icegov2012 proceedings

2012
ALBANY, NEW YORK
UNITED STATES
6 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
ON THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
ELECTRONIC GOVERNANCE
TH
22 - 25 OCTOBER 2012
EDITED BY J. RAMON GIL-GARCIA, NATALIE HELBIG & ADEGBOYEGA OJO

The Association for Computing Machinery
2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701
New York New York 10121-0701
Copyright © 2012 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM) Permission to make digital or hard copies of
portions of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for
profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page in print or the first screen in
digital media. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is
permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or
a fee. Send written requests for republication to ACM Publications, Copyright & Permissions at the address above or fax +1
(212) 869-0481 or email permissions@acm.org.
For other copying of articles that carry a code at the bottom of the first or last page, copying is permitted provided that the percopy
fee indicated in the code is paid through the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923.
Notice to Past Authors of ACM-Published Articles. ACM intends to create a complete electronic archive of all articles and/or
other material previously published by ACM. If you wrote a work that was previously published by ACM in any journal or
conference proceedings prior to 1978, or any SIG Newsletter at any time, and you do NOT want this work to appear in the ACM
Digital Library, please inform permissions@acm.org, stating the title of the work, the author(s), and where and when published.
ACM ISBN: 978-1-4503-1200-4
ii

Foreword
The 6 th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, ICEGOV2012, was held in Albany, New
York, United States (US) from October 22-25, 2012. It was hosted by the Center for Technology in Government, University at
Albany, State University of New York under the patronage of the United States National Archives and Record Administration.
The conference was supported by the Center for Electronic Governance of the United Nations University - International Institute
for Software Technology (UNU-IIST), Macao SAR, which is the ICEGOV Series Organizer.
The ICEGOV (International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance) series focuses on the use of
technology to transform relationships between government and citizens, businesses, civil society and other governments
(Electronic Governance). Established in 2007 by the Center for Electronic Governance, UNU-IIST, the series looks beyond the
traditional focus on technology-enabled transformation in government (Electronic Government) towards new forms, new
paradigms, and new foundations for technology-enabled governance, collaboration and sustainable development. ICEGOV is a
forum where researchers and practitioners meet to test theories, share insights and report their experiences. It facilitates networkand
capacity-building through a diversity of presentation formats. The conference also provides a unque developmental
opportunity for participants from developing countries, nations in transition, United Nations agencies, and from a range of
governmental and non-governmental organizations. Since its establishment, the series has traveled the globe from Macao SAR
(ICEGOV2007), to Cairo (ICEGOV2008), Bogota (ICEGOV2009), Beijing (ICEGOV2010), Tallinn (ICEGOV2011), and now
to Albany (ICEGOV2012); with each edition generating significant local interest and stakeholder engagement.
Continuing the ICEGOV tradition, ICEGOV2012 featured a rich academic, capacity-building and network-building program of
keynote lectures, tutorials, doctoral colloquium, plenary sessions, thematic sessions, paper sessions, poster session and discussion
panels. All these session were built on the contributions from researchers and practitioners from around the world. Individuals
from over 60 countries were involved in the preparations for ICEGOV2012, as authors, reviewers or committee members. The
2012 edition provided a unique forum for rich interactions between digital government researchers in the United States and North
America and peers from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe.
The conference featured three keynote lectures by distinguished experts who offered government, academic and international
perspectives on Electronic Governance. David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, National Archives and Records
Administration, presented the first keynote. Nigel Shadbolt, Co-founder of the Open Data Initiative, Professor of Artificial
Intelligence at the University of Southampton, and Head of the Web and Internet Science Group, presented the second keynote
on Open Data Ecosystems. The third keynote was presented by Dr. Beth Simone Noveck, former United States Deputy Chief
Technology Officer on the Future of Governance in the Digital Age.
Seven tutorials were provided as part of the conference exploring areas such as Contests and Prizes in the Age of Social Media,
Digital Curation for Public Sector Professionals, Open Data, Fraud Detection using Modeling and Simulation for Practice and
Research, Public Value Assessment of Open Government Efforts, and Smart Cities, Smart Government: A Research and Practice
Consortium..
Six plenary sessions were organized on topics including: Value Creation through Open Data Ecosystem moderated by Alex
Howard from O’Reilly Media; Open Government: Vision, Value and the Way Forward moderated by Chris Vein, US Deputy
Chief Technology Officer; Information Stewardship: Policy Foundations for Open Government moderated by Miriam Nisbet,
Director of the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS), US National Archives and Records Administration; Smart
Innovation for Sustainable Urban Growth and Development moderated by Meghan Cook, Program Manager, Center for
Technology in Government; Women and ICTs: Access and Empowerment moderated by Dina Refki, D.A., Executive Director
for the Center for Women in Government & Civil Society, University at Albany; and Celebrating 20 Years of UNU-IIST: A
Conversation about the Future of Government in the Digital Age moderated by Tomasz Janowski, Senior Research Fellow, IIST
Center for Electronic Governance.
An interactive Doctoral Colloquium was co-organized by Elsa Estevez, UNU-IIST Center for Electronic Governance, Macao
SAR and Lei Zheng from Fudan University, China providing doctoral students from different countries and disciplines an
opportunity to discuss a variety of themes related to electronic governance research and topics and issues associated with their
dissertation research and career plans. The colloquium included a keynote presentation from Wojciech Cellary, Professor and
Head of Department of Information Technology, Poznan University of Economics and a representative of Elsevier on how to
publish scholarly articles.
Eight thematic sessions were organized by invited experts from academia, government, industry, non-governmental organizations
(NGO), the World Bank, the United Nations, and New York State Government. Each session drew attention to specific electronic
governance concerns in a particular country or on an issue of particular topical interest.. These sessions cover the following
topics.
iii

• Civic Platforms and Coalitions
• Regional Integration through e-Governance in UN-ESCWA region organized by UN Economic and Social
Commission for Western Asia
• Smart Cities - Sustainable Urban Innovation organized by European Commission, JRC-IPTS, Information Society Unit
• Financial Transparency and the Role of Government organized by the OrgPedia Project;
• Developing Public Value Metrics for Return on Government ICT Investments organized and sponsored by Microsoft
• Big Data Analytics organized and sponsored by EMC
• Bridging the North and South Gap in ICT-enabled Policy Modeling and Governance co-organized by UN-IIST Center
for Electronic Governance, Center for Technology in Government, and the EgovPoliNet/Crossover project
In response to the call for submissions, the conference received 166 submissions from 68 countries. Five kinds of contributions
were sought in the call – (1) Completed research or practice papers (2) Short research or practice papers , (3) Demonstrations – 2
pages in length, (4) Posters and (5) Tutorials proposals. The conference organizers received a total of 98 completed works, 49
ongoing works, 2 demonstrations, 11 posters and 5 tutorial. The members of the program committee and expert colleagues
anonymous peer review (on average, three reviews were carried out for each submission). This process resulted in, 23
submissions accepted as Completed Research work, 10 as Completed Practice/Policy work, 24 as Ongoing Research Work, 14 as
ongoing Practice Work, 33 as Posters, 2 as Tutorials and 1 as Demonstration. This was an acceptance rate of 34%. All accepted
submissions have been included, in revised form, in this volume, which is organized into 15 paper sessions, a poster section and
a tutorial section.
Many people and institutions contributed to the organization of ICEGOV2012. We wish to express our most sincere thanks to the
official host of ICEGOV2012 – the Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, and particularly to the Dr.
Nancy Zimpher, Chancellor of the State University of New York (SUNY), and George M. Phillip, President of the University at
Albany, for creating the enabling environment to turn ICEGOV 2012 into a reality. We also wish to thank Gerald D. Jennings,
the Mayor of the City of Albany, for supporting and hosting the conference in the beautiful city of Albany, New York. We also
wish to thank the conference patron, The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration for endorsing the conference.
We would like to thank our Silver Sponsors Accenture and the Macau Foundation whose contributions have allowed ICEGOV to
be one the premier international conferences in electronic governance. We would also like to recognize Microsoft and EMC for
their dedication to ICEGOV since its inception—it could not have grown without their support. Special gratitude is due to Macao
SAR Government, Public Administration and Civil Service Bureau (SAFP) and Macao Foundation, particularly to Ms. Florinda
da Rosa Silva Chan, Secretary for Administration and Justice; Mr. José Chu, Director of SAFP and the President of the Macao
Foundation; for supporting ICEGOV2012, the ICEGOV global conference series, and the e-Macao Program as the origin of the
series.
Our sincere thank you goes to the host of ICEGOV2012: the Center for Technology in Government (CTG), University at Albany.
In particular we would like to recognize the efforts of Theresa Pardo, Jana Hrdinova, Jane Krumm-Schwan, Meghan Cook,
Alison Heaphy, Paula Rickert, Jim Costello, and the whole CTG team for their time, energy, and dedication to ICEGOV2012.
We are grateful to the General Conference Chairs in particular, David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, National Archives
and Records Administration and Haiyan Qian, Director of the Division for Public Administration and Development Management,
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. We are appreciative of the guidance and support provided by the
International Steering Committee and the National Steering Committee at various stages of the conference planning. We thank
Sharon Dawes for chairing the Best Paper Awards Committee and the members of the committee for conducting a thoughtful and
rigorous selection process. We would like to thank all of the members of the Program Committee and additional reviewers for
their efforts in carrying out a quality review process which is the foundation of a strong conference program. We are most
grateful to the keynote speakers, to the organizers and chairs of tutorials, doctoral colloquium, plenary sessions, thematic
sessions, paper sessions and discussion panels, and to all panelists and speakers for their contributions. We are most thankful to
all authors for their efforts in preparing, submitting and presenting papers at ICEGOV2012. Last but not least, we would like to
acknowledge the efforts of the ICEGOV2012 Conference Committee and the team at the Electronic Governance Center, UNU-
IIST towards organizing ICEGOV2012.
We believe ICEGOV2012 has contributed to the ongoing efforts of building a global community of research and practice for
Electronic Governance that is able to cross not only national but also institutional and thematic borders, and that the contacts,
discussions and ideas in Albany in October 2012 will continue well after the conference is over and continue to build as we
approach ICEGOV2013.
Albany, NY October 2012 J. Ramon Gil-Garcia, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico
Natalie Helbig, Center for Technology in Government, SUNY, United States
Adegboyega Ojo, United Nations University, Macao
Program Co-Chairs
ICEGOV 2012
iv

Table of Contents
Forward .......................................................................................................................................................................................... iii
Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................................................................... v
Conference Organization ................................................................................................................................................................ x
Session 1: Open Government Data
o Beyond Open Government: Ontologies and Data Architectures to Support Ethical Consumption ........................................ 1
Luis Luna-Reyes, Djoko Sigit Sayogo, Jing Zhang, Theresa Pardo, Giri Kumar Tayi, Jana Hrdinova, David Andersen
o Exploring Process Barriers to Release Public Sector Information in Local Government ....................................................... 5
Peter Conradie, Sunil Choenni
o Implementation Framework for Open Data in Columbia ........................................................................................................ 14
Lydia Marleny Prieto, Ana Carolina Rodriguez, Johanna Pimiento
o Increasing Kenyan Open Data Consumption: A Design Thinking Approach ......................................................................... 18
Leonida Mutuku, Jessica Colaco
o New Perspectives for Electronic Government in Brazil: The Adoption of Open Government Data in National and Subnational
Governments of Brazil ............................................................................................................................................................. 22
Ricardo Matheus, Manuella Maia Ribeiro, José Carlos Vaz
o Open Government 2.0: Citizen Empowerment through Open Data, Web and Mobile Apps .................................................. 30
Rodrigo Sandoval-Almazan, Luis Luna-Reyes, J. Ramon Gil-Garcia, Dolores E. Luna, Yaneileth Rojas-Romero
Session 2 - E-democracy & Participation 1
o A Logistic Multilevel Model for Civic Engagement and Community Group Impact in the Digital Age ............................... 34
B. Joon Kim, Stephen Kleinschmit
o Designing Online Deliberation Using Web 2.0 Technologies: Drafting a Bill of Law on Internet Regulation in Brazil ....... 38
Fabro Steibel
o E-Participation in the Era of Web 2.0: Factors Affecting Citizens' Active E-Participation in Local Governance ................. 44
Jooho Lee, Soonhee Kim
o Genres of Communication in Activist eParticipation: A Comparison of New and Old Media ............................................... 48
Marius Rohde Johannessen
o Internet Voting: Fatally Torn Between Conflicting Goals? ..................................................................................................... 58
Marco Prandini, Marco Ramilli
Session 3: Policies 1
o A New Roadmap for Next-Generation Policy-Making ........................................................................................................... 62
Francesco Mureddu, David Osimo, Gianluca Misuraca, Stefano Armenia
o Best International Practices for Access, Ownership and Use of Information and Communication Technologies for People
with Sensory Disabilities ......................................................................................................................................................... 67
Marco Peres, Paula Suárez
o E-Government Education at the Public Administration Departments in Turkey .................................................................... 71
Cenay Babaoglu, H. Serkan Akilli, Mehmet Akif Demircioglu
o e-Government in Latin American Countries: Are they Building National Policies with a Regional Perspective? ................. 75
J. Ignacio Criado
o e-Government in Russia: Is or Seems? .................................................................................................................................... 79
Lyudmila Bershadskaya, Andrei Chugunov, Dmitrii Trutnev
Session 4 - EGOV Adoption and Usage
o Framework for Useful Transparency Websites for Citizens .................................................................................................. 83
Josune Arcelus
o The Circular Continuum of Agencies, Libraries, and Users: A Model of E-Government in Practice .................................. 87
Natalie Greene Taylor, Paul Jaeger, Ursula Gorham, John Bertot, Ruth Lincoln, Elizabeth Larson
o The Critical Success Factors for Websites for Chinese Migrant Farmer Workers: A Multi-case Study ............................... 95
Fang Wang, Lihong Gu
o The Development of Public Smart Phone Apps in Korea: Empirical Approach ................................................................... 105
Eom Seok-Jin, Mi Yeon Lee, Jun Houng Kim
o Understanding Citizens' Perceptions of E-Government Services in Mexico ......................................................................... 109
Juan M. Gomez Reynoso, Celene Navarrete, Rodrigo Sandoval Almazan
v

