Every country is currently preparing themselves for the fourth industrial revolution, the environment where innovation is the key concept for survival. Most of the countries have developed framework for their e-government development. Unfortunately, most of these frameworks do not contain adequate details on what are the activities required if big data will be used as a backbone of all services. This research focuses on proposing a conceptual framework for development of e-government in Thailand. The proposed framework explicitly contains all important activities to be completed if big data will serve as the core component of all services for their citizens.
TopIntroduction
The Fourth Industrial Revolution1 is coming. With various intelligent technologies combined together, things will change very rapidly. Doing things the same way will no longer survive in the 21st century. As a result, most of the countries in the world already have their clear visions to direct how they would like their country to stay competitive in this environment.
Thailand responses to the revolution by creating an initiative called Thailand 4.0. The aim of this initiative is to transform the country towards “Value-Based Economy”. The value-based economy is referred to shifting interest of the country from generating income for the country by relying on aap large amount of goods, especially agricultural products, to focusing on innovation and services.
Different degree of innovations has been promoted in many countries around the world. For example, China and India have “Made in China 2025”2 and “Make in India”3 as visions to encourage better and more technological industries in their countries. America has “A Nation of Makers”4 which focuses on getting Americans to turn ideas into reality. Similarly, the United Kingdom use idea of a “Design in Innovation Strategy”5 in encouraging their businesses to pay more attention to innovations. Last but not least, one of the world hi-tech countries, Korea, using a concept of “Creative Economy”6 to direct development in the country. Thailand, according to Thailand 4.0., is becoming a value-based and innovation-driven economy by moving from producing commodities to promoting creativity and innovations.
Despite the set strategies of all countries on how they would like to pursue with the revolution, there are 2 important elements that they have to concern, a clear strategic plan and supporting technologies that will allow them to achieve their goals.
With regard to the plan, most of the countries today have developed a plan with a framework for developing e-Government in their countries. In order to efficiency support the value-based or innovation-driven economy, having just technologies is not sufficient, attentions have to be given to management and utilization of data used in or provided by the e-Government systems (Hugo, 2017). A concept called “Big Data” has been widely been applied in handling and utilizing data in order to achieve strategic goals of organizations in both public and private sectors (Thomas & Frank, 2016). Unfortunately, to our knowledge, most of the e-Government frameworks do not consider some important management aspects that can greatly affect performance of the big data systems. This chapter discusses a novel framework that integrate important issues for big data development into an e-Government framework. In order to propose a practical framework, this research focuses on a case study of Thailand and its vision as Thailand 4.0, but the proposed framework can be adapted to other contexts if required.
The chapter begins with giving a background of the topic which includes industrial revolution, e-Government frameworks, and big data. The chapter then discusses issues of the existing works, which lead to this research. This followed by a discussion on the proposed framework and its components. The chapter is then ended with challenges that can be further explored and conclusion.