Abstract
E-government, driven by an ever-increasing and pervasive use of information and communication technologies, is affecting the public sector more and more (Bannister, 2005; Eyob, 2004; Metaxiotis & Psarras, 2004). Many governments across the globe have resorted to instituting e-government initiatives as a way of better positioning themselves in the Information Age (Information for Development Programme [InfoDev], 2004), or seem at least to be showing commitments in redressing the imbalances resulting from the low utilization of knowledge resources and ICT in the economy and governance (Joi, 2004). E-government is enabling government organizations to provide better services to their constituents. The ability to improve citizens’ access to services has made e-government an attractive investment for government organizations, fueling worldwide implementation of such applications (Amaravadi, 2005; Scherlis & Eisenberg, 2003). As an emerging practice, e-government seeks to realize processes and structures for harnessing the potentialities of information and communication technologies at various levels of government and the public sector for the purpose of enhancing good governance. The key issues in transformation are the adoption and uptake of interoperable standards, the development of appropriate business models, the legal and policy frameworks that will facilitate integration, and governance arrangements that support both enterprise responsibilities and crossagency approaches and responsibilities.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Community Management System: This is a platform where various communities and special-interest groups with specialized expertise represent themselves and try to find solutions to specific problems.
Distributed Knowledge Management Model: This is the model that combines the interdependence of one partial product state model to others with the idea of knowledge acquisition rather than just an operational exchange relationship.
Intelligent Agents: This is a software agent that exhibits some form of artificial intelligence that assists the user and will act on his or her behalf in performing repetitive computer-related tasks.
Semantic Web: The Semantic Web is a new technology that intends to create a universal medium for information and knowledge exchange by putting documents with computer-processable meaning (semantics) on the World Wide Web.
Collaborative tools: Collaborative tools are electronic tools that support communication and collaboration: people working together; essentially they take the form of networked computer software.
Groupware Tools: These are specific software tools that allow groups of people to share information and to coordinate their activities over a computer network.
Data Mining: Data mining is a process of automatically searching large volumes of data for patterns such as association rules. It is also called knowledge discovery in databases (KDD).