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This paper reports the findings from an empirical analysis of stakeholder opinions relating to t‐government within a United Kingdom local authority. These t‐government initiatives are related to a national drive for the implementation of t‐government from the UK Central Government. The aim of this paper is to gain insight, knowledge and understanding into important issues relating to t‐government from a single case study, senior executive, decision making and user perspective, and to develop a framework for t‐government.

The paper utilises an interpretive exploratory case study research via structured interviews with senior and strategic executives in the case study organisation.

A conceptualised framework for t‐government is extrapolated from the issues raised in the case study, to assist with the t‐government initiatives for UK public sector and elsewhere.

The paper is a single case study, not generalisable, but may be generally useful (Walsham).

The paper extrapolates lessons learnt, framework and options for successful t‐government deployment, from a senior executive user perspective.

Social inclusion is an important and current issue and is discussed in context of the case study.

The paper brings together the literature, recent discussions within enterprise, United Kingdom Central Government, public sector and t‐government, together with an exploratory empirical public sector case study from a senior user perspective. The aim is to inform theory and practice.

This paper aims to understand the conceptualisation of the notion of transformational government that is emerging within the electronic government domain. It reviewed how transformational government is manifest in the policy and strategic commitments of government departments in South Africa. The study focused on understanding the role of public sector planning towards the attainment of transformational government.

The study is interpretive and qualitative in nature. It provides the outcomes of a deductive thematic analysis conducted on strategic documents of government departments to explore their alignment and support for transformational government.

The paper argues for the need for public sector planning that is focused on citizen benefit realisation. The results highlight the significance of strategic plans for developmental transformation. However, the planning instruments were found to have an inconsistent orientation towards transformational government.

The study is significant in light of the implications of public policy and the associated strategic plans for citizens. This paper also contributes to research on the nascent area of transformational government.

The purpose of this paper is to trace the trajectory of the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project, an electronic tolling (e-tolling) programme based in South Africa, to argue for the importance of taking advantage of similar public project opportunities to introduce the concept of Transformational Government (t-government).

The research uses an interpretive perspective and utilizes actor–network theory (ANT) to identify the roles and interests of the various stakeholders within the project and assess how each stakeholder could have better influenced the project’s sustainability using a t-government approach.

The findings suggest that in the midst of waning global actor interest, and strong local displeasure about specific public projects, public participation offers an ideal opportunity to introduce the notion of t-government, the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to transform government for citizen benefits. The research allowed the authors to posit that public participation projects are solid and indispensable avenues for introducing t-government. Part of this claim is hinged on the view that the specific e-toll project carries a visible ICT artefact, which has embodied its own patterns of use characterized by various viewpoints, values, opinions and rhetoric.

The paper elevates the importance of t-government as a means to bring about practical transformation in government using public projects. The paper suggests how governments can use public participatory approaches to assimilate a new way of working in government.

This paper contributes to research on the emerging discourse on t-government. The paper also highlights the utility of ANT as a tool for understanding the dynamic public sector ICT programmes, their associated complexities and unintended consequences.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the application of UML extensions on the elicitation of the knowledge that is intrinsic to the business processes of electronic government that will be available on digital TV.

Based on the understanding that: knowledge of e‐government is inherent in the applications available to the citizen; these applications aggregate content and services; and business processes result in products or services that are available for the citizen, this study seeks to, through the use of diagrams proposed by Eriksson and Penker, elicit the knowledge intrinsic to business processes, facilitating the development of applications destined to digital TV.

The proposed model facilitates the understanding of business processes and the identification of opportunities for improvement. The application of the BP diagram has enabled the authors to obtain an overview of all elements participating in the process as well as detail the relationship between them in a single diagram to facilitate the understanding of the process as a whole and assist its implementation. The assembly line diagram not only highlighted the interaction between business processes and information objects read and written in the assembly line, but also aided the identification of use cases that support the actors of the system and, consequently, the preparation of the t‐Government application requirements. The activity diagram provided highlights of how the activities that comprise the processes interact among each other and what flow of action is necessary to achieve the goal of the business process.

It is worth mentioning that what is being dealt with here is t‐Government applications accessible via iDTV (a fixed device). It is also understood that such applications are not tied to a specific TV program, since they are treated as resident applications; that is, citizens download them from an STB TV Channel and can interact with them whenever they want, regardless of the program that is being aired at the moment.

The use of unified modeling language (UML) extensions as a technique for knowledge modeling is a domain still little explored in literature. Although UML was originally designed to assist in systems modeling, its application has been extended to business and knowledge modeling.