Session 5 - Information Sharing, Models, & Platforms
o Factors Influencing Exchange Activities in Transnational Knowledge Networks: The Case of the Hajj-MDSS ................. 113
Mohammed Gharawi, Theresa Pardo
o Information Sharing and Financial Market Regulation: Understanding the Capability Gap ................................................. 123
Djoko Sayogo, Theresa Pardo, Peter Bloniarz
o On Public Service Provision Informative Phase: A Dialogue-based Model and Platform .................................................... 132
Efthimios Tambouris, Vassiliti Outsetari, Konstantinos Tarabanis
o The Complexity of Cross-Boundary Information Sharing: An Organizational Perspective on Taiwan E-Government ....... 143
Tung-Mou Yang
Session 6: Digital Records & Information Management
o A Patent System Ontology for Facilitating Retrieval of Patent Related Information ............................................................ 147
Siddharth Taduri, Gloria Lau, Kincho Law, Jay Kesan
o Digitisation of Electoral Rolls: Analysis of a Multi-Agency E-Government Project in Pakistan ......................................... 158
Hasnain Bokhari, Mustafa Maqsood Khan
o Integrating Argumentation Technologies and Context-Based Search for Intelligent Processing of Citizens' Opinion in Social
Media ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 166
Carlos Chesñevar, Ana Maguitman, Elsa Estévez, Ramón Brena
o Preparing for Digital Curation Governance: Educating Stewards of Public Information ...................................................... 171
Christopher Lee, Helen Tibbo
o REGNET: Regulatory Information Management, Compliance and Analysis ....................................................................... 175
Kincho Law, Gloria Lau
Session 7: Policies 2
o From Information-poor to Information-rich: Bridging Regional Economic Disparities in Nigeria through e-Governance
................................................................................................................................................................................................. 184
Sanjo Faniran, Kayode Olaniyan
o ICT for Development and the MuNet Program: Experiences and Lessons Learnt from an Indigenous Municipality in
Guatemala ............................................................................................................................................................................... 188
Jorge López-Bachiller, Javier Sáenz-Coré, Diego Cardona
o ICT Policy in Africa a Comparative Study of Ghana and Kenya: Drawing on Lessons from Developed Countries ........... 192
Agnes Odongo
o Laggards or Victims of Socioeconomic Conditions? Findings from Ongoing Survey of Female Slum-dwellers Without Cell
Phone Ownership ................................................................................................................................................................... 202
Devendra Potnis, Kanchan Deosthali
o Promoting User Uptake of E-Government in Colombia ........................................................................................................ 206
Diana Parra Silva, Johanna Pimiento Quintero
Session 8: Measurement 1
o From Failure to Success: Using Design-Reality Gap Analysis as a Mid-implementation Assessment Tool for e-Government
................................................................................................................................................................................................. 210
Lemma Lessa, Solomon Negash, Mesfin Belachew
o Measuring Organizational Interoperability in Practice: The Case Study of Population Welfare Department of Government of
Sindh, Pakistan ....................................................................................................................................................................... 216
Devender Maheshwari, Marijn Janssen
o Ranking and Hotspot Detection Methods on Infant Health for Districts in Java, Indonesia: E-Governance Micro Tools ... 226
Yekti Widyaningsih, Wayne Myers
o Technological Assessment of e-government Web presence in Nigeria ................................................................................. 236
O. Michael Awoleye, Blessing Ojuloge, Willie Siyanbola
Session 9: Social Media in Government
o Exploring Social Media Usage in Saudi E-Government Websites ........................................................................................ 243
Hend Al-Khalifa, Muna Al-Razgan, Nora Al-Rejebah, Ameera Al-Masoud
o Government Crisis Communication on the Microblog: A Theory Framework and the Case of Shanghai Metro Rear-End
Collision ................................................................................................................................................................................. 248
Xiao Liang
o Government Official Microblogs: An Effective Platform for Facilitating Inclusive Governance ........................................ 258
Xinping Liu, Lei Zheng
o Managing Chinese Government Microblogs: Enablers and Barriers ..................................................................................... 262
Lei Zheng
o Study on Social Media Applications by Government in Hong Kong .................................................................................... 267
Huina Xu, Qian Chen
vi

Session 10: ICTs & Governance Transformation
o E-Government and Transformation of Governance and Service Delivery in Bangladesh: A Developing Country Perspective
................................................................................................................................................................................................. 271
Noore Siddiquee
o Evaluating and Assessing a Typology of Ubiquitous City Services by Classifying and Assigning Actual Services from an
Inventory of Identified Services ............................................................................................................................................. 279
Jungwoo Lee, Hyejung Lee, Taesung Kim
o Explaining the E-Government Paradox: An Analysis of Two Decades of Evidence from Scientific Literature and Practical
on Barriers to E-Government ................................................................................................................................................. 287
Alberto Savoldelli, Cristiano Codagnone, Gianluca Misuraca
o Investigating the Relationships between Accountability and Governments' Transformation to E-Government .................. 297
M. Sirajul Islam, Åke Grönlund
o Technologies, Tools & Web 2.0 in Support of Public Administration Workplace Communications ................................... 301
Milena Krumova
o Transforming City Government: A Case Study of Philly311 ................................................................................................ 310
Taewoo Nam, Theresa Pardo
Session 11: IT Governance & Policy
o A Literature Review: IT Governance Guidelines and Areas ................................................................................................. 320
Ruben Pereira, Miguel Mira da Silva
o Assessment of Success Factors of e-Government Project Implementation: Challenges for the Kosovo e-Government
Perspective ............................................................................................................................................................................. 324
Artan Rexhepi, Blerim Rexha, Agni Dika
o Computer Supported Contractor Selection for Public Administration Ventures ................................................................... 332
Zbigniew Paszkiewicz, Wojciech Cellary
o E-Government Success Factors in the Context of an IT-enabled Budget Reform: A Questionnaire Report ........................ 336
Gabriel Puron-Cid
o Public CIO, Figurehead or Decision-Maker? The Case of Germany .................................................................................... 346
Niels Proske, Moreen Heine, Norbert Gronau
Session 12: Implementation & Impact
o Design and Implementation of a Public School Government-to-Employee System ............................................................. 350
Carl Strang, Ira Goldstein
o E-Governance and Millennium Development Goals: Sustainable Development Perspective in Rural India ....................... 354
Harekrishna Misra
o Harnessing Renewable Energy Technologies for ICT and e-Governance Services in Un-electrified Communities in Rural
Nepal ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 364
Mona Sharma
o ICT-enabled Delivery of Maternal Health Services ............................................................................................................... 369
Johanna Awotwi
o If We Build It, Will They Come? A Mixed-Method Exploration of High Speed Broadband Access and Economic
Development .......................................................................................................................................................................... 379
Amy Huffman
Session 13: E-democracy & Participation 2
o An e-Democracy Experience: Digital Cabinet Office of Rio Grande do Sul State (Brazil) .................................................. 385
Marie Anne Macadar, Gabriela Viale Pereira, Vanessa Marques Daniel
o Social Inclusion and Digital Divide: eParticipation Dilemmas in Municipalities ................................................................. 389
Lukasz Porwol, Padraic O'donoghue, John Breslin, Chris Coughlan, Brendan Mulligan
o Studying Chinese Government Microblogs: Content and Interactions .................................................................................. 393
Tuo Zheng, Lei Zheng
Session 14: Information Structure
o CRHIS: Cloud-based Rural Healthcare Information System ................................................................................................. 402
Manas Ranjan Patra, Rama Krushna Das, Rabi Prasad Padhy
o Data collection in a degraded network: case of developing countries or countries in crisis .................................................. 406
Jiomekong Azanzi Azanzi, Broto Laurent, Hagimont Daniel, Tchuente Maurice
o The Secure Platform Problem: Taxonomy and Analysis of Existing Proposals to Address this Problem ............................ 410
Michael Schläpfer, Melanie Volkamer
vii

Session 15: Measurement 2
o Anti-Corruption Online Monitoring Systems in Brazil .......................................................................................................... 419
Ricardo Matheus, Manuella M. Ribeiro, José Carlos Vaz, Cesar A. de Souza
o E-Government Portals in Central America: A Preliminary Evaluation and Ranking (2011-2012) ....................................... 426
Rodrigo Sandoval-Almazan, J. Ramon Gil-Garcia, Nancy Karina Saucedo Leyva
o Evolving e-government Benchmarking to Better Cover Technology Development and Emerging Societal Needs ............. 430
Jeremy Millard, Kim Andreasson, Mikael Snaprud
o Impacts of the Public Procurement Reform in Chile on the Municipal Level ....................................................................... 440
Gaston Concha, Roberto Anrique
Posters
o A Crowdsourcing Model for Public Consultations on Draft Laws ........................................................................................ 450
Vasiliy Burov, Evgeny Patarakin, Boris Yarmakhov
o A Novel Scheme of Government Information Sharing System for Implementing Paperless Government ........................... 452
John (Jong Uk) Choi, Joowon Cho, Dong Hwa Kim, Chang Hun Yoo
o A structure oriented evaluation model for readiness of e-governance ................................................................................... 454
Uranchimeg Tudevdagva, Uyanga Sambuu
o An Initial Exploration of Hyperlinks of African Government Portal Websites ..................................................................... 456
Abebe Rorissa
o C-DAC Pan India Strategy in High Performance Computing for Human Advancement ...................................................... 458
Kapil Mathur, Sandeep Agrawal, Sucheta Pawar, Abhishek Das, Goldi Misra
o Crowdsourcing as Data Sharing: A Regional Web-based Real Estate Development Database ............................................ 460
Robert Goodspeed, Christian Spanring, Timothy Reardon
o Drivers for Public Sector Contests ......................................................................................................................................... 460
Claudia Louis
o E-Reconciliation in Rwanda ................................................................................................................................................... 464
Erika Bagambiki
o Electronic Participation System: The Nigerian Perspective .................................................................................................. 468
Ibrahim Aliyu
o Enterprise Systems and Government Organizational Changes: A Socio-materiality Analysis ............................................. 470
Loni Hagen, Donghee Sinn
o Evaluation of E-Governance Projects of Nepal ..................................................................................................................... 472
Ganesh Adhikari
o Exploiting the FLOSS Paradigm in Collaborative e-Learning: Application to e-Government ............................................. 474
Sara Fernandes, Antonio Cerone, Luis Barbosa
o From Inter-agency Information Sharing to Open Data: A Case Study of Taiwan E-Government ........................................ 477
Tung-Mou Yang
o From International Open Government Dataset Search to Discovery: A Semantic Web Service Approach ......................... 480
Eric Rozell, John Erickson, Jim Hendler
o Implementation of Integrated Tax System COTS Product .................................................................................................... 483
Uyanga Sambuu, Zolbayar Chuluunbat, Esbold Unurkhaan
o Information Sharing in Inter-departmental Collaboration: A Conceptual Framework for Local Government Authorities .. 485
Alinaghi Ziaee Bigdeli, Muhammad Kamal, Sergio de Cesare
o Interagency Collaboration in Providing Public Services in Russia: A Legal Perspective ..................................................... 487
Evgeny Styrin, Andrey Zhulin
o Monitoring Methods of e-Governance Development Assessment: Comparative Analysis of International and Russian
Experience .............................................................................................................................................................................. 490
Lyudmila Bershadskaya, Andrei Chugunov, Dmitrii Trutnev
o Moroccan E-government Ten years Evolutions ..................................................................................................................... 492
Mohamed Mohyi Eddine El Aichi
o Opportunities for Improving eGovernment: Using Language Technology in Workflow Management ................................ 495
Ola Knutsson, Eriks Sneiders, Alyaa Alfalahi
o Prioritization and Geo-spatiotemporal Hotspot Detection of Forest Loss Hotspot Using NDVI as a Response Variable .... 497
Koli Rajesh E., Rao Anil G., Ranei Guari M., Joshi Manish R.
o Quality Assurance Case Study of an ICT Supported Legally Binding Election in Austria ................................................... 500
Klaus John, Andreas Ehringfeld
o Quality Assurance Model for e-Governance Projects: A Case Study on e-Counseling ........................................................ 502
Rama Krushna Das Pabitrananda Patnaik, Manas Ranjan Patra
o Regulation Room: Moving Towards Civic Participation 2.0 ................................................................................................. 504
Josiah Heidt, Jackeline Solivan
viii

o Revival of Farming Community with M-Agriculture ............................................................................................................ 506
Swapna Veldanda
o Social Media Usage Guidelines for the Government of the United Arab Emirates .............................................................. 508
Ibrahim Elbadawi
o System For Measuring E-Gov: A Multi-Stakeholder Approach ............................................................................................ 511
Camilo Cristancho Mantilla, Juan Carlos Noriega Silva
o The Digital Divide's Devaluing of Local E-Government ...................................................................................................... 513
Richard Huff, Liana Kleeman
o The Importance of Electronic Accessibility in Brazilian Juridical Electronic Process .......................................................... 516
Adriana Simeao Ferreira, Daniel Goncalves de Melo, Leondeniz Freitas
o The Use of Mobile and Wireless Technology and Food Quality Control in China ............................................................... 518
Shuhua Monica Liu, Qianli Yuan, Danyao Li, Lei Zheng
o The Use of Recursive Bisection in the Mapping of Sample New York State Electoral Districts ......................................... 520
David Molik, Michelle Sharer
o Toward Interoperable Government: A case of Bangladesh ................................................................................................... 522
M. Shakhawat Hossain Bhuiyan
o Trust Issues in the E-Government Implementation in Nepal ................................................................................................. 524
Garima Dhakal, Prajwal Amatya, Bal Krishna Bal
o eGovernance Implementation Model for Public Sector Innovation ........................................................................................ 526
M. Irfanullah Arfeen, Nawar Khan
Tutorials
o Tutorial: Digital Curation for Public Sector Proffesionals ..................................................................................................... 528
Christopher A. Lee and Helen Tibbo
o Use of Agent-Based Modeling for e-Governance Research ................................................................................................... 531
Yushim Kim, Callie McGraw
ix

Conference Organization
Host
Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY)
Patron
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
Conference Committee
David FERRIERO, Conference Co-Chair - Archivist of the United States, National Archives and Records
Administration, USA
Theresa PARDO, Conference Co-Chair - Director and Research Professor, Center for Technology in Government,
University at Albany, USA
Haiyan QIAN, Conference Co-Chair - Director, Division for Public Administration & Development Management
(DPADM), UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, USA
Jose Ramon GIL-GARCIA, Program Co-Chair - Associate Professor and Director, Data Center for Applied
Research in Social Sciences, Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas, Mexico
Natalie HELBIG, Program Co-Chair - Senior Program Associate, Center for Technology in Government, University
at Albany, USA
Adegboyega OJO, Program Co-Chair - Academic Program Officer, Center for Electronic Governance, UNU-IIST,
Macao SAR
Jana Hrdinova, Organization Chair - Program Associate, Center for Technology in Government, University at
Albany, USA
Meghan Cook, Fundraising Chair - Program Manager, Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany,
USA
Alison Heaphy, Publicity Chair - Communication Manager, Center for Technology in Government, University at
Albany, USA
xii

