2.1.1 What is ‘Government’?
The Internet technology revolution as well as recent advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) enables governments to move towards the e-government era. The letter 'e' in ‘e-e-government’ indicates all form of interactions with government transformed to an electronic form. However, to understand what ‘e-government’ means precisely, it is essential to understand what the term 'government' implies.
According to Grönlund and Horan (2005), government "is made up of a large number of organizations and many different kinds of processes". It is constituted by organizations that differ considerably in the services they provide. These services range from social welfare to road constructions to railroads to education to military defence (Grönlund and Horan, 2005). Pardo (2000) defined government as the means that society pursues to obtain their essential requirements. Examples of government agencies are those who construct roads, maintain the environment, collect and manage taxes, and fight crimes.
Kolachalam (2012) defines a government as: "an institution that meet some of society's most critical needs and any/every member of the society sometime or other has to interact with the government". Therefore, applying electronic approaches to government
will lead to electronic types of interaction between government as an institution and individuals (i.e. citizens and residents) to meet their requisites.
2.1.2 The Emergence of e-Government
Information Technology (IT) has become one of the essential elements of managerial reform (Moon, 2002). It has created many possibilities for enhancing the quality of public services provided to citizens and internal managerial efficiency (Moon, 2002). The rapid developments in IT creates a new means of providing services with e-government throughout the Internet (Baker, 2009). Indeed, when the Internet was invented by the US Department of Defence in the 1960s, no one could predict how this invention would change our life three decades later (Ho, 2002).
The term e-government emerged in the United States from the Clinton Administration (Moon, 2002). They attempted to advance e-government by overcoming the barrier of distance and time to deliver public services (Gore Al., 1993). The Vice President, Al Gore, placed a strong recommendations on the role and effects of e-government in federal services in the US (Grönlund and Horan, 2005; Gore Al., 1993). According to Torres et al.
(2005), at the time when Gore’s report emerged, “e-government was little more than a general recognition of a confluence of information technology (IT) developments and the application and use of these technologies by government entities”.
Elsewhere, in the United Kingdom, the idea of e-government was associated with similar New Public Management reforms by the Blair government which prototyped e-government as a means to increase political participation by the public (Tolbert et al., 2008). In developing countries, the Saudi Arabian government is an example of countries which adopted the idea of e-government in the mid-2000s (Yesser Program, 2014).
However, the history of using information technologies within the business of government organizations can be traced back to the beginnings of the history of using computers. A literature on the utilization of ITs in governments goes back to the 1970s (Danziger and Andersen, 2002). The focus of this literature concerns the use of ITs within governments in internal and managerial work, while the recent e-government literature focuses on external use of ITs, such as the provision of services to citizens (Ho, 2002). Nowadays, research in e-government is concerned with issues such as service processes and decision-making, while in the past, the research on e-government focused on earlier computing issues such as office automation (Grönlund and Horan, 2005).
In the public sector, government agencies have also embarked on ICT investments in Internet technologies. They attempt to take advantage of the benefits of Internet
technologies in extending the means by which public services are delivered to their citizenries (Kaisara and Pather, 2011). According to Kaisara and Pather (2011), “citizens who have grown accustomed to customer-centric service delivery from the private sector, expect the same immediacy of service from government”. Therefore, citizens expect their government to respond to their manifold demands throughout the Internet (Gupta and Jana, 2003).
e-Government is similar to e-commerce in that it was born out of and emerged from the internet boom (Grönlund and Horan, 2005). In recent years, the rapid growth of ICT has had a substantial effect on the way that governments at different levels function (Gupta et al., 2008). The use of ICT by government led to the evolving of the term e-government (Gupta et al., 2008). When mentioning ICT in the literature, it refers to a spectrum of technologies such as Intranet, Internet, Extranet, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and other advanced technologies that range from infrastructure implementation to service and operation improvements within an organization (Gupta et al., 2008). Governments exploited the ICT technologies to leverage their services to citizens (Sung et al., 2009;
Panopoulou et al., 2008).
There are many types of website that have been developed for different purposes (Parasuraman et al., 2005). Portals, online newspapers, shopping sites such as Amazon.com and eBay.com, download sites, sites that provide collections of links for other websites, and job-seeking sites such as Monster.com are examples of the websites available with different purposes. An e-government portal is a form of website that has been developed by a government for the sake of citizens.
