employee, and IEE for internal
effectiveness and efficiency. Three of those acronyms correspond to
those
used in the e-commerce literature. These are B2B for business-to-business,
B2C for business-to-customer,
and B2G for business-to-government, which
we also use in this volume.
Further, throughout this volume we use the acronyms IT and ICT
interchangeably, which refer to information
technology (IT) and
information and communication technology (ICT). These acronyms are
frequently used in a
concept-combining fashion such as IT strategy, ICT
infrastructure, or IT portfolio.
Over the years, several strands of study have developed within EG, most
of which we represent in this volume. A
small but important strand is
concerned with the foundations, the standards of inquiry, and
interdisciplinarity in EG. Another major strand of EG is dedicated to
organization,
management, and transformation, which closely relates to and
overlaps with a strand
focused on infrastructure and interoperability. Also
partially
overlapping with the former two, but distinct in emphasis from
them, is the strand of EG services research. Additionally, from the early
beginnings of EG, we have witnessed a strong
interest in EG-related policy
and governance issues as well as in topics such as EG-facilitated
participation, inclusion, and democracy. Minor strands, not represented
here,
are EG design studies, other EG-related computer-science research,
and EG security.
The volume comprises four parts. The first part, the introduction to the
domain and the chapter on the state of
the domain belong to the foundations
strand. The second part presents research from the strand of organization,
management, and transformation. The third part showcases studies on
policy, participation, and governance.
Finally, the fourth part covers the
strand of infrastructure, interoperability, and services. In the following
pages, the chapters of the four parts are introduced.
 The part on foundations consists of this introduction to the domain and
one chapter. In “Electronic Government: A
Study Domain Past Its Infancy,”
I analyze the foundations and structures of EG, which has experienced rapid
evolution and steep growth since its beginnings in the late 1990s. I then
discuss the disciplinary diversity of
the domain, assess where the domain
currently stands, present its publication trends, and consider where EG
might
be heading.
The part on organization, management, and transformation comprises a
total of five chapters. Some scholars have
questioned the transformative
impact of EG, while others have argued that transformative changes
become visible
only after some longer periods of time have elapsed. In
“Deep E-Government: Beneath the Carapace,” Frank
Bannister argues that
a simple cause-effect perspective on the impact and efficacy of EG might be
insufficient,
since it overemphasizes technology as a single variable in an
overall equation, which involves other major
variables and their complex
interaction. Much research, he argues, has only scratched the surface of the
problem
space, which he presents as a multilayered structure with a deep
administrative core as the innermost layer. EG
research, which only
inquires around the outer shell, might be incapable of discovering any
deeper changes or
outright transformation, Bannister asserts. Rather, EG
should reach to include the deeper and inner layers of
government to
understand what the impact of EG is on all those levels. Bannister illustrates
the analytical power
of the proposed approach by means of four short case
studies. He concludes that the layered analytical approach
helps bring to the
surface the major impacts of EG in the deeper layers of government.
According to the author,
those impacts would not immediately be visible by
analytical approaches ignorant of the various layers of
government.
Research on “deep EG” would brace for a deeper and broader conceptual
interpretation, which moves
beyond a mere technology focus and invokes
insights gained from other disciplines such as public administration
and
political science.
In the chapter titled “Defining the Transformation of Government: E-
Government or E-Govemance Paradigm?” Rowena
Cullen expands the
perspective on transformation by distinguishing transformation in the
administrative domain
(government, e-government, and information
systems) from transformation in and of the participative domain
(governance, e-democracy, and e-participation). From an administrative
perspective, achieving administrative
goals such as business process
improvement, cost containment or reduction, and efficiency and
productivity gains,
might yield certain transformative effects and outcomes
in the administrative context. In contrast, from a
participative perspective,
different transformative effects and outcomes might be observable, for
example, in
interactor relationships, governance structures and processes,
and the extent and nature of stakeholder
involvement. In Cullen’s view,
confusing the two domains and their distinct transformative potentials
misguides
research and practice in either one. Transformative outcomes in
one domain might even be obscured when viewed
through the lens of the
other domain.
