E-Government in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is in the process of transitioning to e-government. Many of the Saudi government agencies have their own web sites; however, most are ineffective. Based on the findings of this study, the Saudis should consider several reforms, chief among which include the following: Increasing the awareness of its e-government program among its employees and the public at-large; making Internet access more available across the full spectrum of society; equipping public facilities for Internet usage; developing a legal framework for secure e-transactions; adopting a flexible approach to technological change and the IT environment more generally; providing IT training to government employees; partnering with the private sector to establish electronic fund transfers; and, finally, fostering 2-way communication between government agencies and between the government and the public.

E-Governance and Development

This article provides a quick assessment of current e-governance policies and programmes to then suggest an alternative approach to the issue of the use information and communications technology in governance process. By focusing on citizens and stakeholders needs and fostering their participation in decision-making processes, governments can be best prepared to provide them with basic services and information, especially to poor and marginalized areas excluded from the potential benefits of egovernance. Pro-poor basic delivery in turn has the potential of fostering stakeholder engagement in public policy discussions at the local level.

The Örebro City Citizen-Oriented E-Government Strategy

This article discusses practices, opportunities, and challenges in local e-government project management by means of a case study involving interviews, document studies, and an element of action research, over eight months. The analysis against e-government success factors finds seven “critical issues”; political timing, resource allocation, political mandate, distinction between administrative and political responsibilities, coordination of departments, dependence on providers, and use of standards. We found these issues open for local choice, influences of strong individuals and groups, and chance. This is a consequence of the prevailing strategic model for the public sector, New Public Management, which leaves these issues to be filled by negotiations among many actors with different roles, goals, and action space. The general lesson is that there is a need for practical ways of acting strategically to reduce the risk level and increase the ability to implement policy.

Assessing Local Readiness for City E-Governance in Europe

This article shares experience on aspects related to the methodology and modeling of a framework of City E-Governance Readiness. We discuss Europe’s progress in this domain using an “e-readiness” assessment methodology: the Integrated City E-Governance Policy Model of the IntelCities Research Project (2004-2007). Practices and trends in 12 European cities are analyzed, drawing on the results of a comprehensive digital city governance survey. A set of propositions are explored about the future of city e-governance. This article suggests that urban governments need to refine their most relevant definition of “e-governance readiness” and the underlying goals and assumptions which shape e-governance outcomes. Cities also need to adapt their approaches strategically and in the light of the increasing demand for “good governance” in an increasingly complex and networked urban knowledge society.

In-Stream Data Processing for Tactical Environments

Data dissemination and information management technologies for tactical environments are quickly becoming major areas of research for both military and civilian applications. Critical to the problem is the need for fully distributed information management technologies that are efficient, adaptive and resilient. In this paper, we introduce and discuss a new strategy for tactical data dissemination and processing based on distributed online learning. Starting from a formal description of the problem we introduce our proposed solution and its theoretical properties. We also present and discuss a number of simulation experiments for different data dissemination scenarios, and conclude the work with a discussion on how such techniques may be applied to critical e-government environments under different assumptions of service availability and information release policies.

Linking Local E-Government Development Stages to Collaboration Strategy

The purpose of this study is to explore the connection between the stages of e-government development and collaboration demands in local government. Specifically, this study analyzes the demand for intergovernmental, interagency, and intersectoral collaborations during the three stages of local e-government development, including e-government initiation, application development, and integration. Based on an in-depth case study, this paper identifies specific collaboration types demanded during local e-government development in the Gangnam district government in Seoul, Korea. In each stage of e-government development, the local government encountered varying degrees and types of resource dependence upon internal and external organizational units. A particular type of collaboration became dominant in each stage as the relative importance of each collaboration type changed.

E-Governance and ICT Enabled Rural Development in Developing Countries

Proactive economic policies combined with the ICT revolution of the past decade have brought about many changes in managing businesses and organizations in developing countries like India. The prowess achieved through this revolution has also led to exploitation of ICT for better governance and rural development. As a result, several ICT projects have been initiated to foster improved governance and facilitate rural development by appropriately linking public and private institutions. RASI (Rural Access to Services through Internet) is one such government-private initiative to promote e-governance and ICT enabled rural development. Our longitudinal research is to analyze the factors related to access to and usage of the services offered through this project in Erode district of the state of Tamilnadu in India. Data for this empirical research was collected through survey and interviews during two time periods (2004 and 2006). Our findings show that the project has largely deviated from its objectives due to lack of government support, non-scalable technology and ownership issues. Based on our findings, we provide a set of recommendations to policy makers and implementing agencies.

Ontological Mediation for Multi-Agent Systems

A major performance factor when gathering information across a platform like the World Wide Web is the efficiency of the search and retrieval system. The effectiveness of current search and retrieval systems is restricted as they do not use the semantics of the data but only utilize keywords. Using a multi-agent system where agents gather information and organize it, creating ontologies, is a very viable approach to the problem. Major difficulties that arise during collaboration among such information-providing agents are ambiguity and data misinterpretation. This is due to the diversity of ontology creators, differences in linguistics, and ontological overlapping. Users may also knowingly or unknowingly add incorrect information to ontologies. Ontological mediation tries to address such collaboration issues relating to ambiguous and unfamiliar information arising due to various reasons. We propose a communicationbased approach for ontological mediation. In the process, we also present a classification model for ontological mediation.

E-Democracy from the Perspective of Local Elected Members

Although efforts for developing e-democracy have been underway for over a decade, recent literature indicates that its uptake by citizens and Elected Members (EMs) is still very low. This paper explores the underlying reasons for why this is so from the perspective of local EMs in the context of UK local authorities. It draws on findings reported in earlier works supplemented with primary case study data. Findings are interpreted through the lens of Giddens structuration theory, which assists in drawing out issues related to three dimensions of human agency: communication of meaning, exercising power and sanctioning behaviour. The paper abstracts categories of agency from the findings and uses these to formulate eight propositions for creating an e-friendly democratic culture and enhancing EMs uptake of e-democracy. These propositions provide an indication for future e-democracy research direction.

Reflections and Proposals on Public Officials Training and Promotion of E-Government

Argentina is a country characterized by successive discontinuities and heavily conditioned by a troubled political-institutional history. This article will argue that only the interaction and coherence between training and management systems created simultaneously as the dynamic expression of change can result in public organizations in tune with the characteristics of the knowledge society. Only those projects that have incorporated from their inception self-regulation, interaction, and readjustment mechanisms may provide answers in times that are difficult to compare with other periods in public administrations. The nation’s problems have never been as complex as they are today, nor did we have tools as powerful as the ICTs to solve them. From a complexity approach, it explores the synergic bonds between the promotion of e-government (EG) and the training and learning processes of public officials.