Guest editorial

Citation

Soliman, K.S. and Affisco, J.F. (2006), "Guest editorial", Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 12 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/bpmj.2006.15712aaa.001

Guest editorial

Electronic government (e-government) involves providing service to citizens, businesses, and government agencies electronically. The scope of this Business Process Management Journal special issue on e-government is to provide an insight to research that is being undertaken in the e-government area. After a vigorous review process, we have selected nine papers and one expert opinion. The selected papers provide an in-depth understanding of critical issues involved in e-government.

Zwass in his viewpoint, “The web-internet compound as the infrastructure of digital government”, discusses digital government and highlights that it encompasses two principal domains. The first is e-government, which addresses the needs of all levels of government as providers of services. The second is e-democracy, which is the support for the process of broad participation of citizens, and of those of them who represent others, in the debate, political discourse, surfacing and elaboration of societal issues, emergence of representation, polling, and voting.

The special issue begins with two papers that focus on e-government transformation and e-readiness. First, in their paper, “E-government: a strategic operations management framework for service delivery”, Affisco and Soliman stress that e-government requires a well-defined strategy to provide valuable service at lower costs while protecting privacy and addressing security issues. Extending Heskett's work in service delivery in organizations to the area of e-government, the authors develop a framework to guide government efforts in the successful transformation to e-government.

Second, Koh, Prybutok, Ryan, and Ibragimova in their paper, “The importance of strategic readiness in an emerging e-government environment”, propose that the perceived degree of strategic e-government readiness affects the perceived importance of e-government functions. The findings of their study suggest that government agencies must evaluate how strategic e-government plans are developed, communicated, and integrated into the work environment and conclude that without the proper understanding of the importance of e-government initiatives, employees do not place high value on e-government initiatives.

Two major issues come into play in establishing e-government services: e-document management and privacy concerns. In his paper, “Ontologies for e-Document management in public administration”, Klischewski explores the potential of ontologies for reorganizing e-document management in public administration with the aim of supporting administration in organizing cross-organizational document and information management. The research findings indicate that first, structuring documents and information through ontologies requires an infrastructure consisting of a number of regularities, services and support on the level of organization as well as information technology, and second, a rather small government must be aware of its strategic goals and step ahead carefully in order to avoid the risks of misinvestment.

On the issue of privacy, Belanger and Hiller in their paper, “A framework for e-Government: privacy implications”, discuss the issues of privacy and electronic government. They present an electronic government framework of the various stages of e-government implementation with respect to the relationship between the government and its various constituents, as guided by global constraints.

On the role of business process reengineering in e-government, two papers are presented. First, Becker, Algermissen, and Niehaves provide in their paper, “A procedure model for process oriented e-Government projects”, a procedure model for process-oriented organisation design, with reference to the example of local government building permission procedures in Germany.

Second, Hughes, Scott, and Golden in, “The role of business process redesign in creating e-Government in Ireland”, analyze the Irish Government's evolutionary path to the provision of successful e-government. The lessons learned from this case provide a valuable insight into a possible roadmap for the successful attainment of citizen-centered e-government in other jurisdictions.

This special issue presents three studies that focus on local e-governments in Australia, United States, and United Kingdom. First, drawing on research involving an examination of local government web sites in Victoria, Australia and an in-depth case study with one local government, Shackleton, Fisher, and Dawson in their paper, “E-Government services in the local government context: an Australian case study”, describe the current status of local government electronic service delivery. Their findings suggest that conventional linear e-Commerce and e-government maturity models are not applicable in the case of local government as this level of government traditionally focuses more on active community participation and interaction.

Second, Fagan in her paper, “Exploring city, county and state e-government initiatives: an east Texas perspective”, explores, in two cases, diverse applications that have involved one locale, the city of Tyler, Texas. The first case briefly describes the Tyler Texas e-government portal, an initiative that illustrates government-to-citizen and government-to-business applications. The second case describes a city/county government information technology integration effort that could support government-to-government applications if it is successful.

The third paper by Daniel and Ward, “Integrated service delivery: exploratory case studies of enterprise portal adoption in UK local government”, describes the development and early stage deployment of enterprise portals within two county councils in the UK, West Sussex and Hertfordshire. The case studies raise a number of issues of relevance beyond the public sector, concerning the ability of organizations to understand and gain immediate and longer-term benefits from enterprise portals.

Khalid S. Soliman and John F. AffiscoGuest Editors