E-Government and Public Service Delivery

This chapter aims to better understand what citizens think regarding the currently available e-government public services in Egypt. This is done through an analysis of a public opinion survey of Egyptian citizens, examining citizens’ use and associated issues with usage of e-government portals. This chapter is different from existing research in that most of the studies that examine e-government and citizens focus on developed countries. This study focuses on a developing country, Egypt, as an emerging democracy, which has very unique and important challenges in the delivery of public services to its citizens. The results revealed that only gender, daily use of the internet, and the desire to convert all of the services to electronic ones were important factors that affected the use of the Egyptian e-government portal. On the other hand, age, education, trust in information confidentiality on the internet, and believing in e-government did not play any role in using e-government.

Social Media and Citizen Engagement

Increased access and the convenience of participation to and through the internet encourage connectivity among citizens. These new and enhanced connections are no longer dependent on real-life, face-to-face interactions, and are less restricted by the boundaries of time and space (Frissen, 2005). In this chapter, two cases from the Philippines are documented and assessed in order to look at online citizen engagement. The first case looks at how people participate in promoting tourism in the Philippines through social media. The second case involves their use of social media for disaster response. Previous studies on ICTs and participation in the Philippines have looked at the role of intermediaries (see Alampay, 2002). Since then, the role of social media, in particular that of Facebook and Twitter, has grown dramatically and at times completely circumvents traditional notions of intermediation. The role of Facebook, in particular, will be highlighted in this chapter, and the authors will analyze its effectiveness, vis-à-vis traditional government channels for communication and delivery of similar services. By looking at these two cases and assessing the abovementioned aspects, it is hoped that the use of social media can be seen as an integral part of e-governance especially in engaging citizens to participate in local and national governance.

Citizen-Centric Access to E-Government Information Through Dynamic Taxonomies

This chapter focuses on dynamic taxonomies, a semantic model for the transparent, guided, user-centric exploration of complex information bases. Although this model has an extremely wide application range, it is especially interesting in the context of e-government because it provides a single framework for the access and exploration of all e-government information and, differently from mainstream research, is citizen-centric, i.e., intended for the direct use of end-users rather than for programmatic or agent-mediated access. This chapter provides an example of interaction and discusses the application of the model to many diverse e-government areas, going from e-services to disaster planning and risk mitigation.

The Effect of Trust on the Continuance Intention of E-Filing Usage

Research on e-government is taking a new phase nowadays, with researchers focusing more to evaluate the continued usage intention by the citizens rather than the initial intention. Continuance intention is defined as a person’s intention to continue using, or long term usage intention of a technology. Unlike initial acceptance decision, continuance intention depends on various factors that affect the individual’s decision to continue using a particular system, with trust being one for the most important factors. Therefore, this case study aims to examine the role of trust, particularly trust in the system, on continuance usage intention of an e-filing system by taxpayers in Malaysia. The primary discussion in this case study concerns the e-filing system in Malaysia, followed by the strategies for successful adoption of e-government services and the benefits of e-government adoption, concluding with future research directions.

Kenya e-Participation Ecologies and the Theory of Games

An e-Participation ecology is composed of five elements—actors, contents, traditional culture of participation, existing media skills and practices, and discourses in conflicts (establishment vs. antagonists)—and three macro-dimensions—cultural/traditional, political, and socio-technological–with which the five elements are interacting (Cavallo, 2010). Game theory can be used to understand how a certain actor or a group of actors can develop a successful strategy in/for each one of the three dimensions. Therefore, the concept of Nash equilibrium (Nash Jr., 1950), developed in physics and successfully applied in economy and other fields of study, can be borrowed also by e-Participation analysts/project managers to develop “Win-Win” scenarios in order to increase e-Participation projects’ chances of success and consequently reduce e-Participation’s “risk of failures,” especially in developing countries where they usually occur more frequently (Heeks, 2002). The Kenyan e-Participation platform, Ushahidi, generated a techno-discourse about the rise of African Cyberdemocracy and the power of crowd-sourcing that is probably more relevant than the real impact that these e-Participation platforms had or will have on the lives of normal citizens and media activists.