International Steering Committee
John Carlo BERTOT, Professor and Co-Director, Information Policy and Access Center (iPAC), University of
Maryland, USA
Francisco CAMARGO, Director General Programa Gobierno en Linea, Colombia
Wojciech CELLARY, Professor, Department of Information Technology, Poznan University of Economics, Poland
Samuel CHAN, Member of Administrative Committee, Science and Technology Development Fund, Macao SAR,
China
Jim DAVIES, Professor and Director, Software Engineering Programme, Department of Computer Science and
Governing Body Fellow, Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford, UK
Sharon DAWES, Senior Fellow & Professor Emeritus of Public Administration, Center for Technology in
Government, University at Albany, USA
Matthias FINGER, Professor, Faculty of Technology and Management, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne,
Switzerland
Tomasz JANOWSKI, Senior Research Fellow and Head, UNU-IIST Center for Electronic Governance, Macao
SAR, China (Series Coordinator)
Lorenzo MADRID, Chief Technology Officer for the Latin America Region and World Wide Director for the
Government Interoperability Initiative, Microsoft Corporation, USA
Henk G. SOL, Professor and Founding Dean, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Maurice TCHUENTE, Pro-Chancellor University of Buea, Cameroon
Saleem ZOUGHBI, Regional Adviser (ICT), UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, Lebanon
National Advisory Committee
Cary COGLIANESE, Penn Program on Regulation, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Mitch LEVENTHAL, Global Affairs, State University of New York
Kim McKINNEY, New York State Office of Information Technology Services (ITS)
Beth NOVECK, Democracy Design Workshop, New York Law School
Robert SAMSON, New York State Spending and Government Efficiency (SAGE) Commission
Jim HENDLER, Departments of Computer Science and Cognitive Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
David L. McCLURE, Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, GSA
Miriam NISBET, Government Information Services (OGIS), National Archives and Records Administration
Douglas ROBINSON, National Association of State Chief Information Officers
Chris VEIN,The White House Office for Science and Technology Policy
xiii

Awards Committee
Sharon S. DAWES, University at Albany, SUNY – USA, Committee Chair
Nicolau REINHARD -- Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brasil
Enrico FERRO – Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, Italy
Marijn JANSSEN - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Lei ZHENG – Fudan University, China
Luis F. LUNA REYES – Universidad de las Amércias Puebla, Mexico
Rejean ROY – CEFRIO, Canada
Gbenga ADEBUSUYI, Nigeria
Johanna AWOTWI, Ghana
Program Committee
Gustav AAGESON, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Gbenga ADEBUSUYI, National e-Government Strategies, Nigeria
Rodrigo SANDOVAL-ALMAZAN, Universidad Autonoma del Estado de México, Mexico
Kim ANDERSEN, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Jean-Pierre AUFFRET, International Academy of CIO, USA
Johanna Ekua AWOTWI, Center for e-Governance, Ghana
Frank BANNISTER, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Joerg BECKER, University of Illinois at Chicago, School of Art and Design, USA
Jaro BERCE, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Deepak BHATIA, World Bank, USA
Melanie BICKING, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
Nikolaj BJORNER, Microsoft Corporation, USA
Brian BURKE, Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, USA
Luis CAMARINHA-MATOS, UNINOVA, Portugal
Donna CANESTRARO, Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, USA
Lemuria CARTER, Mississippi State University, USA
Alejandra CECHICH, National University of Comahue, Argentina
Wojciech CELLARY, Poznan University of Economics, Poland
Yannis CHARALABIDIS, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Venkatesh CHOPPELLA, IIIT Hyderabad, India
Eleni CHRISTODOULOU, University of Ciprus, Ciprus
Gabriel PURON-CID, Centro de Investigación y Docencias Económicas, México
Soon Ae CHUN, University of New York, USA
Meghan COOK, Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, USA
Antonio CORDELLA, Information Systems and Innovation Group at the Department of
Management at the London School of Economics, UK
Anthony CRESSWELL, Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, USA
Ignacio CRIADO, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain
xiv

Jim DAVIES, Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford, UK
Sharon DAWES, Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, USA
Rahul DE, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India
Zamira DZHUSUPOVA, Center for Electronic Governance, UNU-IIST, Macao SAR
Sara ERIKSEN, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
Elsa ESTEVEZ, Center for Electronic Governance, UNU-IIST, Macao SAR
Enrico FERRO, Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, Italy
Pablo FILLOTRANI, National University of the South, Argentina
Simon FONG, University of Macau, Macao SAR
Jose FORMAZ, Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration, Switzerland
Mila GASCO, Institute of Governance and Public Management, ESADE, Spain
Rimantas GATAUTIS, Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania
Jeremy GIBBONS, University of Oxford, UK
Robert GOODSPEED
Mary GRIFFITHS, The University of Adelaide, Australia
Thad HALL, University of Utah, USA
Steve HARRIS, Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford, UK
Karim HAMZA, Maastricht school of Management, Netherlands
Paul HENMA, University of Queensland, Australia
Andrew HOPPIN, New Amsterdam Ideas LLC, USA
Princely IFINEDO, Cape Breton University, Shannon School of Business, Canada
Sirajul ISLAM, Bangledesh Center for eGovernance & Örebro University, Sweeden
Tomasz JANOWSKI, Center for Electronic Governance, UNU-IIST, Macao SAR
Marijn JANSSEN, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Atreyi KANKANHALLI, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Andrea KAVANAUGH, Virginia Tech, USA
Jay KESAN, University of Illinois, USA
Ralf KLISCHEWSKI, German University in Cairo, Egypt
Trond KNUDSEN, Research Council of Norway, Norway
Padmanabhan KRISHNAN, Bond University,
Kincho LAW, Stanford University, USA
Deidre LEE, National University of Ireland, DERI, Ireland
Christine LEITNER, Center for European Public Administration, Danube University Krems, Austria
Calvin LEONG, SAFP, Macao SAR Government, Macao SAR
Miriam LIPS, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Nikos LOUTAS, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Ireland
Luis LUNA-REYES, Universidad de las Americas-Puebla, Mexico
Ann MACINTOSH, University of Leeds, Institute of Communication Studies, United Kingdom
Egle MALINAUSKIENE, Mykolas Romeris University, Lithuania
Albert MEIJER, University of Utrecht, Netherlands
Vassilis MENEKLIS, University of Piraeus, Greece
Ines MERGEL, Syracuse University, USA
Jeremy MILLARD, Danish Technological Institute, Centre for Policy and Business Analysis,
Denmark
Gianluca MISURACA, EC Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies,
Spain
Hrushikesha MOHANTY, University of Hyderabad, India
Fawzi MULKI, Social and Economic Directorate, Royal Hashemite Court, Jordan
Taewoo NAM, University at Albany, USA
Toshio OBI, Waseda University, Japan
Theresa PARDO, University at Albany, USA
xv

Marco PERES USECHE, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Colombia
Vasillios PERISTERAS, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Ireland
Chris REDDICK, The University of Texas at San Antonio, USA
Scott ROBERTSON, University of Hawaii, USA
Tomáš SABOL, Technical University of Košice, Slovak Republic
Steve SAWYER, Syracuse University, USA
Apetipe SEAKOW, Stamford International University, Thailand
Bory SENG, Seoul National University, South Korea
Jochen SCHOLL, University of Washington, USA
Charles SCHWEIK, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA
Aadya SHUKLA, Harvard University, USA
Stuart SHULMAN, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
Henk SOL, University of Groningen, Netherlands
Alberto Savoldelli
Marco Prandini
Maurizio Leo
Eleni Panopoulou
Efthimios Tambouris
Alberto Savoldelli
Walter Cerroni
Marco Ramilli
Franco Callegati
Hans-Dieter Zimmermann
Maddalane SORRENTINO, University of Milan, Italy
Evgeny STYRIN, Higher School of Economics (HSE), Russia
Ivar TALLO, e-Governance Academy, Estonia
Efthimios TAMBOURIS, University of Macedonia, Greece
Vishanth WEERAKKODY, Brunel University, UK
Maria WIMMER, University of Koblenz and Landau, Germany
Gamel WIREDU, University of London, UK
Peter WINSTANLEY, Scottish Government, UK
Jing ZHANG, Clark University, USA
Lei ZHENG, Fudan University, China
Jozef ZURADA, University of Louisville, USA
Additional Reviewers
xvi
Jörg Becker
Petra Wolf
Eleni Kaliva
Efthimios Tambouris
Carl Erik Moe
Brunella Caroleo
Elisa Pautasso
Enrico Ferro
Evangelos Kalampokis
Manabu Nakashima
Djoko Sayogo

Session 1
Open Government Data

Beyond Open Government: Ontologies and Data
Architectures to Support Ethical Consumption
Luis F. Luna-Reyes
Universidad de las Americas-Puebla
luisf.luna@udlap.mx
Theresa A. Pardo
University at Albany – SUNY
tpardo@ctg.albany.edu
ABSTRACT
Two important trends on openness are promoting improved
accountability from government and private organizations. The
case of private transparency finds its roots in consumer and other
stakeholder movements. The open government movement in the
US is looking for alternatives to “smart disclosure,” which implies
providing consumers with better information to make better
buying choices. We explore current knowledge on ethical
consumption, as well as two influential technological tools to
support consumer decisions. Our initial discussion suggests that
the use of ontologies and data architectures, together with the
appropriate policy environment and governance system, may
solve some of the current problems identified.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4.1 [Public Policy Issues]: Private Sector Transparency and
Ethical Consumption
General Terms
Management, Design, Human Factors, Standardization,
Languages, Theory, Legal Aspects
Keywords
Sustainability, Supply-Chain, Ethical Consumption, Private Sector
Transparency
1. INTRODUCTION
In the last years we have witnessed two parallel but closely related
trends. First, governments around the world have increasingly
worked to make their operations and decisions more open [17].
On the other hand, a there is a trend pushing corporate
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
Djoko Sigit Sayogo
University at Albany – SUNY
dsayogo@ctg.albany.edu
Giri Kumar Tayi
University at Albany – SUNY
g.tayi@albany.edu
David F. Andersen
University at Albany – SUNY
fadum@albany.edu
1
Jing Zhang
Clark University
jizhang@clarku.edu
Jana Hrdinova
University at Albany – SUNY
jhrdinova@ctg.albany.edu
organizations to be more accountable, transparent, and ethical
[2,6]. Although the first documented stakeholder actions to hold
corporations accountable and transparent took place in the early
1600’s [2], the movement has intensified in the last decades
through grassroots movements lead by NGOs to address perceived
failures by States to protect workers [6], and more recently,
because of an increased consumer interest in the environment and
sustainability [14]. In the US, government has also included as
part of its open government initiative, the need to take regulatory
approaches to “smart disclosure” of information needed to help
consumers to make better choices 1 [19].
Although there are many formal attempts to measure and
communicate corporate practices to consumers (surveys, indexes,
or technology applications), there is no agreement on what
information should be disclosed to consumers to better help their
decision making. Moreover, there is even less agreement in terms
of how to ensure data availability, reliability, and validity, as well
as transparency of the processes to disclose such information [14].
Thus, the purpose of this paper is to explore what is the relevant
information for consumers, as well as feasible ways of pulling the
information together to fulfill consumers’ needs. To accomplish
this objective, we explore the literature on ethical consumption
and two prominent tools for ethical consumption in the US and
the European Union. The paper ends by proposing the use of open
architecture and innovative governance systems not only to enable
interoperability along the supply chain, but also to improve
consumer access to information to make better buying decisions.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Understanding Ethical Consumer Values
and Preferences
A large body of literature focusing on ethical consumption is
based on the premise that consumer behavior is “rational”. As a
rational actor, a consumer will seek a product that satisfies his/her
needs by optimally considering all available alternatives and
information [7]. The consumer consumption behavior is guided by
1 http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/inforeg/foragencies/informing-consumers-through-smart-disclosure.pdf

the combination of their moral sentiments and economic motives,
especially for the sustainable products [1].
Based on their information seeking behavior, consumers can be
categorized into: the “super-informed” and the “ignorant” [12].
The “super-informed” consumers actively search for product
information related to social and environmental values. These
types of consumers consider social attributes such as fair labor
practices [13], environmental attributes such as climate change,
carbon footprint, recycling, energy conservation and other. The
“ignorant” consumers have to rely on the information provided by
supply-chain actors and government. Disclosure of organizational
and industry information becomes a valuable tool to guide ethical
consumption decisions [5].
Other streams of literature depict some ethical consumers as
altruistic actors. These consumers adopt their ethical values into
their life styles [13], and adjust their behavior to consume
environmental friendly, ethical or fairly traded products and show
pro-environment behaviors [3,13,16]. Consumers who are more
involved in ethical lifestyles perceived higher benefits from
additional information [18].
Other research shows that the degree of commitment to the ethical
values also depends on economic factors. Ethical consumers have
to make a compromise due to conflicting and competing priorities
[16]. The social and environmental attributes and consumer
lifestyles serve as interacting and/or moderating variables in the
determinants of ethical consumption behavior. Research show that
consumers deal with three interacting factors in ethical
consumption behavior, price, quality and convenience [3].
2.2 Sustainability Liability
Following ethical consumption could become a liability for the
consumers. In general, although consumers might shift their
purchasing preference from cheaper non-labeled products, they
may not venture to choose more expensive alternatives [16].
Buying unethical products is usually cheaper than buying better
equivalent products thus hindering the proliferation of ethical
consumption [5]. Researchers argue that this is due to the fact that
higher costs to the environment does not translate into higher
price to consumers, and capturing all social and environmental
costs associated with a product is hard to accomplish [5].
2.3 The Role of Trust for Ethical Consumer
Trust in information plays also a key role in consumption
decisions. Trust formation is affected by shared values and joint
beliefs held by consumers and companies about certain social or
ethical behavior [15]. Consumers rely on existing information to
assess the conformance of ethical values practiced by particular
companies [15]. Findings from these streams of research suggest
that consumer’s trust in the product depends partly on consumer’s
trust in the company’s ethical conduct and partly on product
labeling. Thus, some research explores the role of trust in the
context of corporate social responsibility (CSR). This research
found that ethical conduct reflected in the CRS report influences
consumers’ perception of trust toward the company [4,15].
However, trust based on the CSR practices does not always
account for corporate success in the market [4]. The positive
impact of trust depends on factors such as consumers’ perceptions
of the social reputation of a company [4], product quality and
consumer satisfaction [15].
2
Other stream of research assesses consumers’ trust based product
labeling or certification. This research explores the values that
consumers attach to certification and labels. For instance,
consumers positively correlate organic certification with values
such as stricter production standards and control system, domestic
origination of product, and familiarity with the logo as source of
trust [8]. Customers rely on the label regardless of their
understanding of the meaning behind label [3].
3. METHOD
We used a convenience sampling approach to identify the current
tools providing consumers with information for value-based
purchasing. We chose to evaluate Barcoo and GoodGuide based
on the following considerations: 1) each tool was developed and is
primarily used on a different continent, thus enabling us to make a
comparison. Barcoo was established and widely used in Europe
while GoodGuide was established and extensively used in North
America. 2) Both tools are currently popular tools used for valuebased
purchasing considerations.
4. RESULTS
4.1 Ethical Consumption – Online
Information Strategy
This section evaluates the above mentioned tools that are designed
to help consumers make ethical purchasing decisions. The
evaluation focuses on examining the data problems related to
building the tool, identifying the source of trust on the
measurements used in each tool and delineating the possible
limitations of each tool.
4.1.1 GoodGuide (www.goodguide.com)
GoodGuide was founded in 2007 by Dara O’Rourke, a professor
specializing in global supply chain at the University of California
at Berkeley. The mission of GoodGuide is to transform the
marketplace by helping consumers make value-based purchasing
decisions. It provides expert judgment about the health,
environment, and social performance of products and companies
with a team of scientific and technology experts. GoodGuide
gives four 1-10 numeric ratings, with one general score and three
sub-scores for health, environmental and social performance of
the product or the company respectively.
4.1.2 Barcoo (www.barcoo.com)
Barcoo is an independent service that offers consumers product
information on their mobile phone. Consumer can use their
mobile phone to scan the barcode of products and obtain
background information about the product. Barcoo has a customer
base of more than two million in Germany. It is used mostly in
Europe. The information provided by Barcoo includes ingredients,
nutrition value, certification, and other environmental
information, as well as price comparison and users reviews.
A summary of the evaluation on GoodGuide and Barcoo is
presented in Table 1. The assessment on both tools indicates
several limitations that exist in both tools: 1) lack of clarity in the
mechanism to generate the score, 2) data collection, matching, and
processing is manual resulting in limited scalability, 3) the
transparency and accuracy is limited in the sense that both tools
cannot drill down to the data at product level, and 4) because of
the lack of source data and verification capacity, the construction
of trusted information is primarily based on human judgment,