It is clear when reviewing the literature that different terms are used to cover e-government sites: Garcia et al. (2005) uses the term 'e-e-government sites' Wang and Liao (2008) 'e-government systems', Yuan et al. (2012) 'government portal websites', Sandoval-Almazan and Gil-Garcia (2012) 'government internet portals', and Al-Khalifa (2010) 'eGovernment websites'. All of these terms indicate the same phenomenon of websites that have a presence on the Internet and belong to government authorities.
2.1.3 What is e-Government?
Digital government or e-government are occasionally used interchangeably (Gupta et al., 2008). e-Services is broadly defined as the “interactive software-based information systems received via the Internet” (Featherman and Pavlou, 2003). Many definitions of e-government have been provided by organizations and academia.
Similar to other concepts of contemporary, there are different definitions of e-government among specialists, researchers and institutions, but most of them agree to conceptualize e-government as the use of ICT to deliver services in a better way for individuals and businesses. Chee-Wee and Benbasat (2009) characterized e-government in three ways based on its definitions, the role of citizens and the implication for development: Virtual socialization process, virtual value chains and IT artefacts. Table 2.1 (Chee-Wee and Benbasat, 2009) lists definitions of e-government based on this characterization.
Table 2.1: Definitions of e-government based on certain characteristics (Chee-Wee and Benbasat, 2009)
Definition
(e-government is defined as) Citizens' Role Implication for development Virtual Socialization Process
The United Nations (UN) is one of the international organizations paying great attention to e-government as an emerging technology and has conducted many studies and surveys in this field at the international level. The UN define e-government in their website as, "E-government refers to the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) – such as Wide Area Networks, the Internet, and mobile computing – by government agencies" (United Nation Public Administration Programme, 2011).
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is another organization that shows interest in e-government. OECD’s definition of e-government refers to the use of ICTs in general and internet technology in particular which is reflected in government becoming better government. The World Bank defines e-government thus:
‘e-Government’ refers to the use by government agencies of information technologies (such as Wide Area Networks, the Internet, and mobile computing) that have the ability to transform relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government. It can be observed that these definitions all describe e-government from a technological perspective. Table 2.2 categorizes the definitions of e-government available in the literature to three categories: technological, political, and potential benefits by e-government.
It is worth mentioning that is a difference between governance, governance and e-government. The terms appear to be similar but they have different meanings. Basu (2004) explains these three terms as follows. Starting with the term governance, Basu (2004) describes good governance as an exercise of political, economic and administrative authority to enhance the management affairs at all level in a country. The electronic means in e-governance indicates support and stimulation of good governance (Basu, 2004). The author differentiates between e-governance and e-government by stating that e-governance is more than a government website published on the Internet, which indicates one form of e-government systems. In addition, e-governance is defined by Grönlund and Horan (2005) as the “the whole system involved in managing a society”.
These systems include all activities performed by not only government authorities but also voluntary organizations, companies and citizens.
"a belief in the ability of technology to achieve high levels of improvement in various areas of government, thus transforming the nature of politics and the
relations between governments and citizens"
"The use by the Government of web-based Internet technologies, combined with processes that implement these technologies, to
a) enhance the access and delivery of Government information and services to the public, other agencies, and other government entities or
b) bring about improvements in Government
operations that may include effectiveness, efficiency, service quality, or transformation;"
"e-government is not only about changes in the area of public administration but also about changes in the area of public decision-making" Internet applications, to enhance the access to and delivery of government information and service to to enable and improve the efficiency with which government services are provided to citizen, employees, businesses, and agencies”
(Carter and Bélanger, 2005)
Nowadays, the phenomenon of e-government has received more attention from practitioners and researchers alike. Bélanger and Carter (2012) note the following examples of special issues and dedicated, new journals. In the literature of IS, several journals have published special issues on the topic of e-government: the European Journal of Information Systems, the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, the Journal
of Cases on Information Systems, the Information Systems Journal, the DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems, and the Journal of Organizational and End User Computing. There are three new journals that are dedicated to e-government: Electronic Journal of E-government; E-government, An International Journal, and International Journal of Electronic Government Research (Bélanger and Carter, 2012).