Transformational government has been on the European agenda for several years. However, progress towards transforming public services for older adults with age‐related cognitive impairments has been very limited. While socioeconomic factors associated with the older adult community which can hinder their usage of governments' online services, partly explain such slow progress, the paper argues that inability of current web‐based technologies and services to adequately cater for specific cognitive impairments of older adults plays a major part in this. Highlighting such limitations, the purpose of this paper is to present the results from a research project currently being undertaken in the UK, Norway and Italy, to demonstrate how assistive web‐based technologies can be developed to assist the transformation of governments' services for older adults with age‐related cognitive impairments.

The research approach includes three phases. The aim of Phase 1 is to develop a comprehensive list of requirements for the development of the first version of the delivering inclusive access to disabled and elderly members (DIADEM) application. In Phase 2, a usability evaluation is carried out from the perspective of the older adult target user group. These two phases include the literature revive, the focus group interviews and the user trials. Currently, DIADEM project activities are about to go into Phase 3.

The key findings of the study indicate that the users of the DIADEM assisted online form filling seemed report comparatively high levels of satisfaction. Furthermore, the innovative use of experts systems has brought significant benefits to the older adults with cognitive decline as the DIADEM technology appears to be sensitive to the users who present high level of cognitive decline, and provides increased levels of assistance accordingly. The paper shows how such benefits can transform the governments' services to older adults with age‐related cognitive impairments when the DIADEM technology is commercialised and diffused.

The DIADEM enabled transformations is not simply about technology. It is an organisational change too. As a result further research needs to be carried out on the challenges around change management, and the level of commitment to change which will be required to achieve the DIADEM enabled transformation in governments.

The paper focuses on transforming governments' online services for older adults with age‐related cognitive impairments. This research area has been neglected for several years by both researchers and practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how to analyse the possibilities for e-government transformations in public sector organisations and how these possibilities can be improved.

The research constructs a model based on a literature review that focusses on the pressure that drives transformations, on the challenges transformations face and on the abilities needed for overcoming these challenges. The resulting model is subsequently used to analyse a successful case and to identify the keys to success in terms of the strategies used to transform.

The possibilities for transformation depend on the organisational and contextual configuration (a public sector organisation and the context it operates in) which is more or less supportive of transformations. The configuration can be characterized by the pressure to transform, the challenges that must be overcome and the abilities to do so. There are some basic conditions that impact the possibilities for making the configuration more supportive of transformations: the interest of powerful stakeholders, the degree of publicness, the possibilities for changing the configuration are path dependent and the factors that matter for the possibilities for transformation are interrelated and might be governed by different authorities which make it difficult to manage and change them. When improving the possibilities for transformation in a configuration, the pressure can be increased, transformations can be made easier to accomplish by reducing challenges and by providing more support and abilities might be developed to better overcome the challenges. Transformation is accomplished through an interplay between actions that improve and exploit the configuration.

The findings are based on a single case.

The public sector should find the balance between making transformations easier and increasing capabilities. The lessons from this research suggest that a more balanced strategy focussing more on eliminating the contextual and organisational challenges that make these projects so complex and providing more support might be a better investment than just aiming to increase project level capabilities.

Just as practice might benefit from changing the balance between increasing project level capabilities and making transformation easier, e-government research might improve its relevance by changing the balance between suggesting new approaches and researching the basic conditions for the exploitation of IT in public sector organisations. While the essence of public sector organisations in some cases makes transformations very challenging, there are still factors that might be improved upon through research.

Previous research has established knowledge about transformational challenges and solutions. Based on this knowledge this research constructs a model that can be used to systematically analyse the possibilities for success, and strategies for dealing with these challenges are suggested.

The purpose of the study is to assess the environmental and socio‐economic impacts and risks of climate change through GIS database management system (DBMS) on land use‐informatics and climate‐informatics. The Dabka watershed constitutes a part of the Kosi Basin in the Lesser Himalaya, India in district Nainital has been selected for the case illustration.

Land use‐informatics consists of land use mapping and change diction, i.e. decadal changes and annual changes. Climate‐informatics consists of climate change detection through daily, monthly and annual weather data for a period of 25 years.

The exercise revealed that oak and pine forests have decreased, respectively, by 25 percent (4.48 km²) and 3 percent (0.28 km²) thus bringing a decline of 4.76 km² forest in the watershed during 1990 to 2010. But, due to climate change the mixed forest taking place of oak forest in certain pockets and consequently the mixed forest in the catchment increased by 18 percent (2.3 km²) during the same period which reduced the overall loss of forests in the region but its not eco‐friendly as the oak forest. Barren land increased 1.21 km² (56 percent), riverbed increased 0.78 km² (52 percent) and cultivated land increased about 0.63 km² (3 percent) during the period of 1990 to 2010. Out of the total seven classes of the land use land cover, five classes (i.e. Oak, Pine, Mixed, Barren and Riverbed) are being changed dominantly due to climate change factor and anthropogenic factors plays a supporting role whereas only two classes (scrub land and agricultural land) are being changed dominantly by anthropogenic factors and climate change factors plays a supporting role. Expansion of mixed forest land brought out due to upslope shifting of existing forest species due to climate change factor only because upslope areas getting warmer than past with the rate of 9°C‐12°C/two decades. Consequently, the results concluded that the high rate of land use change accelerating several environmental problems such as high runoff, flash flood, river‐line flood and soil erosion during monsoon season and drought during non‐monsoon period. These environmental problems cause great loss to life and property and poses serious threat to the process of development with have far‐reaching economic and social consequences.