such as users based assessment in the case of Barcoo or
combination of users and experts in the case of GoodGuide. These
limitations are arguably affecting the trustworthiness of the
information provided to the users. In addition, their inability to
integrate information across the supply-chain impacts the validity
of their result. In the next section, we will argue for the case of I-
Choose as an architecture that could assist web tools such as
Barcoo and GoodGuide with increasing the credibility and
trustworthiness of the information produced.
Table 1. Comparison of Barcoo and GoodGuide
Indicators GoodGuide Barcoo
Information
elements &
scoring
Data Source
Source of
Trust
Data
Problem
1 – 10 numeric ratings:
General score, Health,
Environment, and Social
scores
• Over 1,000 third party
sources
• Comprehensiveness of
data sources
• Experts and Users
judgment
• Company image
• Clarity of scoring
• Manual data collection
• Human judgment
biases
• Limited granularity of
data
• Credibility of data
source
Product background
information:
Ingredients, nutrients,
certifications, price
• Third party providers
• Independent sources
• Data sources – facts
• Legitimacy of partners
& their database
• Users judgment
• Limited granularity of
data
• Reliance on 3rd party
• Credibility of data
source
4.2 I-Choose As An Architecture to Empower
Current Tools and Trends
In this section, we develop a proposal that could make a
contribution to research and practice of ethical consumption.
4.2.1 Main Gaps from the Literature
Although there is an agreement in the literature that the main
consumer concerns are associated with both environmental and
social impacts of corporate activities, there is not an agreement on
how to measure such impact. Rahman and Post [14] found 15
different ways to define environmental impacts, and different
ways to measure them.
Another gap is the difficulty in creating transparent and reliable
measures. Data is not equally available for all corporations, and
because of that, all available scores require the intensive use of
expert judgment, making them highly costly. Moreover, many of
the either publicly available or proprietary data are not transparent
enough, and do not report on reliability and validity [14].
Research in the area has also shown the importance of labeling in
buying decisions [11]. However, labels that certify low
environmental or social impacts may present very similar
information to the consumer at the point of sale, but use very
different criteria or processes in order to get the certification.
3
Researchers have explored extensively key factors affecting
consumer buying decisions, however, we could not find literature
on the impacts of the use of tools such as Barcoo or GoodGuide in
these decisions. More research in the area is needed. This research
may benefit from current efforts on understanding adoption of
software to aid consumer decision making [17]. Some of the
research that we found suggested that incorporating the cost of
externalities in price is yet another way to promote ethical
consumption [5]. However, there is little research on ways to
account for externalities such as environmental impact. There is
still less research exploring the economic impacts of a policy of
this nature.
Finally, a potentially important problem with this area of research
is the fact that most is looking for ways to promote ethical
consumption, without exploring the possibility of consuming less
or changing significantly current consumption patterns.
4.2.2 A Pathway Forward: A Socio-Technical System
for Opening Private Sector Information to
Support Consumer Choice
Our current research suggests that some of the current gaps and
shortcomings of tools that support ethical consumption can be
addressed by the creation of a socio-technical system such as I-
Choose to facilitate information sharing and interoperability
among stakeholders in the supply chain [10]. Our current efforts
are focusing on coffee produced and traded in the NAFTA region.
Coffee producers and consumers have made an effort to attach
additional information to specific kinds of coffee –such as organic
or Fair Trade—to differentiate them and to allow consumers to
make ethical decisions. Lessons from our current project have the
potential to be used by other industries and in different
geographical areas.
We envision that I-Choose should include at least three different
components: a set of data standards to share information across
the supply chain, a set of Application Programming Interface
(API) standards to make it possible for developers and other
interested groups to create specific applications to make this
information usable by regular consumers, and a governance
system, which will be in charge of creating and modifying the
standards over time. We are calling this system the I-Choose
system [9].
In terms of the data standards for information sharing and
interoperability, we are currently developing an ontology-based
set of standards to integrate information from the coffee supply
chain. There are already many higher order ontologies or data
classifications that can be used to support this interoperability
such as the XBRL standard for financial information. Because of
that, our focus is on data components that are related to
certification, which will link to other data standards.
Shared data promoted by I-Choose will benefit efforts such as
GoodGuide or Barcoo by providing better and wider information.
However, this kind of ventures will need to have a way to access
the information. Thus, the second component of I-Choose should
be an API to ease the development of these kinds of applications.
Finally, those two technical components need to meet the
requirements of usability, utility, trust and openness to be widely
adopted and used. To accomplish this objective, we believe that a
multi-stakeholder group needs to collaborate to set the standards,
but also to maintain and adjust them over time. Our current efforts

involve the creation of a Network of coffee stakeholders that we
believe can constitute a very first group to promote this kind of
standards. The group must include government regulators,
industry associations, consumers, consumer associations,
producers and other stakeholders. The group will need to have in
place a series of policies and procedures to ensure the fairness of
the process, avoiding standards that become driven only by the
larger players in the supply chain.
5. CONCLUDING REMARKS
This paper aims to explore feasible ways of drawing relevant
information to fulfill consumers’ needs in making ethical
purchasing decision. To do this, we explore extant literature on
ethical consumption and evaluate two existing tools available to
support consumers’ ethical consumption. Our exploration
identifies some of the current gaps and shortcomings of the
existing tools supporting ethical consumption. We then proposed
a scalable socio-technical system to facilitate information sharing
and interoperability among stakeholders in the supply chain. This
system comprises of three different but interrelated components,
namely: 1) a set of data standards to share information across the
supply chain, 2) a set of Application Programming Interface (API)
standards to make it possible for developers and other interested
groups to create specific applications to make this information
usable by regular consumers, and 3) a governance system, which
will be in charge of creating and modifying the standards over
time. We are calling this system the I-Choose system. We further
call for more attention to the role of government in the
management of an architecture such as I-Choose.
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Research reported in this paper is supported in part by the US-
NSF (Grant No. IIS-0540069), CONACYT-Mexico (Grant No.
133670), and COMEXUS-Fulbright Commission in Mexico. The
views and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the
authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of
COMEXUS, CONACYT or NSF.
7. REFERENCES
[1] Barnett, C., Cloke, P., Clarke, N., and Malpass, A. Consuming
Ethics: Articulating the Subjects and Spaces of Ethical
Consumption. Antipode 37, 1 (2005), 23–45.
[2] Baue, B. and Murninghan, M. The Accountability Web:
Weaving Corporate Accountability and Interactive
Technology. Journal of Corporate Citizenship, 41 (2011), 27–
49.
[3] Carrigan, M. and Attalla, A. The myth of the ethical consumer
– do ethics matter in purchase behaviour? Journal of
Consumer Marketing 18, 7 (2001), 560–578.
[4] Castaldo, S., Perrini, F., Misani, N., and Tencati, A. The
missing link between corporate social responsibility and
consumer trust: the case of fair trade products. Journal of
Business Ethics 84, 1 (2009), 1–15.
4
[5] Chouinard, Y., Ellison, J., and Ridgeway, R. The Sustainable
Economy. Harvard Business Review 89, 10 (2011), 52–62.
[6] Doorey, D. The Transparent Supply Chain: from Resistance
to Implementation at Nike and Levi-Strauss. 2011.
[7] Freestone, O.M. and McGoldrick, P.J. Ethical positioning
and political marketing: the ethical awareness and concerns
of UK voters. Journal of Marketing Management 23, 7-8
(2007), 651–673.
[8] Janssen, M. and Hamm, U. Consumer perception of different
organic certification schemes in five European countries.
Organic Agriculture, (2011), 1–13.
[9] Luna-Reyes, L.F., Andersen, D.F., Andersen, D.L., Derrick,
D., and Jarman, H. Full Information Product Pricing (FIPP)
Regimes: Policy Implications for US-Mexico Sustainable
Commerce. (2012).
[10] Luna-Reyes, L.F., Zhang, J., Whitmore, A., et al. Full
Information Product Pricing: An Information Strategy for
Harnessing Consumer Choice to Create a More Sustainable
World. 2011.
[11] De Magistris, T. and Gracia, A. Do Consumers Pay Attention
to the Organic Label When Shopping Organic Food in Italy?
In M. Reed, ed., Organic Food and Agriculture - New Trends
and Developments in the Social Sciences. Janeza Trdine,
Croatia, 2011.
[12] McEachern, M.G. and McClean, P. Organic purchasing
motivations and attitudes: are they ethical? International
Journal of Consumer Studies 26, 2 (2002), 85–92.
[13] Michaelidou, N. and Hassan, L.M. Modeling the factors
affecting rural consumers’ purchase of organic and freerange
produce: A case study of consumers’ from the Island
of Arran in Scotland, UK. Food Policy 35, 2 (2010), 130–
139.
[14] Rahman, N. and Post, C. Measurement Issues in
Environmental Corporate Social Responsibility (ECSR):
Toward a Transparent, Reliable, and Construct Valid
Instrument. Journal of Business Ethics 105, 3 (2012), 307–
319.
[15] Swaen, V. and Chumpitaz, C.R. Impact of Corporate Social
Responsibility on consumer trust. Recherche et Applications
en Marketing (English Edition) 23, 4 (2008), 7–33.
[16] Szmigin, I., Carrigan, M., and McEachern, M.G. The
conscious consumer: taking a flexible approach to ethical
behaviour. International Journal of Consumer Studies 33, 2
(2009), 224–231.
[17] Xiao, B. and Benbasat, I. E-Commerce Product
Recommendation Agents: Use, Characteristics and Impact.
MIS Quarterly 31, 1 (2007), 137–209.
[18] Zander, K. and Hamm, U. Consumer preferences for
additional ethical attributes of organic food. Food Quality
and Preference 21, 5 (2010), 495–503.
[19] MOU for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies
- Informing Consumers through Smart Disclosure. Executive
Office of The President - Office of Management and Budget,
Washington, DC, 2011.

Exploring Process Barriers to Release Public Sector
Information in Local Government
Peter Conradie
Creating 010
Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences,
P.O. Box 3001 HA Rotterdam
The Netherlands
003110 794 4801
p.d.conradie@hr.nl
ABSTRACT
Due to expected benefits such as citizen participation and
innovation, the release of Public Sector Information is getting
increased attention on various levels of government. However,
currently, data release by governments is still novel, with little
experience and knowledge thus far about the benefits and barriers
of release. This is compounded by a lack of understanding about
how internal processes influence data release. Our aim in this
paper is to get a better understanding of these processes and how
they influence data release, i.e, to find determinants for the release
of public sector information. For this purpose, we conducted
workshops, interviews, questionnaires and desk research. We find
that the way data is used by a department, the way data is
obtained, how data is stored, and the suitability of data to become
open, as crucial indicators for open data release. We conclude
with lessons learned based on the research findings. These are that
we should take a nuanced approach towards data release, avoid
releasing data for it’s own sake and take small incremental steps
to explore data release.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.3 [Information Systems]: Information Storage and Retrieval;
K.4 [Computers and Society]: Public Policy Issues
General Terms
Design, Experimentation
Keywords
Open Data, PSI, Participatory Action Research
1. INTRODUCTION
The release of Public Sector Information by governmental
organisations is getting increasing attention from government on
several levels, local, national and international. For example, early
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
5
Sunil Choenni
Research and Documentation Centre
Ministry of Security and Justice
P.O. Box 20301 2500 EH, The Hague
The Netherlands
0031648100301
r.choenni@hr.nl
in his presidency, United States President Obama called for
increased release of public sector information [24]. Similarly,
European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes is a
strong advocate for the release of Public Sector Information in the
European Union, by its member states, but also by the
commission [21]. Her view is supported by the 2003 PSI
Directive the European Parliament and the European Council
[11].
Oft cited motivations for data release are hopes of increased
citizen involvement in government, increased transparency and
improved decision making [2, 21, 24]. Besides the premise of
increased citizen involvement, open data is also seen as fuel for
innovation. To illustrate, the MEPSIR study places the estimated
value of the PSI market at 27 billion within the EU [10].
Furthermore, open data may give also a boost to the field of egovernance.
However, this increased call for data release by governmental
agencies presents data professionals with tasks that are as of yet
unknown, in addition to having side effects that are hard to predict
on a large scale. The cost associated with data release is also not
always known, while the benefits that open data can have need to
be explored. Having said that, the directives from higher levels of
government are putting pressure onto local governments to find
answers to pressing questions in relation to open data, such as
what are the challenges, potentials, barriers and impact of open
data?
In The Netherlands the calls for the re-use of data has not gone
unheard. On various levels of national government in The
Netherlands initiatives have been launched to free data for re-use
in the public domain. These include local city councils, ministries
and provincial governments. To illustrate: recent months has seen
the launch of a national platform of data release [20], but also
platforms on metropolitan level, as the that of the Dutch city
Enschede [19].
While possible barriers and potentials of open data are reported by
several researchers (see Section 2), a deep understanding of the
underlying processes for these barriers is missing. In this paper,
we study the underlying processes that pertain to data release in a
local context, i.e., we search for crucial determinants for the
release of open data. We have studied the processes involved in
releasing data at four organizations of the municipal Rotterdam,
which is the second largest city in the Netherlands, with a
population of 680 000. The municipality currently has 12 000
employees. We have implemented a participatory action research