Under the title “Evaluating E-Government Implementation: Opening the
Interdisciplinary Door,”
Maddalena Sorrentino and Marco de Marco use
Maggi and Albano’s theory of organizational action (TOA), which
provides
an interdisciplinary perspective on evaluating organizational action and
outcomes. Based on TOA, the
authors take a process view of the
organization. EG appears as an organizational action (not just as technology
diffusion), for which actors are elements that make decisions under
bounded rationality regarding the process
flow and its outcomes. Since
ultimate outcomes are not knowable or determined ex ante, EG success can
be
evaluated only relative to various and variable criteria (e.g., specific
stakeholders’ desires). This excludes
the possibility of meaningfully
comparing and evaluating EGIS and their efficacy unless their specific
contexts
are also accounted for. The authors maintain that Maggi and
Albano’s theory of action not only helps scholars
integrate and interpret
research from different disciplines on the subject but also supports
practitioners in
understanding and making choices in the organizational
process of EG.
From its early beginnings in the late 1990s, EG has been interested in
measuring the progress of EGIS
proliferation, their efficacy and
transformational impact, and the degree of sophistication of both deployed
systems and applied methods. Tony E. Wohlers adds to this strand of
research in the chapter on “Local
E-Government Sophistication in the
United States.” As Wohlers points out, local governments, private
businesses,
and citizens embrace and benefit from the growing Web
presence and availability of government online services.
The higher
visibility and transparency of local government as facilitated by EGIS lead
to increased trust in G2C
and G2B/B2G relationships. However, significant
differences in EG sophistication remain among local governments
across
the United States. Wohlers does not attempt to explain those differences and
similarities in
local-government EG sophistication along the traditional
lines of size and resource richness, since those expose
variance that is too
high to suggest any correlation. Instead, he invokes Elazar’s framework,
according to which
certain political subcultures dominate politics and shape
government posture in the various geographic areas of
the United States.
Following Elazar’s line of reasoning, Wohlers concludes that moralistic,
traditionalistic, and
individualistic subcultures leave their distinct imprints
on local governments’ EG engagement and sophistication
with respect to
communication with citizens, online service availability, and citizen
participation in government
and community affairs. In his study, Wohlers is
able to show that his model of EG sophistication has greater
explanatory
power than the traditional models of size and resource richness.
The concept of mobile government (MG), that is, “the use of information
and mobile technology to support and
improve public policies and
government operations, engage citizens, and provide comprehensive and
timely
government services,” emerged in practice a few years after the
appearance of EG. Some practitioners and also
some scholars have argued
that MG is different from EG. Other practitioners and scholars hold that
MG is an
extension, or even an instantiation, of EG. It seems that the
narrower EG is defined (e.g., to certain technology
uses), the more MG
stands out as different, while when using the definition of EG advanced by
the Digital
Government Society of North America as cited earlier, the more
MG appears as an integral part of EG. In the
chapter titled “M-Government
and E-Government: Transformative Relationships,” Norm Archer shows
how inextricably
the two concepts are intertwined. Archer refers to MG as a
subset of EG. In his review of studies about MG, it
becomes obvious that
mobile EGIS need to be smoothly integrated into the stationary EGIS
landscape. According to
Archer’s analysis, most mobile applications are
currently found in the areas of IEE, G2C, G2E, and G2G. He also
concludes
that transformational effects of mobile EGIS also depend on concurrent
transformational outcomes in the
area of stationary EGIS. The research
suggests that MG might be a major transformational force in future EG
developments.
The part on policy, participation, and governance contains three chapters.
Vendor defaults, that
is, preselected options in software packages as well as
software standards, powerfully enact policies and impose
assumptions on
how human actors will or should use the respective software instrument.
While human actors
maintain certain degrees of freedom and in turn
influence the enactment of the software instrument according to
their needs,
defaults and standards might still predetermine and even manipulate uses of
software instruments and
outcomes in certain ways and to a certain extent.
This is the basic thesis in Rajiv Shah and Jay P. Kesan’s
chapter on
“Software as Governance.” The authors discuss illustrative cases on the
effects of defaults and
standards and suggest that EGIS and EGIS-related
policies should be crafted in ways that account for those
behavior-
regulating mechanisms. The authors also point out that standard-setting or
standard-framing policies may
not immediately lead to the desired
outcomes, but might even have some unintended side effects.
Voting as a central element of democratic participation and governance
has attracted the interest of EG
practitioners and scholars alike. In the
United States, the general elections of 2000 sparked legislation (the
Help
America Vote Act/HAVA), which attempted to overcome observed
deficiencies and outright irregularities that
engulfed the 2000 election,
which was held the traditional way. However, young countries such as
Estonia did not
shy away from testing radically new approaches, and they
pioneered voting over the Internet as early as 2005.
