Patterns for Designing E-Government Programs

Introduction

The first time one read an e-Government strategic plan, always comes to the mind many questions about the process that was followed to design the strategy and how the team worked out its content and finalized its components. One of the common processes that have been used to formulate a country strategy is to look at the experience of other countries or to bring subject experts from these countries to help in formulating the national strategy. This chapter, by underpinning the importance of sharing knowledge, tries to look at the experiences of other countries in designing their national e-Government programs and to capitalize on their experiences to identify and outline a standard designing process. At a macro level, many published e-Government strategic plans include a list of components, sub-strategies, projects, or initiatives without making a clear link between these components or illustrating the cause-and-effect relationships between different elements. Furthermore, many of these e-Government strategies was able to identify the major success factors for a successful implementation of e-Government projects or initiatives but without outlining how to initiate the process of having these success factors.

The focus and scope of this chapter is limited to the design process and does not extend to the implementation and post implementation of the e-Government initiatives. The main objectives of this chapter are summarized by the following questions:

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  Does the design of e-Government follow a Fuzzy or clear Logic?

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  Which e-Government barrier should be overcome first?

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  Which e-Government strategy/initiative has the highest priority?

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  Which is better a process-oriented or results-oriented e-Government implementation plan?

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  Which is better a centralized or decentralized implementation plan?

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  Which is better a budget-driven or a performance driven implementation plan?

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  Which is better a 15 years implementation plan or 3-years implementation plan?

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  Why implementation plans differs from country to country?

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  What are the main principles that each implementation plan should consider?

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  Who owns the implementation plan of the e-Government?

Methodology

The approach to determine the designing process and finding commonality [possible patterns] between different e-Government programs and action plans included the following series of steps:

• 1.

  Review different e-Government programs and action plans from different countries

• 2.

  Apply commonality analysis techniques and finding shared properties then summarizing and grouping commonalities.

• 3.

  Outline the e-Government program designing process and its implementation model.

In order to document the current e-Government action plans, a selected sample from different countries is chosen and analyzed by applying the software engineering technique of commonality analysis (shared properties) to the domain. The sample analyzed included the following programs and action plans:

• 1.

  Saudi Arabia's e-government action plan. The action plan is published online at http://www.yesser.gov.sa/. This site covers the latest updates and information about the Saudi Arabia National e-Government Strategy and Action Plan.

• 2.

  Federal Government of Germany, e-Government Phase Plan . The online resources are found at http://www.kbst.bund.de/cln_012/nn_837392/Content/Service/English/

• 3.

  United Kingdom, Transformational Government implementation plan . Online resources are available at : http://www.cio.gov.uk/transformational_government/strategy

• 4.

  Pakistan, E-Government Strategy and 5-Year Plan for the Federal Government published on May 2005.

• 5.

  Different cases from the United States especially the Department of Interior “e-Government Strategy Governance Framework FY2004-FY2008”