This study generated primary data on land use‐informatics and climate‐informatics to integrate each‐other for impact assessment and mitigation through sustainable land use as constitutes a part of a multidisciplinary project, Department of Science and Technology (D.S.T.) Government of India.

The main objective of the study is to identify the vulnerable areas for river‐line and flash flood hazard and its mitigation through GIS Database Management System (DBMS) of geo‐hydrometeorological parameters. The Dabka watershed constitutes a part of the Kosi Basin in the Lesser Himalaya, India in district Nainital has been selected for the case illustration.

The Dabka DBMS is constituted of three GIS (Geographic Information System) modules, i.e. geo‐informatics (consists of geomorphology, soils, geology and land use pattern, slope analysis, drainage density and drainage frequency), weather informatics (consists of daily, monthly and annual weather data about temperature, rainfall, humidity and evaporation) and hydro‐informatics (consist of runoff, sediment delivery, and denudation). The geo‐informatics and weather informatics modules carried out by comprehensive field work and GIS mapping than both modules used to carry out hydro‐informatics module. Through the integration and superimposing of spatial data and attribute data with their GIS layers of all these modules prepared Flood Hazard Index (FHI) to identify the level of vulnerability for flood hazards and their socio‐economic and environmental risks.

The results suggest that geo‐environmentally most stressed areas of barren land (i.e. river‐beds, flood plain, denudational hills, sites of debris flow, gullies, landslide prone areas etc.) have extreme vulnerability for flood hazard due to high rate of runoff, sediment load delivery and denudation during rainy season (i.e. respectively 84.56 l/s/km², 78.60 t/km² and 1.21 mm/year) whereas in geo‐environmentally least stressed dense forest areas (i.e. oak, pine and mixed forests) have low vulnerability due to low rate of stream runoff, sediment load delivery and denudation (i.e. respectively 20.67 l/s/km², 19.50 t/km² and 0.20 mm/year). The other frazzled geo‐environment which also found high vulnerable for flood hazard and their risks is agricultural land areas due to high rate of stream runoff, sediment load delivery and denudation rates (i.e. respectively 53.15 l/s/km², 90.00 t/km² and 0.92 mm/year).

For hydro‐informatics module it is quite difficult to monitor water and sediment discharge data from each and every stream of the Himalayan terrain due the steep and rugged topography. It requires strategic planning and trained man power as well as sufficient funds; therefore representative micro‐watershed approach of varied ecosystem followed for a three years (2006‐2008) period.

The study will have great scientific relevance in the field of river‐line flood and flash flood hazard and its socio‐economic and environmental risks prevention and management in Himalaya and other mountainous terrain of the world.

This study generated primary data on hydro‐informatics and weather informatics to integrate with geo‐informatics data for flood hazard assessment and mitigation as constitutes a part of multidisciplinary project, Department of Science and Technology (D.S.T.) Government of India.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the global progress and explore research areas and development trends of open government data (OGD) field from the Web of Science (WOS) database by applying the bibliometric visualization approach.

This paper conducted a bibliometric mapping study on OGD scientific research publications based on WOS from six aspects.

There are six research perspectives on OGD research. European countries and developed countries pay more attention to OGD movement. The 20 most cited and highly influential research documents were identified. What’s more, the analysis of journals level highlights the interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary characteristics of OGD research. Current six research topics for OGD research that have been formed and two major emerging research priorities in OGD research fields were identified.

The limitation is that data retrieval result which decided to include only 180 publications in the WOS-indexed publications produced a bias against research publications published in non-WOS publication sources. A fuller research trend would be obtained with the more extensively used electronic databases.

By dint of bibliometric analysis, this paper may be able to quantify research patterns on OGD, to analyze what has been done in this field and to identify the main research hotspots. Therefore, it can aid academic researchers and practicing professionals in contributing to the field more effectively and advancing scientific progress in the field of OGD research.

The results can also promote the study on OGD movement in academia, government and industry and also enrich the theory of OGD and provide some new perspectives for research on OGD.

This is the first study to quantify and evaluate global research patterns and development trends in OGD research based on WOS database, which provides a quantitative perspective on OGD studies that may assist in advancing the development of the field.