Encouraged by the
positive experience, Estonians were offered electronic voting for the general
elections in 2007
as well. While Internet voters in that country still
remained a small minority of less than 5 percent of eligible
voters,
electronic voting had increased more than threefold over the 2005 numbers.
But old democracies are also
beginning to ponder the potential of e-voting.
Under the title of “Lessons Learned from the E-Voting Pilots in
the United
Kingdom,” Alexandras Xenakis and Ann Macintosh give a comprehensive
account of e-voting initiatives
and development in the United Kingdom.
The pilots in Britain focused first on electronically registering voters
and
then during elections providing the choice of casting votes at electronic
kiosks, touch-tone phones, or the
Internet, in addition to traditional polling-
place and paper-based methods. While numerous organizational
problems
surfaced in the pilots during those elections, a number of important lessons
were learned. The path to
increased use of electronically based methods
seems to have become more charted out and better understood.
Conducting
elections is not like any other government service; it is rather the
government service in a
democratic system. The authors conclude that more
practical work and more research are needed to explore the full
potential of
the e-voting process.
While over the years EGIS have advanced internal efficiency and
effectiveness in government and have also helped
to build a bridge for
serving citizens and businesses quite effectively, the majority of those first-
generation
systems and methods still represents the traditional paradigm of
system design and system enactment, which
emphasizes functionality and
usability. However, next-generation EGIS might be guided by another
paradigm, which
revolves around the human actor’s individual need and
experience. Such an approach would be inherently
interdisciplinary in
nature, involving social science research as well as human-computer
interaction research. In
“Designing E-Government: Exploring the Potential
of New Information and Communication Technology Paradigms for
Democratic Purposes,” Teresa M. Harrison and James P. Zappen use the
case of Web 2.0 to discuss the dimensions
and potential of a new
information- and experience-centric system design paradigm for EGIS. The
authors hold that
the new paradigm might ultimately replace the old one.
They illustrate the argument by discussing several design
cases and show
how next-generation system designs might not only be capable of creating
superior EGIS, but might
also shape the process of stakeholder involvement
in favor of increased participation and influence on public
decision making.
The concluding part on infrastructure, interoperability, and services
encompasses six chapters. J.
Ramon Gil-Garcia, Theresa A. Pardo, and G.
Brian Burke add to the stream of EG on integration and interoperation
with
a chapter titled “Conceptualizing Information Integration in Government.”
The authors develop their
definition via several illustrative cases, from
which they derive four interorganizational information
integration (III)
components. For III to happen in EG practice, they find that (1) a trusted
social network must
exist, in which (2) information sharing occurs, leading
to the use of (3) data standards for integration.
Further, (4) an interoperable
technical infrastructure needs to be in place. The authors hypothesize that
for the
success of III, a trusted social network is more important than the
interoperable technical infrastructure;
however, they also hold that due to
their interdependence, all four components are equally important for
practical system interoperation.
Private-sector e-commerce has made popular the notion and practice of
one-stop service, which lets customers
acquire diverse products and
services in a comprehensive fashion from a single point of access and with
a single
request. Similarly, in government, the concept of one-stop service
aims at integrating the services of several
agencies in a way that citizens,
businesses, and other stakeholders experience a smooth fulfillment of their
service requests. In government, such one-stop service frequently requires
process and service integration of
separate and, in most cases, at least
partially independent government agencies, which also need effective
interoperation of agency EGIS. In the chapter titled “Organizing Integrated
Service Delivery: Comparing and
Evaluating Orchestration Arrangements
Using Multicriteria Analysis,” Marijn Janssen and Jeffrey Gortmaker
investigate cross-agency collaboration aiming at integrated service delivery
and find that in order to be
successful, such undertakings require sound
orchestration under the leadership of what they call an orchestrator.
Interestingly, practitioners overwhelmingly voted that the central role of
orchestrator should not be entrusted
to the agencies that contribute the most
to the final outcome, but rather to a neutral entity. The authors also
point
out that certain path dependencies might seriously limit the choices of
orchestration and orchestrators.
The chapter highlights the difficulties
governments face when integrating processes and interoperating EGIS.
Information and process integration in support of one-stop service is also
at the core of Ralf Klischewski’s
chapter on “Semantic E-Government:
Implementing the Next Generation of Information and Process Integration,”
in
which the author investigates the actual state and advocates in favor of
the potential role of semantic
technologies in that context. Semantic
technologies rest on the upfront conceptualization of administrative
processes and information by domain experts, and, as found in pilot
projects, by so doing, those
conceptualizations produce abstractions, which
help manage the integration of processes and information as well
as process
redesigns. Furthermore, Klischewski argues that the resulting machine-
readable annotations pave the
path to technological and (inter-)
organizational readiness for interoperability and integration. He suggests
that early adopters might benefit from initially available funding, which
might give those agencies a jump start.