Low Cost and Human-Centered Innovations in Healthcare Services

This chapter focuses on a change effort for introduction of an e-governance innovation in the operating room management of a medium-sized Italian hospital, which led to higher levels of efficiency and effectiveness at once. The innovative project has made all the stages of the surgical process transparent, highlighting where there is an opportunity to improve overall performance via the introduction of organizational and process innovations. New techniques implemented and the specific factors that led to the hospital’s success in achieving improved outcomes at lower costs are discussed. The chapter concludes by highlighting that low cost and human-centricity are amongst the key characteristics of success of this innovation.

Measuring Effectiveness of an E-Governance System

In the era of economic liberalisation, institutions of higher education in the government sector, particularly universities, are facing tremendous challenges in terms of academic, general, and financial administration, which need effective governance. Recently, some of the universities are trying to adopt e-governance as a platform for such a purpose. However, the design of such a system is very much important, as it has to cater to the needs of various stakeholders in the public system. In this context, the effectiveness measurement of such an e-governance system is really necessary either to improve its performance level by re-aligning its organisational culture or by providing inputs for re-designing the system in order to make it more effective. Hence, the performance of such a system can be known if a human-centric approach with multiple criteria of evaluation is considered in the governance environment. This chapter attempts to determine those criteria by multiple factor analyses carried out for the purpose of considering multiple stakeholders. Analytic hierarchical processes as well as fuzzy analytic hierarchical processes have been then employed to measure the effectiveness of e-governance systems along those criteria, taking an Indian university as a case study.

E-Government System Design and Port Authorities

Port authorities constitute very active organizations that frequently interact with citizens as well as public and private organizations. The employees and administration of port authorities require effective e-government services in order to implement their tasks. The required services should provide effective information flow and collaboration to improve decision making, governance, and integration of all sectors. In this chapter, the authors briefly outline issues concerning the usefulness of intranets in organizations and corresponding services provided to organization employees. They briefly present key aspects of certain recent approaches concerning e-governance and intranets in ports. The authors also present a case study involving the e-government services implemented for Patras’s Port Authority in Greece. The specific port authority has a lot of workload because the corresponding port is the third largest in Greece and a main gate to countries abroad. The case study combined Internet-based technologies with e-learning technologies. E-learning services assist employees in acquainting themselves with newly introduced e-government services. Therefore, e-learning may contribute in the successful realization of e-government projects.

Authentication Mechanisms for E-Voting

The e-government paradigm became an essential path for governments to reach citizens and businesses and to improve service and public performance. One of the important tools used in political and administrative venues is e-voting, where ICT tools are used to facilitate the process of voting for electing representatives and making decisions. The integrity and image of such applications won’t be maintained unless strict measures on security and authenticity are applied. This chapter explores the e-voting process, reviews the authentication techniques and methods that are used in this process and proposed in the literature, and demonstrates few cases of applying e-voting systems from different countries in the world. Conclusions and proposed future work are stated at the end of the chapter.

Technology Design for E-Governance in Nonprofit Organizations

Nonprofit organizations are an important sector of society working to support underprivileged citizens. The operations of nonprofit organizations differ from their organizational size, scope, and application domain. Modern computer systems are quite effective in managing organizational tasks, but the nonprofit sector lacks in technological systems concerning organizational settings. In order to foster a successful use of electronic services, it is vital that computer systems are appropriate according to user needs. The diversity of users and their work practices in nonprofit organizations make it difficult for standardized infrastructure to work optimally in diverse organizational settings. In this chapter, the authors discuss the issues and complexities associated with system design for nonprofit organizations. They analyze important open issues that need to be explored for appropriated technology design in this domain.