E‐Government Typologies, Stakeholder Relationships and Information Systems Support: The Case of Services to Employment
Mariagrazia Fugini 1, Piercarlo Maggiolini 2 and Ramon Salvador Valles 3
1 Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Italy 2 Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Ingegneria Gestionale, Italy 3 Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Department of Management ETSEIB, Barcelona,
Spain fugini @ elet. polimi. it piercarlo. maggiolini @ polimi. it ramon. salvador @ upc. edu
Abstract The e‐Government label is used to frame several activities, such as e‐Service, e‐Administration, e‐Voting, e‐ Participation, e‐Democracy. Leveraging the e‐Government“ umbrella term” to refer to such set of e‐activities( which may be viewed as sub‐concepts of the general e‐Government concept) highlights from one side the existence of several interrelated concepts and on the other side the lack of a well‐defined and commonly‐accepted conceptual framework to identify and classify e‐Government implementations with respect to the several“ e‐Government sub‐concepts”. e‐Government can be portrayed as an empirical driven adoption, since all the e‐Government sub‐concepts share the exploitation of ICT to support( very) different government activities. In this paper, we classify e‐Government projects according to sub‐concepts. Since some public services may be classified both as e‐Service and as e‐Administration, while others can hardly be classified, the exploitation of a general term like e‐Government allows for a classification according to stakeholder, relationship types, and Information System( IS) typologies. The investigated research question is whether such classification framework can improve the understanding of e‐Government scenarios and can help e‐Government project design, reengineering and evaluation activities by disambiguating the several involved e‐Government sub‐concepts. We use Services to Employment as a paradigmatic example of e‐Government, due to their inherent nature and to our experience in designing and evaluating employment service systems.
Keywords: ICT for PA, edemocracy, services to employment, service networks, portal data analysis
1. Introduction
Currently, under the label“ e‐Government”, several significances and activities are included, like, to mention just a few, e‐Administration, e‐Services for health, labour, social services, Public Administrations( PAs) in general, and e‐Democracy. In such streamline, the spreading of“ e‐Government” is an empirical driven adoption, since all the sub‐concepts included within e‐Government share the approach of service provisioning and knowledge management towards communities and groups( both customers and citizen groups) and the exploitation of ICT, in particular of( web) services and distributed technologies, to support very different activities concerned with government tasks. Nevertheless, understanding what kinds of e‐Government are involved in a project can’ t be ignored. The many e‐Government sub‐concepts may lead to different conflicting goals expressed by the stakeholders, and may generate diverging requirements for the ICT infrastructure. Such issues and conflicts could lead to project failure when not unfolded and appropriately managed. The exploitation of ICT tools to support government activities may introduce divergences with respect to traditional activity goals( e. g., the inclusion issues arising when ICT‐based services are introduced). Furthermore ICT may considerably impact the information flows occurring among service stakeholders by improving structured information flow efficiency and by worsening unstructured information flows. The overall result may be positive or negative according to the e‐Government sub‐concepts affected and to the type of stakeholders involved.
In the literature and in the communities of practice, the term e‐Government keeps being extensively used in a somehow fuzzy way, although the meanings vary. For example, e‐Democracy is very different from e‐ Administration( Gregg 2001, Gronlund 2005). There are different requirements( e. g., in terms of privacy required from the ICT platform), goals( e. g., for the number of people needed to be reached and the way of reaching them) and stakeholder roles( e. g., in terms of end users, customers, providers and consequently of interaction modes). From our experience and from the literature( Hevner 2004, Kuhn 1996), we can affirm that classifying a project or initiative( e. g., re‐engineering of processes and technologies) related to e‐Government into one of the different e‐Government sub‐concepts is not straightforward. In fact, some projects belong to different e‐Government sub‐concepts at the same time. For example, projects in public health aimed at offering smart cards for hospitalization services can be classified in both areas of e‐Service and e‐Administration.
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