approach [28] to expose indicators that play a significant role in
releasing data for public at the four organizations. Important
elements in this approach are desktop research, workshops,
questionnaires, and in-depth interviews with key persons at
different levels of the organizations. We have found that
important indicators for data release are the way data is stored in
an organization (distributed/decentralized versus centralized),
whether data is internally produced or externally gathered, the use
of data, and the availability of guidelines to determine whether
data is suitable for release. We discuss how these indicators may
contribute to shape an open data policy at a local level.
We note that while the combination of the indicators may be
considered as a predictor of data release by an organization, the
focus of the paper is rather to identify these indicators.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2,
we embed our work in the field of open data in more detail. In
Section 3, we motivate the use of a participatory action research
approach for our purpose, while we implement this approach in
Section 4. In Section 5, we present our findings from the
participatory action research sessions. Section 6 is devoted to the
lessons that we have learned so far. Section 7 reports about our
future activities, while Section 8 concludes the paper.
2. RELATED WORK
Despite the pressures from higher levels of (federal) government
to realise data release on local level, there are barriers along
several dimensions to open data release. From a user perspective,
major barriers are the access to proper datasets and the adequate
use of datasets. The access to proper datasets is aggravated by the
fact that the datasets are fragmented and offered at several
websites, which are in some case hard to find [3, 17]. Moreover,
access to datasets are in some cases restricted to specific user
groups. Adequate use of datasets is hindered since metadata with
regard to datasets are poorly documented, and therefore the
semantics of the data may be ambiguous. Furthermore, how to
determine the quality of a dataset is an open question. In [29] an
overview of the barriers that users may encounter in using public
sector information is provided.
Along with barriers from a user perspective, data providers also
encounter barriers to data release. From this perspective, major
barriers are the lack of knowledge to deposit data, the economical
loss that data release may entail, and the lack of knowledge to
decide which datasets are eligible to release. In order to deposit a
dataset, often this dataset should be formatted and processed
according to the system requirements that accepts the dataset.
Especially dataset providers who are not familiar with the
technical aspects of data processing should deliver a lot of effort
to deposit a dataset.
The economic impact of data release becomes clear when taking
into account that some European public sector bodies used a cost
recovery model to fund data collection. For example, the Dutch
Business Register (KvK), knows a cost recovery ratio of 19,50%
[25]. By releasing data that is currently sold, certain agencies
loose a valuable source of income [27].
Organizations need practical frameworks that support them to
decide whether a dataset is eligible to release or not [30]. In these
frameworks, special attention should be given to privacy issues.
Nowadays, organizations are struggling with the questions
whether a dataset is or may become privacy sensitive [7]. For
6
example, according to [16, 18], combining datasets could lead to
undesirable results such as revealing the identity of persons.
Additionally, publishing data that was gathered and managed for a
one purpose might lead to different conclusions if implemented in
an unrelated context [16]. The potential violation of privacy, has
especially gained a lot of attention in the literature, see for
example [1, 5, 13, 16, 22, 23, 26].
In [5] a study is devoted on the impact that information
technology has on several privacy issues. While the field of
database security [1] mainly focuses to technical solutions that
enforce the “need to know principle” i.e., access control policies,
which may prevent the disclosure of privacy, more comprehensive
alternatives to prevent the disclosure of privacy are proposed in
[4, 16, 26]. In [26] a framework is proposed to protect the privacy
of citizens, while in [4] and [16] comprehensive architectures are
proposed to minimize the violation of privacy law and regulations.
In [13], the authors plea for a so-called ambient law that
articulates fundamental legal protections, including privacy,
within the socio-technical infrastructure. In [23] privacy concerns
about using cameras and solutions to these concerns are discussed
in the context of monitoring dementia patients, while [8, 22] do
the same in the context of public safety.
However, PSI, is not always personally bound. Moreover, the
barriers that may be encountered depends on the type of data at
hand to be released. Therefore, for different types of data,
different kind of barriers may be encountered. At a national level,
there are also barriers to data release above and beyond privacy. A
comparative study by [15] highlights these issues. Barriers to data
release on national level are cited as traditionally closed
government culture, but also limited data quality or uncertain
economic impact of data release.
These studies, while providing a view to data release on a national
level, lack the focus on issues as experienced on a local level by
public sector information professionals. There is a lack of
understanding on local government levels on the impact, barriers
and opportunities of open data release. Our study focus on the
understanding of the underlying processes entailed by open data at
a municipal level. The rationale to choose this level instead of a
national level is that data is mainly gathered at local levels, and
therefore their support are of crucial importance for the success of
open data. To prevent that the understanding of the underlying
processes will be dominated by privacy issues, we will place our
emphasis in this study on the release of data that not are
personally bound, and therefore the chance that data is privacy
sensitive is minimized. For example, we focus on the underlying
process that are entailed by the release of data that pertains to all
trees in Rotterdam, such as the number of trees in a street, the
kind of trees in the street, the year that a tree is planted and so on.
3. APPROACH
As mentioned above, there is a lack of understanding of how data
should be released, what the effects of release might be, and the
processes needed to facilitate data release. This applies not only to
national or federal governments, but also on a local level. Within
our education program experience has also shown that data
release is not self-evident.
In order to explore data release, the University of Applied
Sciences in Rotterdam initiated a research project with four
services that form part of the Municipality of Rotterdam. They are

Figure 1. Stakeholders in the Participatory Action
Research
City Development (Stadsontwikkeling), City Works
(Gemeentewerken), Library (Bibliohteek) and City Archive
(Gemeentearchief).
The participating services form part of a consortium exploring the
barriers and benefits of open data for the local council and
represent one of the clusters that comprises the municipality. The
Library and the City Archive focuses on clients accessing its
services, City Development is more involved with executing and
developing urban policy, while City Works makes products such
as detailed city maps in addition to maintaining objects and
infrastructure in the city. These roles will be elaborated on later in
Section 4. First, we motivate in the following the choice for a
participatory action research approach and describe how we will
apply this approach.
3.1 Participatory Action Research
In order to understand barriers of data release, we employ a
participatory approach to research, where stakeholders from the
various public services are co-researching through action and
participation how an open data policy can be implemented.
Formally referred to as Participatory Action Research (PAR), this
approach focuses on co-research with participants [28].
From the previous sections, it is clear that the barriers – e.g.:
technical issues, privacy or law - associated with data release
require expertise from different branches of knowledge. Seen
from this perspective, PAR can be an appropriate methodology,
due to its applicability in multidisciplinary research [28].
Furthermore, PAR is often a combination of theory and practice
and thus brings together academic researchers and practitioners as
problem solvers. PAR research aims to advance practical
knowledge and is often built on an understanding that results from
field experience [6]. According to [14], where knowledge
embedded in local context, a PAR approach can be beneficial.
What also speaks to more methodologically flexible approaches
such as PAR is the context in which research is taking place.
Organizations such as the local council are not found in a
7
laboratory environment where variables can be tightly controlled
in order to conduct experiments. Instead, individuals are busy
conducting their regular tasks. Given this, a more flexible
approach to research is required, where results can be quickly
incorporated into the research.
While [28] has expressed the benefits of PAR from a sociological
point of view, [12] mentions that such an approach also benefits
the development of information systems. For instance, the
participatory process can elicit increased commitment, while
helping create support for proposed solutions. This resonates with
the recommendation of [28] that PAR can help to prevent
misconceptions about research results and interpretations, because
participants are involved in research. [12] further mentions that a
more participative approach is less likely to result in change to
resistance from users (i.e.: data professionals in the local council)
during implementation, which is also relevant in the context of the
implementation of open data policy.
In practice, PAR thus means a more involved approach by all
participating stakeholders. In the context of our research, this has
meant not only conducting interviews with our participants, but
also organization of workshops to discuss emerging themes about
data release on a local level. Researchers also aim to be involved
with discussions relating to PSI release by attending internal
events at the council about PSI and data release. Furthermore,
events are organized to involve external stakeholders in the
process, by giving a platform from which issues related to open
data could be discussed.
Throughout the project, there is also a strong focus on the use of
cases that will guide data release. These cases are thematically
tied to the middle and long-term goals of the local council. These
themes were distilled down to projects, to be performed in our
education program by students. The goal is to let the projects act
as driver for data release in the local council, first by animating
the participating partners to quickly supply data for project
purposes, but also to highlight the type of data that is most
wanted, and the potential re-uses of data. Results from the
education program can subsequently be used by participants why
data re-use can be valuable.
Data release cannot be seen in isolation. In the long term, the goal
of open data is to foster innovation, transparency and
participation. This is achieved with actors found externally from
the municipality. Additionally, the municipality, through its very
nature serves goals of others. As such, PSI release is not in and of
itself the goal. The aim is also to explore the value of data for the
city, whether expressed financially, or through other metrics such
as social cohesion o participation.
This prescribes the involvement of stakeholders from outside the
public sector, such as the local creative industry. Several
commercial companies partake in exploring, through their active
involvement in our educational program. The cooperation
between Creative Industry as potential user of data, the Public
Sector as data supplier, education and research is shown in Figure
1. We believe that in bringing these four stakeholders together, a
broad view of the issues can sketched, with education and creative
industry acting as data users, while the public sector
experimentally supplies data, with researchers cataloguing data
release.

4. IMPLENTING PAR
In order to come to a deeper understanding of the underlying
processes for the barriers to data release, we have studied the
participating services provided by the four organizations at the
municipality. This happened first through an exploratory
workshop with consortium partners where earlier experiences
with regards to data release within each service was highlighted.
This was attended by a representative of the four services, plus a
member of the Management Service (Bestuursdienst) (n=6). In
addition to this, we performed desk research about the services.
This was followed up with a questionnaire with all the participants
(n=11). Subsequently, the questionnaire was also filled in by other
civil servants (n=50). Questions were based around five themes,
introduced by [15]: internal; judicial, social cultural, economic
and technical barriers to data release. The statements relating to
these themes were given, asking respondents to agree or disagree,
on a 5-point Likert scale. Examples include: Because my
department generates income through licensing data, I think my
department should retain the right to license the data, or, Within
my department, too much of the data is too privacy sensitive to
release.
The answers from the questionnaire formed the input for
subsequent in-depth interviews with participants (n=11). As part
of the project, a workshop was also attended, where statements
regarding data use was introduced and discussed by attendees
(n=8). Following this, a second workshop was organized where
the benefits and barriers of data release was discussed (n=6).
These various investigations were used to construct the indicators
for the underlying processes. Below we present the results from
these investigations.
Participants work at various departments within the local council
and were recruited as a result of previous engagement with
projects at the University. Respondents also came from services
outside of the project consortium, in order to give a broader
impression of open data. Interviews were loosely structured and
conducted on site.
The goal of these initial interviews was to explore how data
release is currently facilitated within the organization. It also
helped in connecting the internal processes of the council with the
barriers, leading to a better understanding of how data is managed.
Interviews were created based on themes that emerged from a first
open workshop about data release, where participants reflected on
earlier experiences. These results were compared with existing
research on data release by national governments, to form a better
picture of the subject. Respondents also filled out a questionnaire
prior to the interview, which helped to focus the interview themes
and identify some barriers as expressed by the participants
The first impression gathered from the interviews is the large
variety between the profiles of the services and how this impacts
data treatment. City Development executes and develops urban
development policies such as new housing complexes, or new
traffic routes. For this task, City Development uses data
extensively. The organization has a traditional decentralized data
structure, where data is used to execute policy, but is subsequently
often not re-used. The sources of the data also varies. In some
cases, it is gathered by a certain department, for example through
sensors on the road. In other cases, data might be bought
externally, or requested from a service of department controlling
8
the data. Illustrative of this is the use of quantitative interview
data from 17000 citizens in Rotterdam. These interviews,
conducted by an external bureau, is subsequently analysed and
presented in booklet form. This booklet might influence policy,
but the underlying data: interview results with 17 000, or even the
data interpretation that results from an analysis of the data is not
necessarily used again for different purposes within the
department, nor is it centrally controlled. Ownership of the data is
also opaque, in addition to its status as public sector information,
due to the fact that it was bought from an external agency.
While City Development creates policy, City Works has as task to
maintain the objects and infrastructure of the city. This includes
trimming trees, maintaining garbage bins, or removing unwanted
growth from bicycle paths, but also large infrastructure project
planning and advice. Additionally, City Works also produces a
variety of products, such as detailed maps of the city. These tasks
require intensive use of data, either because data is needed to
identify the location of objects due for maintenance, or simply
because it is a core aspect of created products such as maps. City
Works also supplies data to organizations inside the local council.
This would include sharing data with City Development to assist
policy development. For all these tasks City Works has
traditionally been very reliant on data management. Data must be
easily accessible and findable because not only is it important for
the internal functioning of the department, it is also one of the
core services offered.
The Library relates to City Works and City Development in the
sense that data is essential for the internal functioning of the
service. Data is collected about books to make them findable
online or in a local catalogue, but the library also keeps data about
all their customers, to ensure efficient service delivery. However,
data is either personally bound, or might be subjected to copyright
law. For example, meta data about books might contain
descriptions supplied by publishers, unavailable for re-use.
However, the Library is also in the midst of reorganization and
might in the future not be part of the city council, at least not in its
current form. This essentially means that the data gathered and
used by the library might not be considered as PSI. Subsequently,
the legal frameworks, as recommended on European and national
level might not be applicable. This creates uncertainty about the
status of the data and to what extent in might be made available.
The last service, the City Archive, is fundamentally already an
active participant in open data, albeit in a largely non-digital form.
Currently, the archive consists of almost 20 kilometres of archived
material, stretching back 800 years. The legacy of, until recent
years, always working with physical artefacts means that
digitization is not traditionally part of the role of the Archive.
However, the Archive has already digitized more than 150TB
worth of data. This data has not been imported into any
centralised system for easy retrieval. There is thus a significant
amount of available information, but a proportionally small
amount is currently accessible through the digital archive. A scan
on demand services has also been launched, but it seems illusory
that the entire archive will be available online soon. Additionally,
certain objects are not easily scanned: these would include objects
that are of unusual format, or very fragile. The City Archive also
possesses very little geographical information about catalogued
objects, prohibiting its use in maps, or other geographic
applications.

