Multi-channel provisioning of public services - Department of ...

discussed regarding the autonomous nature of government organisations and privatisation of
government services. This devolution of government (Farooq et al., 2006) is one outcome of
transformational government that is important when establishing the next-generation digital
government infrastructures.
In addition to the pressure caused by ICTs, the conceptualisation of e-governance by Rossel and
Finger also includes aspects in context of globalisation, liberation and state transformation. These
aspects are mainly expressed through the common values and behaviour. The common values in our
model are primarily a description of the long running cycles of societal changes and the values
expressed through these. And while the economic aspects of a globalised economy might cause a
change of values that occur seemingly immediately, these are most probably the results of processes
that have been building up over some time, and the change of values is just an expression of the result
caused by regulation and behaviour over time.
So why is this model important? The model gives an understanding of the environment in which
government services are provided and in which the infrastructures supporting service delivery are
created. The pressure on service delivery increases as better services are provided, with the rise of new
technology affordances and from services delivered to the citizens by actors in a commercial context.
Any change that happens in a part of this model will affect the other in some way not known at the
time where the change is activated. Knowledge of these dynamics should have an impact on how
systems supporting the provisioning of government services are created in the future.
3 PROVISIONING OF E-GOVERNMENT SERVICES
As stated by Chan Kim and Mauborgne (1999), it is inherently impossible to predict the future.
Innovation work focuses on finding insight in trends observable today, seeking opportunity in
combining trends or finding elbowroom in the gap between two diverging trends. Change in trends
might be “a discontinuity in technology, the rise of a new lifestyle, or a change in regulatory or social
environments” (Chan Kim and Mauborgne, 1999). New technology opens up for new channels,
services and markets, which again can lead to new understanding and new requirements. This
described situation fit well to the pre-transformation-stage e-government scenario (Siau and Long,
2005): Computer-assisted processing of services has started, information is online and users are
culturally starting to adjust to the new technology through personal experiences with Internet banking,
mobile services and social media.
Innovation in public sector is not a new phenomenon (Windrum and Koch, 2008), but with the
increasing presence of information systems, there is an increase in complexity and risk associated with
process change. Riedl (2003) mentions two opposing hidden threats to designing e-government
services. One being abstract design, distancing from the actual problems; the other is situated design,
where complexity of architecture comes to the point where the described service cannot be
implemented.
There are lots of smart concepts supporting the development of services, but the holistic IT
architecture to realise these concepts are still missing, and there are many critical engineering issues
that have not yet been solved. (Riedl, 2003)
There is a fundamental need to understand how to create flexible systems that can adapt and change
with demand (Elliman et al., 2007).
With all this in mind, we are now research-wise at a point with the promise of a coming information
architecture that will support transformational government. We can assume that the requirements to
build such an architecture are basically represented by the capabilities to adapt to new operational
requirements and for a system or network of systems of e-government scale to operate.
In this section, we will present two scenarios within transformational government built on the same
principle but providing different views on government service delivery. The first scenario is based on
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