Is E-Government Ready for Prime Time? Internet Computing (04/07) Vol. 11, No. 2, P. 80; Ruth, Stephen; Doh, Soogwan
as it appeared in the March 9, 2007 edition of ACM TechNews.
E-government's chief goal is to connect citizens with user-friendly services that offer state-of-the-art information technologies, but there is substantial evidence to support the contention that e-government is not yielding the maximum benefits in even the most technologically sophisticated nations. The poorer countries usually boast modest e-government implementations, while the United Nations believes e-government can be used to positively effect national policy via the three-step inclusion/access/connectivity process. The UN, Japan's Waseda University, and Brown University in the United States offer comprehensive rating schemes that can help researchers assess national and municipal capacities to support e-government, and the rankings gauge such representative properties as ease of navigation, digital signatures, presence of online services, Web site personalization, privacy and security features, availability of online publications and databases, commercial advertising, audio and video clips, non-native languages or foreign language translation, disability access, automatic email updates, credit-card payments, and premium fees. The Freedom House says the world's leaders in e-government proliferation are countries with high ratings for press and government, yet only 68 percent out of 192 nations are ranked as "free" in both domains. It comes as no surprise that the more developed, richer countries with greater access to technological resources feature more extensive e-government deployments, but the World Bank's Robert Schware offers the sobering claim that only about 15 percent of e-government initiatives fulfill their objectives, while over one-third are utter failures. In addition, he observes that e-government measures are stepped up to win over voters at election time in certain developed nations. Despite these failures, there is still a lot of global enthusiasm for e-government because its potential advantages are long-lasting. Click Here to View Full Article