This sketches the picture of the four services participating in the
research. Through our interviews we also identified certain
recurring themes, as identified by respondents. What follows is a
closer look at the most important subjects.
5. OBSERVATIONS
The data collection in our PAR results in a number of interesting
observations. In the following two subsections we report on these
observations. We have classified the observations in two
mainstreams. Observations that pertain to underlying thresholds of
data release, and therefore indirectly determine the release of data,
and observations that directly determine the release of data. From
the latter observations, we derive a set of indicators that are
relevant for the release of data. In Section 5.1, we outline the main
underlying thresholds that play a role in data release. Section 5.2
is devoted to the observations and a set of indicators that directly
determine the release of data.
5.1 Underlying Thresholds
5.1.1 Fear of False Conclusions
A recurring theme was the fear of false conclusions being drawn
from released data. An example of this would be the potential
decrease in property value if details would surface about policy
plans of new city developments, even if these were not yet
finalised. Interpretations of data by outsiders without prior
knowledge about the goal of data gathering could also lead
unwanted situations. For example, research performed on the
demographic profile of certain neighbourhoods might not appear
nuanced enough to an outsider without knowledge about statistical
methods. In the case that there are judicial frameworks in place to
mitigate such issues, there might not be known to individuals
dealing with a particular data request.
5.1.2 Financial Effects of PSI Release
On the economic front, licensing fees also formed a barrier to
release. As mentioned earlier, some public bodies charge usage
fees for data. This is also the case for City Works. While research
has shown that the data recovery model results in proportionally
low amounts of income and that less restrictive data release can in
some cases lead to increases in revenue and or, in the case of free
data, lower transaction costs [25], services find themselves in a
transitional phase. Even proportionally low amounts of income
from data licenses need compensation. The current climate of
decreased government spending aggravates the problem since it is
not a given that lost income from releasing previously licenced
data for free will be compensated by the national government or
the council.
5.1.3 Opaque Ownership and Unknown Data
Locations
There are also significant questions regarding ownership of data.
Due to vertical data management in the past, data sharing between
departments has historically not always been the case. As a result,
services and, in extreme cases, departments within a service, lack
a complete picture about which data others control. Additionally,
even if the location of data is known, its ownership remains
opaque, inhibiting release. Merely identifying a dataset that would
strictly speaking be suitable for release does not warrant its
appropriateness as open data.
9
5.1.4 Priority
Finally, from our interviews and workshops, it transpired that
open data is not necessarily a priority within the council and does
not form part of existing tasks. This is not a consequence of
unwillingness, but simply because data release is not part of the
regular work for many data professionals. In combination with
this, the immediate benefits of data release are not always explicit,
making it an extra task, without clear incentives.
While the interviews conducted provide insights into the
experience of data release by the data professionals in the city
council, it neglects exploring the actual process of data release in
an empirical form. In the following section, we elaborate on the
released data, but also on the data that has, as of yet, not been
easily released. From these observations, we derive a set of
indicators that determines the release of data.
5.2 Indicators for Data Release
For our educational program, the focus has been to release data
that can be described as the low hanging fruit. This was for the
most part non-personal data related to objects in the city, for
reasons elaborated on earlier. A majority of data relates to public
property – in essence everything controlled by the municipality
that can be observed in the public space. Given this, a major
supplier has been City Works. The data released includes data
such as the locations of objects like trees, roads, or parks.
However, release has not only been swift because of the types of
data, but also due to the central data storage at City Works.
However, data released by the City Works was not made available
for re-use outside of our education program. The reason behind
this is the lack of clear judicial rules with regards to data re-use on
a wider scale. This effectively means that the data cannot strictly
be referred to as open data: it may not be used without restrictions
outside of our education program.
Despite the ease with which data about objects was released, other
types of data that relate to the internal processes of the council is
much more sensitive. For example, data about the maintenance
costs of objects has not been released, even within the education
program. This would include data about how often trees are
treated for various disease and the costs associated with cutting
the grass in public parks, or what the budgets are for keeping the
city maintained. Anecdotal evidence from our education program
suggests that this type of data (such as the maintenance cycle of
objects, or the costs associated with taking care of trees), can form
interesting input for applications. Also from the perspective of
transparent government, this data seems valuable. However, in the
short term, this is not forthcoming.
The lack of judicial frameworks and the ease of release stands in
stark contrast with data from City Development. This department
has made explicit decisions about data release, by classifying data
released under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. Applying
this license means that, unless otherwise indicated, the contents of
data objects such as traffic information is available for any type of
reuse. An exception to this might be the presence of copyrighted
material inside a document. For example, a policy document
could be supplied, unless it contains a photograph that does not
fall under the CC0 license. Furthermore, it is not required to state
the source of the data by the re-user. However, it is prohibited to
create the impression that the local council agrees with any

conclusions that might arise rom the data, when interpreted by
external parties [9].
Notwithstanding, despite having seemingly unambiguous
permission to release data to the public, the City Development
department is often in the dark as to where data actually resides.
Even if the data location is fully known, it does not warrant
release. Illustrative of this is a request for the locations of public
transport data. While this data is controlled by City Development,
the data is owned on a metropolitan regional level. As a result,
requests for the data’s release needs to go to metropolitan level,
even though the data location is known. Due to its ownership
being external, it is subsequently unclear whether the data can be
classified under the CC0 license mentioned above. This illustrates
that defining the judicial aspects of data release does not translate
to release. Practical or technical issues remain.
Due to the product focussed work process present at City
Development, the extreme decentralization is not conducive to an
open data policy. Additionally, departments within City
Development are controllers of datasets, but do not necessarily
own them. This potentially creates uncertainty as to the
applicability of the license, but also ambiguity as to who has the
final word in releasing the data.
Furthermore, while City Development has been very clear in
taking care of the judicial side of open data, the data that is
currently classified for re-use does not compromise all data. The
real-time status of many parking garages in the city is such an
example. This data, whilst known and shown in certain locations
in the city, is not available to third parties.
While City Development and City Works both deal for a big part
with data in a digital format, the City Archive is historically much
more focussed on physical artefacts. Data release by City Archive
has up until now been limited to the opening up of the search
Application Programming Interface (API), in order to access the
object metadata. There is thus no raw, unedited data about
archived objects such as high-resolution images, or historical
maps available in digital form, for reasons discussed earlier.
Table 1. Indicators of data release based on observations
Themes City Development City Works Library City Archive
Use of data Execute development policy. Maintain public
objects, producing
geographical products.
Support core services,
internally and
externally
Source of data Externally gathered Internally produced Internally produced
through services
processes and
externally bought
Enhance services,
catalogue objects
Metadata internally
created, artefacts
externally supplied
Data storage Decentralized Central Central Central (meta data
only)
Suitability of data for Medium: combination of High: many sets related Low: data personally High: data not
release personally identifiable to public objects, non- identifiable or subject personally identifiable
information, live sensor data personal.
to copyright
and owned by the
and object data.
Archive
Data released None Object data of public Book metadata Search API of archive
artefacts
metadata
Biggest threshold Decentralized data storage No legal framework for Personally identifiable Costs associated with
and internal data
the supply of data, data, uncertain digitalization of
management processes. commercial interests. organizational status,
copyright.
archive artefacts.
10
As mentioned before, the Library has more comprehensive digital
service provision, due to the reliance on data to manage the
collection and serve the public. However, the only set of
information that is currently available for use contains book meta
data. The use of this data currently falls into a grey zone:
bibliographic information gets bought from a commercial
organization, which has implications on its release as open data,
while for education purposes, re-use would be allowed. While the
library is also in possession of other data that is without copyright
restrictions, this comprises information about book lending, or
statistics about members. This data could theoretically be
personally identifiable, which complicates its use as open data.
Even in cases where data is anonymized it might still be possible
to extract personally identifiable data, through methods discussed
by [18].
From these observations, we note that the judicial issues, which
include privacy and copyright concerns, the way data is collected
and how it is stored, play an important role in data release.
Therefore, we distinguish the following indicators that may be
important for data release:
o Use of data, i.e., the way data is used by the department.
o Source of data, i.e., how is a set of data obtained?
o Data Storage, i.e., is data stored centrally, or decentralized?
o Suitability of data for release, i.e., are there rules and
regulations that determine whether a dataset may be released
or not, such as privacy or copyright.
In Table 1, we summarize how the several departments score on
each of the indicators together with the results of dependent
variable “data released”. Based on the research performed, we
also name the biggest threshold to data release. These relate to
indicators important for data release.
This overview of the release of data for use within the education
program provides an initial view to the barriers of data release as
experienced by the various participating partners. In the following

section we will elaborate more on how these findings can impact
open data policy on local level.
6. LESSONS LEARNED
First and foremost, the act of freeing up data is new to the services
at the city council. This results in many questions by public
servants about how data requests should be handled. Because
there is, as of yet, no real framework in place to answer these
questions, data release stumbles. However, beyond the fact that
data professionals lack clear guidelines to support data release to
external parties, there are some more fundamental issues
concerned with data release.
Due to the urgency of the education program, the most effort has
also been on acquiring easy datasets, without prioritizing data
according to demand. As a result, our inquiry reveals where data
is most easily retrieved, but also, by virtue of not being easily
accessible, what types of data needs further exploration. This
revealed that the easiest data to technically and practically release
was non-personal object data and especially due to the centralized
data storage of such data.
Below we will elaborate more in depth about the main lessons
learned from the research.
6.1 Nuanced Approach to Data Release
While the municipality typically presents itself as one entity to the
outside world, there is a much more complex organisational
reality. Even though our focus had merely been on four services,
the heterogeneous character of these services are immediately
apparent. This ranges from the types of tasks conducted, such as
servicing the public (Library), to developing policy (City
Development). Additionally, while some of the services are
involved with interacting with the public as a core task (City
Archive), others focus more on maintaining objects in the public
space. Our attempts at data release further emphasized this view.
This complex picture effectively also means that these services
deal with data in different ways. City Development, as a service
that is primarily concerned with developing and executing policy,
uses data for the creation of a product (such as a policy
recommendation). The data itself in this context merely supports a
task. As a result, data requested by the service remain unused,
except for the times when it is being applied in policy
development or creation of various products such as informational
publications about the city.
These processes of data usage thus impacts data release. Services
where data is used and stored very centrally has shown to be much
quicker in being able to release data, as the Library and City
Works have shown. This does not take into effect the suitability of
the data for release. The converse is true of City Development,
where data is important, but where the emphasis is on the products
that result from the data. Data storage is decentralized and
ownership opaque, complicating data release.
The suitability of PSI for release as open data also varies. Based
on two factors, privacy sensitivity and copyright restrictions, we
identify that internally produced data about public objects are the
most suitable, while at the other end, Library data, which is partly
bought from third parties and pertains to persons have a lower
suitability.
11
Different barriers to data re-use apply. While only one service,
City Development, has made explicit arrangements with regards
to judicial matters, this service, as our interviews and data release
shows, is not in a position to release data under a CC0 licence for
reuse because of how it treats data.
This too would be the case for data release by the City Archive. In
the event that the Archive has a legal framework about data
release it still might not possess the types of data that is easily
released, due to physical limitations to what the archive can
digitize, or financial restrictions. Conversely, the library can, and
has, released data for re-use. However, this data is not widely
reusable due to copyright, and the data that is not subject to
copyright law can be sensitive to privacy.
Given this, it seems that a nuanced view is needed to data release
strategies on a local level, with all the implications this has for
associated policy. Prior to formulating policy it remains important
to look at how services deal with data storage by taking into
account whether data is easily accessible, stored centrally, or
available in digital formats and what the other financial, internal
or judicial aspects might be.
6.2 Data Release for its Own Sake
The difficulties of data release, either as a result of technical
issues, uncertain judicial frameworks, uncertain economic
outcomes or simply not being able to find the data, means that
data release can still be a costly, labour intensive activity. Our
experience up until now has been that simply requesting “all” data
yields no results.
This means that choices are necessary to decide which data should
be released. In reflecting back on the motivation behind PSI
release, it is clear that the aim should not be merely the release of
data for its own sake. Rather, the ambition of PSI release policy is
to contribute to transparent government, innovation and increased
public participation. This however, is easier said than done. The
current state of affairs mean that to ensure efficient use of released
data, it is important to consider the return on investment, not
merely in a financial sense, but in the context of highest re-use
achieved by datasets when compared to effort needed to realise its
release. A more focused approach to data release has the potential
to mitigate some of the problems identified earlier. For example,
if finding the location of data is currently prohibiting release, as is
indeed currently the case, a demand-based approach to data
release might be applicable.
To facilitate the release of data based on demand, it remains
necessary to inform potential end users of the types of data
currently controlled by a service or department. This is currently
attempted within the department of Traffic and Mobility at City
Development. Through our education program, students are given
insight into the types of data that is regularly used at the
department. Request for data can then be performed with much
more focus and results of release, whether failure or success, can
be documented. Through this, the demand is articulated and effort
spent on data release yields quicker results.
Additionally a stronger focus can be achieved without big
investments into infrastructure: by exploring data release on a
small scale, data is released with clearer end-goals, which also
explicitly demonstrates the benefits of PSI.

6.3 Large Scale Implementation
In relation to the heterogeneity of the separate public sector
organizations and in combination with the transaction costs
associated with data release we identify that the large-scale
implementation of open data infrastructure is likely to encounter
significant difficulties. First and foremost, such an
implementation would be troublesome to achieve due to the
inherent heterogeneity of the services as discussed earlier. For
example, significant efforts would first need to take place to
ensure efficient data release and due to the differences in place at
the various services this process could be lengthy and costly. In
our context, merely clearing the judicial hurdles for the four
participating services in cases where data is deemed usable could
slow down development significantly. Even more illustrative of
this is the change needed in internal processes, as would be the
case in organizations with very fragmented data storage.
Furthermore, a large-scale implementation implicitly requires
large amounts of data to be made available. As discussed above,
even where there are judicial frameworks in place and data release
is technically feasible, there are still transaction costs related to
the release of data, such as locating datasets, or digitization. The
resources needed to build op a large-scale infrastructure that could
facilitate data release, might not be justified in relation to the
uncertainty of the actual re-use of the data that is finally released.
This holds especially true in a time when governments on local
and national scale in industrialized countries are seeking to reduce
expenditures.
This sketches the conclusions of the research. In the following
section we will reflect on how these barriers might be addressed
in our own work.
7. OUTLOOK
This research up until now presents a complicated picture with
regards to open data release. We believe that the appropriate way
to deal with data release on the local level is to run small pilots
and cases where there is a continual focus on data release where
direct effects of the value of data can be illustrated. Below we will
elaborate on a practical case that acts as driver for data release.
The data thus far collected is restricted to the easiest to release
information. While this provides insights into what the low
hanging fruit are, it does not answer questions about data that is
harder to release, and what changes the underlying processes will
have to undergo to facilitate release. In order to get a fuller
understanding of data release, more effort should be placed on
harder to release data.
To achieve this we have identified a portion inside the city that
can act as city laboratory for open data. Named the 1km3, this is a
space where an Open Data experiment is being conducted.
Located in the centre of the city, the 1km3 encompasses a place
where people live, shop, play and work. Within the confines of
this area, the goal is to gather as much data as possible. The case
acts to motivate participants by showing the role PSI is playing
for the city and its potential for interaction between residents and
local government. This should also highlight, in addition to the
barriers to data release, the potential benefits that PSI can have on
a local scale. Because the 1km3 is a limited area, a more focused
approach can be taken. Additionally, the limited scope is
appropriate to analyse the process of data release by local
12
authorities, allowing the research results to be applied on a
broader scale.
The results from the first exploratory phases of the project and the
barriers introduced in Table 1 currently forms a basis from which
stakeholders can attempt data release within their own
department. Additionally, the results from the education program
is assistive in illustrating data re-use in the municipality as a
whole.
In referring back to the PAR approach, this city lab provides
conditions where stakeholders can actively play a role to explore
efficient data release. Due to its small size, we can also focus on
the barriers of individual services, whilst releasing data with
explicit goals in mind. Such a pilot also precludes large
information systems, but rather allows smaller explorations.
8. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we explored data release on a local level. For this
purpose, we conduct interviews, workshops, questionnaires and
desk research. Through this we identified underlying thresholds
that inhibit data release, summarized in Section 5.1. Most
importantly, we identified indicators for data release, seen in
Table 1, based on our observations. These include the use of data
within a service, where data is stored and the suitability of data for
release. More studies could show whether there is a dependency
between indicators. This could assist in focussing efforts of
process change to best suit an organization, based on discovered
themes.
To realise the ambition of open data on a wide scale on local
level, there needs to be more questions answered about data
release. Clear examples are needed that illustrate the benefit of an
open data policy to civil servants, on a small scale. Large ICT
projects that attempt to solve all these problems in one attempt
might, in the current financial climate, not feasible. The focus
should be on using pilot projects that illustrate, on a local,
measurable level, the potential impact of open data.
9. ACKNOWELDGEMENTS
We thank our colleagues of the Rotterdam University, both the
researchers of the research lab Creating 010 and the teachers and
students of the School of Communication, Media and Information
Technology involved in the Rotterdam Open Data projects and the
participants from the council of Rotterdam. Special thanks to
Judith Lemmens. The work has been partly funded by the
Rotterdam Media Commission and RAAK Publiek.
10. REFERENCES
[1] Bertino, E. and Sandhu, R. 2005. Database security -
concepts, approaches, and challenges. IEEE.
[2] Bertot, J.C., Jaeger, P.T. and Grimes, J.M. 2010. Using ICTs
to create a culture of transparency: E-government and social
media as openness and anti-corruption tools for societies.
Government Information Quarterly. 27, 3 (Jul. 2010), 264–
271.
[3] Boulton, G., Rawlins, M., Vallance, P. and Walport, M.
2011. Science as a public enterprise: the case for open data.
The Lancet. 377, 9778 (2011), 1633–1635.

