Lesego Ditibane, Magda Huisman and Nehemiah Mavetera
• to deliver government information and services faster and at a reasonable price to the public and private sectors, community members, consumers, employees as well as other government officials across the country.
4.2 Types of e‐Government systems
The focus of e‐Government systems is to deliver services to four main customers. The following are four different types of e‐Government systems:
• Government‐to‐Citizen( G2C) is the type of e‐Government systems which provide information dissemination like basic citizen services such as license renewals, ordering of birth / death / marriage certificate and filling of income taxes( Sharma & Gupta 2004).
• Government‐to‐Business( G2B) is the type of e‐Government systems which provide various transaction services between government and the business community including dissemination of policies, memos, rule and regulations( Layne & Lee, 2001).
• Government‐to‐Employee( G2E) is the type of e‐Government systems which provides specialized services that covers only government employees such as provision of human resources training and development( Layne & Lee 2001).
• Government‐to‐Government( G2G) is another type of e‐Government systems which are used at two levels: domestic level and at the international level( Sharma & Gupta 2004).
4.3 The challenges in the development of e‐Government systems
The development of e‐Government systems in South Africa has raised a number of challenges which can be defined as chaotic and unmanageable( McClure 2000). Chaotic means total lack of order or simply disorganized and unmanageable meaning difficult to keep under control or within limits. Some challenges of e‐Government systems include providing access to needed information, ensuring privacy and security, changing technology and maintenance and measuring customer satisfaction( Farelo & Morris 2006). From the data collected during the interviews so far some of these challenges include incomplete and ambiguous user requirements and inadequate time and budget constraints. The next section discusses the research method used in this study.
5. Research methodology
This study used the interpretive approach and hence a qualitative research methodology for studying the development of e‐Government systems was followed. Information was sourced from three case studies and data was collected using interviews. Project managers and system developers were interviewed and the data collected was analyzed using specialized analytical software called ATLAS ti.
6. Preliminary framework results
Table 1 shows the preliminary framework where characteristics of e‐government systems matched to the various SDMs that can be used to capture or develop such a feature in the system. For example, if the e‐ government system requires the development of UC1‐Electronic service delivery system that enables people to apply and receive passports or birth certificates, SDMs such as STRADIS, IE, XP, RUP, ETHICS and SSM can be used. On the other hand, systems that allow user participation( UC6) may not be developed using IE and RUP as a SDM.
Table 1 also suggests that for any type of systems that only delivers electronic services( UC1) and is partly an electronic workflow system( UC2), STRADIS is the suitable SDM. For systems that is processes oriented projects( PT1) that also involves number crunching( PT3) and are very big( PT5), IE is the appropriate SDM to be used but if such project is very small, XP is the suitable SDM to be adapted.
7. Conclusion and future work
This paper presented a framework that can be used in assisting project managers and system developers to select a suitable SDM to use in the development of e‐Government systems with regard to the characteristics of such systems. Future work looks at collecting more data to verify this framework.
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