Semiotic Analysis of E-Policing Strategies in the United Kingdom

Technological infrastructure must satisfy business requirements, and more importantly, it must be able to evolve to meet the new requirements. This requires not only a good understanding of business strategies, visions and functions, but also the evolvability built into the architecture. This chapter first presents a semiotic approach to the business and information technology (hereafter IT) systems. This approach treats the IT system as an integral part of the business organisation. The chapter then discusses the applicability of a semiotic framework in the e-government in the UK, particularly in an evolvable architecture for e-policing. The semiotic framework is applied in the assessment of the e-government strategies and systems requirements, and in the analysis of these requirements to the e-architecture. A case study demonstrating the applicability of the framework is conducted to evaluate the implementation of the national Information Systems Strategy for the Police Service (ISS4PS) and the Crime Justice Information Technology community (CJIT) in the UK.

Shanghai's E-Government

This chapter will present and discuss some successful experience of Shanghai’s e-government strategies and implementation from the perspective of a developing country. A case study of Social Security Card System (SSCS) in Shanghai will be conducted to further illustrate Shanghai’s e-government strategies and implementation experience. Differences of e-government implementation strategies between China and USA are identified and discussed, which may provide some useful insights to the other developing countries, especially to those developing countries that are under the process of transiting to the “market economy” model when implementing e-government in the near future.

Participants' Expectations and the Success of Knowledge Networking in the Public Sector

This chapter reports a study of how participants’ expectations of interorganizational knowledge sharing are related to the success of information technology projects that require such sharing. Survey data were collected from 478 participants in six cases based on information technology innovation projects in New York State. Each project was initiated by a single New York State agency, with participants from other state agencies, local government, non-profit organizations, and private sector companies. The data analysis results identified four dimensions of participants’ expectations of knowledge sharing: benefits in providing more effective services, organizational barriers, technological incompatibility, and legal and policy constraints. Furthermore, building on Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), we found that the participants’ expectations regarding organizational barriers were negatively associated with the success of knowledge networking. The less positive participants’ expectations are about the inter-organizational structure and implementation processes, the less likely their efforts are to succeed. This chapter highlights the importance of the behind-the-scenes interorganizational collaboration necessary for public sector agencies to present a coherent public face in electronic government development. The benefits of and barriers to knowledge sharing as they are reflected in participants’ expectations provide an opportunity to elucidate the relevant factors that can facilitate or impede the implementation of interorganizational electronic government initiatives.

E-Government Applications and User Acceptance in Taiwan

E-government has become one of the most important issues in the transformation of the public sector in many countries. However, it is not easy to implement. According to a report by the Center for Public Policy at Brown University, Taiwan’s e-government was ranked the first among the 198 countries in 2002. Therefore, the developing experience of Taiwan may be a useful lesson for other countries. In this chapter, we briefly introduce the history, current status and the architecture of Taiwan’s e-government. To further help, this chapter also identifies the critical factors of e-government adoption in Taiwan, using the Online Tax Filing and Payment System.

Access Control Model for Webservices E-Government Infrastructure

E-government is an exciting area for applying information and communication technologies (ICT). ICT can improve the efficiency and effectiveness in the provision and delivery of citizen services. A critical issue for the e-government implementation is the interoperation problem among heterogeneous legacy government systems. In this aspect, the universal system interoperability supported by the XML-based Web service technologies can be a useful component in a holistic e-government infrastructure. A key requirement of the e-government systems is the establishment and the implementation of the right access policy to the government resources. This in turn requires an appropriate mechanism to specify the access rules. Due to the nature of Web service and the specific requirements in the e-government context, we propose that a more powerful and flexible mechanism is required to express the access policy more effectively in a Web services e-government infrastructure.

The Dimensions of Business Process Change in Electronic Government

Governments at all levels and across all branches have been urged to become leaner and smarter, providing better and faster service at lower cost. Such fundamental change, however, inevitably impacts the business processes governments work by. So far, though, business process change has mostly been studied in the private sector. Electronic government (e-government, e-gov) appears as a potent enabler when reinventing the way government is doing business. According to Layne and Lee (2001), four stages of development can be distinguished in electronic government. This chapter maps the dimensions of business process change into the developmental stages of electronic government, providing a roadmap for business process change through electronic government.

Digital Government Development Strategies

This chapter provides policy makers with a comprehensive framework for developing national digital government strategies. This framework raises the importance of technical and economic situations, cross-country comparison of laws and institutions, and the necessity of considering political contexts. More importantly, it outlines the general developmental strategies and critical success factors for improving the practice of national digital government efforts. To illuminate the utility and application of the framework through an examination of Poland and Taiwan’s experience, this chapter also yields insights into specific considerations for designing and improving digital government.

Building the Network State

The administration portal for Switzerland, www.ch.ch, is based on a powerful meta-database of available resources and services of the public administration and allocates a unique name, the Uniform Resource Name (URN), to every resource. The URN:Technology, adapted to the requirements of www.ch.ch, has become an open standard and a building block of the Swiss e-government platform. This chapter shows why portals in widespread, long-established federal structures with decentralized responsibility for the resources and interlinking can benefit from the URN:Technology, enabling the implementation of the vision of a network state. In this chapter, a blueprint of the network state in Switzerland based on URN:Technology will be presented.

The Paradigm of E-Commerce in E-Government and E-Democracy

During its relatively short history, e-commerce, the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in business, has been more successful and glamorous than e-government or e-democracy, the comparable use of ICT in governments and administration. This may be the reason why many government initiatives try to emulate the success of e-commerce by using concepts, processes, technologies, and approaches pioneered by businesses. This chapter analyses the relevance and limits of this use of e-commerce as a paradigm in government. For this purpose it starts out by distinguishing between e-government and e-democracy. In the following step the chapter discusses which factors have led to the success of e-commerce and might therefore be applicable as parts of the paradigm. It then discusses the strengths and the weaknesses of e-commerce as applied to government. The conclusion will be that there are good reasons to use the commercial paradigm in e-government and e-democracy. However, this may lead to an unintended shift towards e-government. E-democracy may even be weakened by the paradigm, which might turn out to be detrimental to the democratic legitimacy of e-government and e-democracy.

Implementing Digital Government in the Finnish Parliament

The Finnish Parliament has been active in utilizing information and communication technologies in the parliamentary work as well as in communicating with citizens and other organizations. As common in public sectors, work, knowledge management, and communication in the environment is document-centric. A strategic issue in implementing digital government has been SGML/XML standardization. The Finnish Parliament has been a pioneer in the adoption of SGML/XML technologies. The chapter reports experiences from the standardization efforts. The implications of the standardization will be examined from the viewpoints of documents, information technology, work with documents, the Finnish Parliament, and the whole society. From the point of view of a citizen, the major effect of the standardized document production is the improved accessibility to legislative information through the Internet. Plans for new knowledge management solutions and semantic Web services will be discussed at the end of the chapter.