This chapter reveals the overview of electronic government (e-government), the adoption of e-government, the digital era governance (DEG) and new public management (NPM), and the significance of e-government in the digital age. E-government is the use of information and communications technology (ICT) to improve the activities of public sector organizations. E-government can open new opportunities for city and local governments to engage in governance by requiring the reforms of underlying working processes. E-government can advance the local democracy by improving the access to information and deepening the citizens' participation in the policy-making process. E-government offers a path to sustain with the civil society and the private sector to design effective services and tools to execute policies. The chapter argues that mastering e-government has the potential to enhance organizational performance and achieve strategic goals in the digital age.
TopBackground
Regarding e-government, ICT is an effective instrument for reducing the role of bureaucracy in government organizations (Cordella & Tempini, 2015). There has been a social evolution on the Internet recognized as the Web 2.0 (Waters, Burnett, Lamm, & Lucas, 2009). Web 2.0 is characterized by enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and through services with rights granted to use content in the new and exciting contexts (Chadwick, 2009). The adoption of ICT in public sector organizations has been associated with the e-government reform programs aiming at reducing the inefficiencies generated by the bureaucratic burden (Osborne & Plastrik, 1997). The levels of human and technological development of a country are the driving forces of e-government (Siau & Long, 2009).
Global interest in e-government has produced a wide range of internal and external evaluations of national performance in service delivery (Taylor, Marshall, & Amiri, 2010). E-government standard describes how governments work, share information, and deliver services to the internal and external stakeholders (Sun, Ku, & Shih, 2015). ICT artifacts are recognized as the linear catalysts of transformation of public sector organizations and structures (West, 2004). ICT diffusion leads to transaction integration, process reengineering, and administrative transformation, toward creating the citizen-centric government (Zhang, Meng, Guo, Yin, & Luo, 2015). Governments' investments in public sector information systems are correlated with organizational transformations designed to enhance the policy effectiveness (Gil-Garcia & Pardo, 2005).