He concludes that favorable cost-
benefit scenarios might further spur investments in the development of
semantic
EGIS, which would be capable of lowering the interoperability
barrier.
Countries around the world have embarked on EG, which rests on a
modernized IT infrastructure. As highly regarded
innovators, the countries
in Southeast Asia have played significant roles in EG and in updating and
expanding
their IT infrastructures. Under the title “Emerging IT
Infrastructures for E-Government: A Status Report on
China, Japan,
Singapore, and South Korea,” Chee Wei Phang and Atreyi Kankanhalli
provide a comparative overview
of EG-related IT infrastructure
developments in four countries in that region. In all four countries (China,
Japan, Singapore, and South Korea), the authors find evidence of high
investments in numerous projects geared at
creating high-bandwidth
networking capabilities, which sufficiently cover the geography either
wirelessly or with wired networks, or both, such that citizens have
ubiquitous access to information and
computing resources. A key element
in this is the smooth integration of both wired and wireless infrastructures.
The authors show that all four countries, despite their different geographic
situations, are rapidly moving ahead
in their digital infrastructure
development projects. Common themes in these EG undertakings are
personalized
services to citizens, improved safety provisions, and citizen
participation. Phang and Kankanhalli conclude that
while the mere
infrastructure alone would not create the next-generation EGIS, it was
indispensable for the
envisioned advanced services and application in EG.
The four Southeast Asian countries, while on different
trajectories, seem to
be headed in similar directions in their next-generation EG-related
planning.
With the advent of EG in the late 1990s, governments have strived to
improve and extend their services to
citizens, businesses, and other
stakeholders. In this undertaking, publicly accessible government Web sites
have
played an important role. However, so far it has not been investigated
and empirically resolved to what extent
and how the effectiveness of
government service Web sites has an impact on the quality of service, if at
all. By
answering these questions, claims regarding the efficacy and
influence of EG on the business of government and
the governments’
service quality to stakeholders could be better assessed. In the chapter titled
“Modeling the
Relationship Between Web-site Effectiveness and Service
Quality: A Study of State Level Human Services Agencies,”
Eric W. Welch,
Sanjay K. Pandey, and Nilay Yavuz present an approach in which they
model the relationship between
government Web-site effectiveness and
service quality at the state level using national survey data collected
from
health and human services agency managers. The authors introduce a
technology demand model of Web-site
effectiveness for service quality,
which distinguishes between technology supply and stakeholder demand. In
this
model, managerial intermediation connects the supply and demand
sides and also the service quality side. The
authors theorize that higher
technical effectiveness of Web sites is a predictor of higher managerial
Web-site
effectiveness, which makes higher levels of service quality more
likely, and find their hypotheses supported by
their results The authors also
hold that in turn, higher service quality fosters higher managerial Web-site
effectiveness, but find no support for that hypothesis.
In recent years government agencies have increasingly interacted with
one another and exchanged information. But
in so doing they have
encountered compelling challenges. In the chapter titled “Frameworks for
Fostering
Cross-Agency Interoperability in E-Government Initiatives,” Luis
Guijarro studies various frameworks that
governments use to enable and
improve interoperation through EG. Guijarro compares the approaches of
agencies of
the United States, the European Commission, and the United
Kingdom. He distinguishes between three types of
interoperability
frameworks concerned with organizational interoperability, semantic
interoperability, and
technical interoperability. He also finds more
comprehensive enterprise architecture concepts used in government.
Guijarro briefly portrays the paths of those interoperability and enterprise
architecture approaches in three
cases and finds that the more loosely
organized interoperability approaches are easier to implement but at the
expense of their reach, while enterprise architecture approaches are more
difficult to implement but provide the
higher degree and reach of
interoperability.
 In summary, the four parts of this book cover the range of contemporary
EG regarding the areas studied and
disciplines involved. As a consequence,
the chapters showcase different standards of inquiry as they are accepted
in
the various disciplines. Those standards overlap in part. Hence, one major
challenge in EG is to reconcile and
integrate those differing standards and
methodological instruments. As the volume shows, this diversity fosters a
rich research agenda enhancing the understanding of the phenomena studied
in this rapidly expanding domain.

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