[4] Braak, S. van den, Choenni, R. and Verwer, S. Combining
and Analyzing Judicial Databases. Discrimination and
Privacy in the Information Society: Effects of Data Mining
and Profiling Large Databases. Springer.
[5] Broeders, D., Cijpers, C. and Prins, C., (eds) 2011. De Staat
van Informatie. Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het
Regeringsbeleid.
[6] Chesler, M. 1991. Participatory action research with self-help
groups: An alternative paradigm for inquiry and action.
American Journal of Community Psychology. 19, 5 (Oct.
1991), 757–68.
[7] Choenni, S., Dijk, J. van and Leeuw, F. 2010. Preserving
privacy whilst integrating data: Applied to criminal justice.
Information Polity. 15, 1-2 (2010), 125–138.
[8] Choenni, S. and Leertouwer, E. 2010. Public safety mashups
to support policy makers. Proceedings of the First
international conference on Electronic government and the
information systems perspective. Springer-Verlag.
[9] Creative Commons — CC0 1.0 Universal: 2011.
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.
Accessed: 2012-04-10.
[10] Dekkers, M., Polman, F., Velde, R. te and Vries, M. de 2006.
Mepsir: Measuring European Public Sector Information
Resources.
[11] European Commission 2003. Communication of the Re-use
of Public Sector Information – Review of Directive
2003/98/EC. Regulation.
[12] Fitzgerald, B., Russo, N. and Stolterman, E. 2002.
Information Systems Development: Methods-in-Action.
McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
[13] Hildebrandt, M. and Koops, B.-J. 2010. The Challenges of
Ambient Law and Legal Protection in the Profiling Era.
Modern Law Review. 73, 3 (2010), 428–460.
[14] Hughes, J. 2003. Commentary: Participatory action research
leads to sustainable school and community improvement’.
School Psychology Review. 32, 1 (2003), 38–43.
[15] Huijboom, N. and Broek, T.V.D. 2011. Open data: an
international comparison of strategies. European Journal of
ePractice. 12, April (2011), 1–13.
[16] Kalidien, S., Choenni, S. and Meijer, R. 2010. Crime
statistics online: potentials and challenges. Proceedings of
the 11th Annual International Conference on Digital
Government Research (2010), 131–137.
[17] McLaren, R. and Waters, R. 2011. Governing Location
Information in the UK. Cartographic Journal, The. 48, 3
(2011), 7.
13
[18] Ohm, P. 2009. Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to
the Surprising Failure of Anonymization. Social Science
Research Network. 57, 6 (2009), 1–64.
[19] Open Data Enschede: 2012. http://opendata.enschede.nl/.
Accessed: 2012-04-10.
[20] Open data | Overheid.nl Open Data: 2012.
https://data.overheid.nl/. Accessed: 2012-04-10.
[21] Public data for all – opening up Europe’s public sector: 2011.
http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/neelie-kroes/public-data-for-all-–opening-up-europes-public-sector/.
Accessed: 2012-04-10.
[22] Reiman, J. 2012. Driving to the Panopticon: A Philosophical
Exploration of the Risks to Privacy Posed by the Highway
Technology of the Future Santa Clara Symposium on Privacy
and IVHS. Clara Computer & High Technology. 11, 1
(2012).
[23] Schikhof, Y., Mulder, I.J. and Choenni, S. 2010. Who will
watch (over) me? Humane monitoring in dementia care.
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. 68, 6
(Jun. 2010), 410–422.
[24] Transparency and Open Government | The White House:
2009.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Transparency_a
nd_Open_Government. Accessed: 2012-04-10.
[25] Vries, M. de, Kapff, I., Achiaga, M.N., Wauters, A., Osimo,
D., Foley, P., Szkuta, K., O’Connor, J. and Whitehouse, D.
2011. POPSIS: Pricing Of Public Sector Information Study.
[26] Warner, J. and Chun, S.A. 2008. A Citizen Privacy
Protection Model for E-Government Mashup Services.
Proceedings of the 2008 international conference on Digital
government research (2008), 188–196.
[27] Weiss, P. 2002. Borders in Cyberspace : Conflicting Public
Sector Information Policies and their Economic Impacts.
Federal Register. February 2002 (2002).
[28] Whyte, W.F. 1989. Advancing scientific knowledge through
participatory action research. Sociological Forum. 4, 3 (Sep.
1989), 367–385.
[29] Zuiderwijk, A., Janssen, M. and Choenni, S. 2012. Open
Data Policies: Impediments and Challenges. 12th European
Conf. On E-government, June 14-15 (Barcelona, Spain,
2012), 794–80.
[30] Zuiderwijk, A., Janssen, M., Meijer, R., Choenni, R.,
Charalabidis, Y. and Jeffery, K. 2012. Issues and Guiding
Principles for Opening Governmental Judicial Research
Data. Proc. EGOV 2012, 11th European Conf. On Electronic
Government, September 3 - 6, LNCS (Kristiansand, Norway,
2012).

Implementation Framework for Open Data in Colombia
Lydia Marleny Prieto
IT Development Manager
GEL Programme, Ministry of ICT
Cr 8 12-00 Bogotá, Colombia
+57 (1) 3442270 x1501
lydia.prieto@
gobiernoenlinea.gov.co
ABSTRACT
This document contains an executive summary of the Open Data
strategy for Colombia represented in an open data model fit into
the Government online strategy, which allows operating and
managing the supply, as well as the demand, of public access data.
Colombian Open Data Model has been made with the objective of
supporting the generation of economic and social progress in the
country, by allowing citizens and business to have access to
public information, so that it can be used for developing
government services that create value to society in general; and to
promote transparency in the country, through information and
data available to citizens and businesses.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4. [Computers and Society]: Public Policy Issues
General Terms
Documentation, standardization, legal aspects, management
Keywords
Open data, open data strategy, open data model, online
government, transparency, public data, support and operation.
1. INTRODUCTION
Information generated by public agencies can be considered as a
public asset. According to the Colombian Constitution citizens
have the right to access such information. The concept of open
government data arises as part of the efforts made to structure
information. Governments can have more effective
administrations by means of being more transparent and by
working on improving citizen’s quality of life.
In Colombia, the e-government program has been implemented in
a systematic and coordinated way in all public agencies. Starting
in 2000 with Presidential Directive No. 02 [4], followed in 2008
with Decree 1151 [3], a general framework for e-government
strategy was defined. With the growth of the e-government
strategy, from 2011, a new maturity model was developed, and
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Ana Carolina Rodríguez
Research and Politics Manager
GEL Programme, Ministry of ICT
Cr 8 12-00 Bogotá, Colombia
+57 (1) 3442270 x 1007
ana.rodriguez@
gobiernoenlinea.gov.co
14
Johanna Pimiento
General Manager
GEL Programme, Ministry of ICT
Cr 8 12-00 Bogotá, Colombia
+57 (1) 3442270 x 1500
johanna.pimiento@
gobiernoenlinea.gov.co
new topics such as Open Government [2] and Open Data have
been included in the file of topics to develop, by taking concrete
actions.
Article 230 of the National Development Plan 2010 - 2014,
introduced this directive: "Government online as a strategy of
good governance: All public agencies shall forward the actions
identified by the national government through the Ministry of
Information Technologies and Communications" [5].
"Gobierno en Linea" (GEL) is the Colombian online strategy,
led by a program with the same name, that contributes to
developing a more efficient, transparent and participative
government, which provides better services by means of ICT
(http://www.gobiernoenlinea.gov.co). This strategy guides the
delivery of online services by public agencies at both national and
local levels.
GEL strategy contributes to build an efficient, transparent and
participative government which provides better services with the
collaboration of the whole society through the use of information
technologies in order to increase competitiveness and to improve
the quality of life for the prosperity all throughout Colombia.
Heading towards such objective, the open government data model
for Colombia has been developed. International best practices,
grounded on political and legal principles as well as technological,
cultural, organizational and budgetary perspectives have been
used to enable the publication of data by government agencies.
The openness of information publicly available has been
leveraged by citizens, academia, developer communities and
agencies, along with some policy framework.
Such work aims to introduce the open government data
framework in Colombia, plus the strategic guidelines needed for
its implementation. Chapters two and three describe the research
methodology and the model design. In chapter four current results
are described: a technical prototype for data and application
catalogs implementation, a regulatory framework, and a road map
to continue working until 2014. Lastly, conclusions and lessons
learned are addressed.
2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
This research was developed combining a mix approach of
quantitative and qualitative components. It focused on the
construction of the information that would support the formulation
of guidelines and regulations for the open data strategy in the
Republic of Colombia.

In order to have elements of analysis to produce knowledge,
experiences of other countries in the implementation of actions
and policies of open data were studied. Focus groups led by
experts on specific topics were carried out, as well as case studies
were conducted in eight local national public institutions, mainly
ministries and administrative departments.
Case studies aimed to assess the implementation of the strategic
framework along with the methodological and technological tools
developed by GEL program. This analysis involved a catch effort
through interpretation by the research team against focus groups
and case studies.
A benchmarking study including United Kingdom, Canada, USA,
Australia, Spain and Chile open data models, helped to identify
the main steps needed to develop the framework: a) definition of
the objective situation; b) gap analysis between the objective
situation and the current situation; c) definition of the necessary
components for the model; d) definition of the proposed
architecture for each of the perspectives; e) identification of
elements and organizational structure, actors and components
required to implement the initiative; f) identification of
technological and regulatory elements; g) identification of sociocultural
elements to cope with change; and h) identification of the
mechanisms, actions and budgets required to implement the
initiative.
Through quantitative analysis, results of case studies were
evaluated using surveys to officials of the organizations involved.
Such surveys measured the quality of the concepts, content and
language used in the proposed framework, which were studied
through scales from 1 to 5. Concepts were transformed variables,
identifying areas of improvement used for the formulation of the
final version of the framework toolkit.
3. OPEN DATA MODEL
3.1 Objectives
The open government data model in Colombia seeks to fulfill the
following objectives:
o Support the generation of economic and social progress in
the country by allowing citizens and business to have access
to public information, so that it can be used or transformed
for developing government services that create value to
society in general.
o Promote transparency in the country by means of information
available to citizens and businesses.
3.2 Principles
Taking into account the objectives, the expectations of the
Colombian Government, and the best practices identified, the
following are the fundamental principles for open government
data, illustrated in Figure 1. Basic principles are grouped into
four perspectives: politic and legal, socio-cultural, organizational
and budgetary, and technological.
Politic and legal principles guide the policies handling political
and legal efforts, and establish responsibilities and competences
for its enforcement; sociocultural principles lead strategies, tools
and actions necessary for the promotion and appropriation of good
practices, and guidelines for policy massification by public bodies
and third party application developers; Organizational principles
give directives in policies, business processes, competencies,
roles, organizational structures and resources required to
15
implement the initiative in public administration; and
technological principles guide the definition of protocols,
standards, tools and methodological guidelines necessary to
implement the strategy.
Socio-cultural principles
§� Pursue balance between supply and demand.
§� Seek for support from software development
communities, private companies and
academia.
§� Promote of interaction and feedback from
citizens and businesses about the relevance,
quality and timeliness of published data.
§� Focus on the satisfaction level of citizens,
businesses, the public and the media.
Strategic lines
and
fundamental
principles
Politic and legal principles
§� Support from all levels of government.
§� Phase out restrictions that limit access and use of
public information (such as payments or licenses).
§� Legal establishment of responsibilities and
competencies.
§� Progressive coverage of the initiative, for all
branches of government and private agencies
exercising public functions.
§� Agencies responsible and autonomously publishing,
hosting, maintaining and updating data
§� Support from a legal system that integrates open
data guidelines and policies.
Organizational and budgetary principles Technological principles
§� Leadership, control and monitoring of the
implementation strategy from the central level.
§� Encouraging and supporting generation of local
and thematic initiatives.
§� Considered a common practice throughout
public agencies.
§� Supported by a sustainable budget.
§� Aligned with e-government GEL maturity model.
§� Encouraging quality of data being published.
§� Data easily found by others at a central point.
§� One main data catalog for the country and
multiple synchronized federate catalogs at local
and thematic levels.
§� When possible, government should guarantee the
authenticity of published data.
§� Multiple publication mechanisms to suit the
conditions of the different public agencies.
Figure 1. Fundamental principles for open government data
3.3 Model components
Based on the principles outlined before, Colombian open
government data model has been structured. It was organized for
describing the elements that should be considered at the strategic,
tactical, operational and support levels, as displayed in Figure 2.
This model seeks to generate value-added services to society
through the development of applications made by third parties
(development communities, infomediaries industry, and
academia), using open government data from public agencies.
The elements associated with the model are described below.
3.3.1. Strategic Elements
Strategic elements describe the articulation that must exist
between the proposed open data strategy and the general GEL
strategy. It contributes to the achievement of GEL vision under
the following considerations:
1) Facilitate the efficiency and collaboration within and
between state agencies as well as society as a whole.
2) Strengthen the conditions for increasing competitiveness and
improving the quality of life.
3) Contribute to increase transparency in public administration.
4) Promote citizen participation using electronic media.
3.3.2. Tactical Elements
Tactical elements sought to link operational and strategic
components. For materializing this, an element of institutional
articulation and public policy was formulated through which the
responsibilities and powers of each of those involved in the open
government data initiative in Colombia were defined. Three main
indicators that allow the monitoring and continuous evaluation of
the open data initiative were defined:
1) Compliance: Monitoring the level of compliance of open
data policies and regulations by government agencies,
through the criteria defined in GEL manual.

