Dimitris Christodoulakis et al.
and communication technologies) in order to improve the system by which a nation, state, or community is governed, for the eradication of poverty and the promotion of development.
Goal of this paper is to discuss the relationships between e‐Government and good governance. We suggest that, dynamic simulation provides the appropriate methodological tool to get a better understanding of those relationships, results and unintended consequences( Richardson and Pugh, 1981). To set a short of foundations of e‐Government that provides satisfactory explanation of the current situation and set up a solid basis for planning the next generation e‐Government applications.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: We start our discussion with a short introduction of the relationships between government and governance. In Section 3 we discuss e‐Government in conjunction with good governance and other qualitative / technical characteristics. We conclude in Section 4 where we sketch open problems and our plans for future work.
System Dynamics
System dynamics is a method for studying and managing complex feedback systems( Sterman, 2000). One of the basic principles of System Dynamics is that a system’ s performance is closely linked to an underlying structure of endogenous feedback processes. We suggest that the processes of modeling and simulation in e‐ Government can give a positive effect to all e‐gov stakeholders and especially the policy makers to improve their way of thinking and deciding. Since developing e‐Government is an aggregation of processes that show dynamic behavior where the pattern can be explained by actors’ decisions and actions, system dynamics becomes a formal way of developing and testing hypothesis about the impact of feedback processes on various social and political behaviors. According to Richardson et al.( 2004), a feedback loop exists when decisions change the state of the system, changing the conditions and information that influence future decisions. There are two kinds of feedback loops.
• A reinforcing loop( or positive loop) represents a changing process where the characteristic is growing, decaying, destabilizing, or accelerating.
• A counterbalancing loop( negative or balancing) represents a process implying resistance to change, goal seeking or stabilizing behavior.
2. Governance and government
The purpose of this section is to bring together, partly for reference and partly for closer inspection, some of the ideas and relationships we have presented in the introduction.
Graham et al( Graham 2003) argue that in order to understand the main players of governance at national level, we should identify the major“ entities that occupy the social and economic landscape.” In most cases these entities are: Business, the institutions of civil society, government and the media. In some cases important role in governance have also other entities like military, the church etc. Dominant role in governance maintain also entities like history, tradition, culture and technology. The extent the above entities influence governance is of cause different from country to country.
In a more recent study Dawes( 2009), states that there are various encompassing interactions among social trends, human elements, changing technology, information management, interaction and complexity, and the purpose and role of government. These interactions affect the development of government and governance in the digital age. The following figure shows in a more analytical way this statement.
In order to understand how the entities of the social and economic landscape( also called SEL‐entities) interrelate with government we sketch the causal structure between them, using System Dynamics( Wikipedia 2012, Ghaffarzadegan at al 2011). System Dynamics have been successfully applied for the description of the causal structure of a wide range of systems like social and environmental systems, business, manufacturing etc. In this paper we are primarily using the small system dynamics models as introduced in( Ghaffarzadegan at al 2011). For detailed studies, system modeling and simulations the reader is referred to the bibliography included in( Wikipedia 2012).
121