2) Usage: Assessed by quantifying the use of published data,
taking into account feedback provided by users.
3) Impact: Evaluated considering the applications that had been
built using published data.
Evaluation
Strategic
Tactic
Operational
Support
Open Data Offer
Preparation
Identification
Analysis and Prioritization
Documentation
Structuration, uploading and publishing
Promotion and follow up
Access and use of
information and data
Legal and regulation
Information and
data publishing
Open Data Objectives and alignment with GEL
strategy
Institutional and public policy articulation
Publishing
responsibility
Responsibility of
information /data
access and use
Continued
Feedback
Culture
Strengthening
Publishing
management
Demand and value-added
services generation
Demand identification
Published data access
Applications development
and registration
Processes
Support and
maintaining
Technology
Non-functional
Conceptual model
requirements
Monitoring
Services
consumption
Citizens
Sectors, unions,
NOGs
Stekeholders
GEL Developers,
Infomediary
Agencies
Academy Allies
Figure 2. Open Government Data Model for Colombia
3.3.3. Operational Elements
Operating elements are those which bear with the “day to day”
implementation of the open data model. These elements are solely
responsible for promoting the provision of open government data,
the generation of services around them and the balance between
supply and demand through continuous public feedback and
reinforcement of cultural strategies.
Data supply is the backbone of the operation by which
information is published by public agencies (and private
companies with public functions) at national and local levels in
structured and reusable formats under defined quality parameters.
The demand for data that supports the operation allows
identifying the needs that users have of open data and the
requirements of added value services needed by citizens and
companies.
3.3.4. Support Elements
Support elements include the legal and regulatory framework,
business processes and technological components.
Legal framework establishes determination and the institutional
mandate not only to formulate an open data policy, but also to
implement that policy across the government, including the legal
mechanism that establishes the fundamental principles, rights and
obligations related to open government data. It focuses on four
pillars: access to and use of information; publication of
information; responsibility for publication; and responsibility for
access and use of information.
Technological framework comprises: a conceptual view that
illustrates the different functional modules; a logical view that
identifies the principal components of the required software
structured by means of a layered architecture in which the external
resources, the integration components, the presentation
components, the business logics and the transversal and support
components are identified; and a deployment view that identifies
the possible physical distribution of the technical infrastructure
components and some non-functional requirements identified as
quality attributes of the required platform.
16
For the correct operation of the proposed model, two activities to
support initiative processes were created: release management, for
accompaniment of the implementation, and support and
maintenance, a process including management of the catalog data
portal, plus the promotion and distribution of data dissemination
and application development.
3.4 Road Map
The road map proposed for the implementation on the open data
initiative in Colombia comprises an incremental strategy that is
aligned with GEL maturity model [9]:
The initial level refers to having the institutional conditions that
are necessary to establish open data. At this level some public
agencies start publishing their information inventory, best
practices are shared and an intra-governmental community of
open data advocates starts to be created.
At the basic level, all data sets are prioritized, collaborative
focused events are performed, and feedback from citizens and
organizations start to be significant.
At the advanced level, the open data process has moved beyond
the simple fulfillment of baseline requirements. Impact
measurement, quality assurance, collaboration platforms and
massive collaborative events will be performed.
The maximum level will be reached with continuous processes of
innovation, transparency, and public/private cooperation.
Sustainability of the best applications is reached, key performance
indicators are monitored and the use of semantic components is
achieved [1].
3.5 User Guidelines
A guide for public servants interested in easily acquiring open
data knowledge and a toolkit were developed. It was structured in
five stages of an ongoing process that guide them to publish data
in open formats:
o Identification of information: At this stage the identification
and characterization of all the information held by entities is
performed.
o Analysis of publishable information: At this phase
o
information is classified by filtering what is publishable from
what it is not, according to legal framework policies.
Prioritization of data: This phase organizes the data that
needs to be published according to a strategic analysis which
generates the inventory and working plan of public data to be
published.
o Documentation: This phase fully describes data to be
published, producing useful metadata to make it
o
understandable and easy to find and use.
Structuring, upload and publishing: This phase performs the
preparation of data in open formats, and the execution of
ETL processes to load and release data on the technology
platform for subsequent open access.
3.6 Government data and application catalogs
The primary tool for data supply is the Colombian Government
data catalog prototype available at http://www.datos.gov.co, a
web portal that allows citizens and enterprises to centralize search
and access to all public data – illustrated in Figure 3. This
platform meets two goals: 1) It should make it as easy as possible
for citizens – especially developers—to discover interesting

datasets and to reuse them. 2) It should make it as easy as possible
for government data stewards to make their datasets available for
public consumption. As a pilot case study, nine datasets provided
by national agencies including Transport, ICT and Education
Ministries, Planning Department were identified and published.
Data supply involved the development of a prototype of an online
government operated clearinghouse for publishing third party
applications using open government data, now available at
http://ww.aplicaciones.gov.co. This tool allows third party agents
(volunteers, civil society groups, government itself) to upload
apps, and citizens to search and download apps that provide
government services, using open published datasets.
3.7 Legal Framework
Definitions and actions associated with open data strategy in
national regulations were absent and needed to be developed in
order to implement the mandatory compliance of the model by
public agencies in Colombia. In this sense the inclusion of a law,
a draft decree and two manuals guiding public policy are being
prepared.
National Open Data
Plataform
Citizens
Local and
Thematic Open
Data Platforms
GEL Storage
Datasets
www.datos.gov.co
National Open
Data Catalog
Data load website
www.datosentidad.gov.co
Federated
Storage
Datasets
Federated
Open Data
Platform
Agency Data
Base National, thematic and local web sites
Figure 3. Open Government data platform
First, the draft "Law on Transparency and the Right to Access
National Public Information" [9], included the enforcement for
agencies to allow access to and use of public information, rules
for information publication, accountability in the publication, and
responsibility in access to and use of information.
Second, the draft "Decree for establishing general guidelines
for GEL strategy for the Republic of Colombia" [7],
establishes the open data strategy as one of the priorities for the
country, and identifies the rules for the disposal of information
from public institutions to citizens, free of charge.
Third, the matter of open data was incorporated into the
guidelines contained in the "Manual for the Implementation of
GEL strategy in Colombia" [8], as well as in the "Unique
Manual of Accountability" [6], as mechanisms to promote
openness, transparency and accountability in the Colombian
Government.
4. DISCUSSION & CONCLUSIONS
Open data model developed by GEL provides a framework for
data opening in a structured and organized manner, establishing
balance and sustainability between supply and demand of data,
and outlining a clear route for accomplishing a transparent,
participative and collaborative strategy. Added value must be
obtained from solutions that solve citizens’ needs and agencies
required services for them.
17
At the moment, results from Colombian open government data
initiative are still incipient. Complexity perceived by public
agencies regarding the openness process is one of the main
barriers for the model implementation. Agencies face diverse
problems when trying to comply with the model. Those problems
are mainly related to human behavior and fright to change: fear of
losing control over data, lack of legal responsibility for
publishing, and concern and distrust of third parties that would
market or use the information to publish, summarize the main
concerns.
Currently GEL open data team is working on improving the
technological platform, optimizing the existing instruments,
defining the uptake model, setting the initial legal framework and
developing training campaigns to disseminate the strategy.
In the near future some actions need to be included in the work
agenda: quick gathering of data to be published that can be easily
identified, such as data from national research statistics, already
published at web portals; engage citizens themselves in the
decisions about what data to publish; creation of open channels
for developers to provide information about the use and impact of
the data; and the design of an environment that gives developers
the flexibility to use a full range of software tools to manipulate,
and to add value to, government information, among others.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was performed in the framework of the Inter-
Administrative Cooperation Agreement No. 308-2011, subscribed
between “Fondo de Tecnologías de la Información - FONTIC and
Centro de Investigación de las Telecomunicaciones – CINTEL”,
with participation of “Everys Colombia” in its development.
6. REFERENCES
[1] Cantera Fonseca, J. M., Hierro Sureda, J. J. and Romo
Zabala, P.A. Web semántica: Tecnologías y arquitectura.
Revista Comunicaciones de Telefónica I+D. ISSN 1130-
4693, Nº. 39, 2006, 211-221.
[2] Corojan, A. and Campos, Eva. Gobierno abierto: alcance e
implicaciones. Fundación Ideas. ISBN: 978-84-15018-73-5.
2011.
[3] Decreto 1151 de 2008. Ministerio de Comunicaciones de la
República de Colombia. Diario Oficial No. 46.960 de 14 de
abril de 2008.
[4] Directiva Presidencial No. 02 de 2000: Gobierno en Línea
del 28 de Agosto de 2008
[5] Ley 1450 de 2011. Por la cual se expide el Plan Nacional de
Desarrollo, 2010-2014. Congreso de la República de
Colombia. Diario Oficial No. 48.102 de 16 de junio de 2011.
[6] Manual Único de Rendición de Cuentas. Proyecto de ley
estatutaria no. 133/11 cámara– Por la cual se desarrollan
disposiciones para la promoción, protección y garantía del
derecho a la participación ciudadana en Colombia
[7] Proyecto de Decreto para establecer los lineamientos de la
Estrategia Gobierno en Línea para la República de Colombia.
2012.
[8] Programa Agenda de Conectividad – Estrategia de Gobierno
en línea. Manual 3.0 para la Implementación de la
Estrategia de Gobierno en Línea en las entidades del orden
nacional de la República de Colombia. Junio 2011.
[9] Proyecto de Ley 156 de 2011 Senado, 228 de 2012 Cámara.
Por medio de la cual se crea la ley de transparencia y del
derecho de acceso a la información pública nacional y se
dictan otras disposiciones. 2011.

Increasing Kenyan Open Data Consumption: A Design
Thinking Approach
Leonida N. Mutuku
iHub Research
Bishop Magua Centre, Ngong Road
P.O. Box 58275 – 00200 Nairobi
+254 732792987
leo@ihub.co.ke
ABSTRACT
In July 2011, the Kenyan Government became the twenty-second
government worldwide and the second in Africa to release many
of its data sets in an open and reusable format on the Open Kenya
portal. This open data portal has presented great opportunities to
develop applications, especially on the mobile platform. There
have been, however, challenges in engaging the technical and
industry experts in conversations around the open data. We are
conducting an ethnographic study on an experiment that brings
together subject matter experts in the Water, Education,
Transport, and Local County sectors, together with open data
evangelists and software developers to guide them through a
design thinking approach to identifying, idea-ting, and
prototyping open data applications. The main objective of this
study is to identify best practices in increasing open data
consumption through scalable mass appeal mobilization and civic
engagement tools and applications.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
A.1 [General Literature]: General – Conference Proceedings
General Terms
Documentation, Design
Keywords
Kenya, Open Data, Design Thinking, Ethnography
1. INTRODUCTION
Over the past couple of years, various governments and public
institutions have launched numerous initiatives to make their data
sets open. Open data is data that is freely accessible, easily
redistributed and reused [8]. The US Government and the World
Bank were among the first of these institutions to release, in 2009,
numerous data sets in an open format for access by all.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
18
Jessica Colaco
iHub Research
Bishop Magua Centre, Ngong Road
P.O. Box 58275 – 00200 Nairobi
+254 735203733
jessica@ihub.co.ke
Since then, we have seen more than 20 governments and other
major institutions around the world release their data, in a bid to
democratize this public information by making it accessible to all
citizens; and to promote innovation of local solutions to socioeconomic
development issues that afflict the respective countries
[13]. By providing this public information to citizens, the
governments empower them to query this data and in this way
promote accountability, transparency and innovation in service
delivery.
2. THE KENYA OPEN DATA INITIATIVE
In July 2011, the Kenyan Government became the twenty-second
country worldwide and the second in Africa [16] to release many
of its data sets in an open and reusable format on the Open Kenya
[13] portal. The Vision given for this initiative is that “with the
launch of Open Kenya, Africa will have its own story of
promoting transparency through open data to celebrate, learn from
and share” [13]. At the launch of the portal, there were over 400
data sets released to the public in easily manipulated formats.
2.1 Potential of the Open Data Initiative
The Kenya Open Data Initiative enables Kenyans to interact with
government data at different levels and use this information to
engage [11] further with the government in accordance with the
new Constitution’s provisions on access to information [14]. The
government has released many more large data sets since the
launch of the portal, ranging from national census data to statistics
on government spending at national and county level [9].
Various opportunities to develop applications that use the newly
available open data as a basis to represent information have
emerged. Over 90 dataset requests surfaced within the first month
of the launch by developers and other stakeholders, which
indicates a great interest to explore this data in meaningful ways
and represent it visually, while providing useful insights into the
information that lies within this data.
This opportunity could be explored further in the mobile space to
create mobile open data applications. With over 99% of users that
access Internet in Kenya doing so through their mobile phones,
[4] a much faster and more efficient tool to disseminate open data
information to citizens may be through mobiles. It is therefore
worth considering mobile applications as an important
dissemination method of open data information [9].

Giving Kenya’s citizens greater access to government data
enables communities to mobilize and demand better services
based on evidence provided by open data. [1]
2.2 Importance of Open Data to Governance
Through continuous interaction and providing feedback on the
platform and its data sets, in the long term, open data promotes
not only transparency and accountability, but also democracy. As
previously highlighted, improved service delivery will be
promoted by the feedback loops that arise through frequent
querying of the open data by both citizens and government
agencies. For example, the resource allocations and government
expenditures could be queried and insights obtained by analyzing
the open data accessed. In this manner, open data will allow for a
paradigm shift from a centralized governance model to a citizencentric
governance model.
The government realizes these important values of the open data
platform and has been a strong advocate for the platform,
evangelizing about its potential and benefits at various events and
public functions. In return, many developers and journalists have
embraced the Open Data Portal with a number of applications that
query the database being developed. Examples of such
applications include: Huduma [10], MsemaKweli [12],
CountyScoreCard [5] and CDF Review [3]. Further, the
government has promoted interaction with these data sets by
providing grants of up to $30,000 for the development of
applications based on open data. [6]
The World Bank has also been instrumental in the education and
awareness campaigns on the importance and opportunities of the
open data portal by sending in their own open data evangelists and
members of the finances’ open data team to officiate at boot
camps with a focus on data journalism and open data
visualization.
Despite these numerous efforts, the potential of the open data
portal has only barely been realized.
3. OPEN DATA CONSUMPTION
3.1 Open Data Evangelism
The openness of the platform is subject to interpretation because,
though the data sets are available online, this does not necessarily
translate to the data being available to all Kenyan citizens. This is
because currently, the data is only available on a web or mobilebased
portal. Less-educated citizens may not be comfortable
accessing information through the Internet or mobile phones.
Alternatively, the less educated citizens may not be Englishliterate.
These less educated citizens may be the users who have
the most need for the open data information. Therefore, for the
portal to be a success, citizens, end users, and beneficiaries must
be made aware of what information lies on the data platform and
its relevance and usefulness. This awareness can be raised through
direct interpretation of the data on the portal, but perhaps more
importantly, from easily-digestible information created by
intermediary parties from analysis and visualization of the open
data.
These intermediary parties essentially interact directly with the
platform creating applications based on the data. To reap
maximum benefits from the open data sets, the applications
19
created must address real needs and not just be fancy visuals with
no real value behind them.
Despite the many efforts discussed above, there has been no real
measurable engagement of industry and sector experts in these
open data conversations to date. These are important stakeholders
when it comes to formulate problem statements based on these
data sets and advice on the solution development [2]. While
software developers may create great visualization tools, great
value is derived from their engagement with industry experts who
together, will assist to build necessary service to serve the likes of
those who will not readily accept or understand the data on the
platform.
Figure 1: How different stakeholders engage with
opendata.go.ke
There is a need to bridge the gap between those who can make
sense of the data sets and interpret the seemingly random numbers
to software developers, in a manner that can then be easily
adapted and captured in innovative useful products and
applications. This research aims to test the hypothesis that the
realization of the full potential of open data will be achieved when
easily interpretable open data products are made for the general
public, the final end user of these data sets.
3.2 Design Thinking Approach
3.2.1 The Open Data Pre-Incubator
We are currently carrying out this research study around a sixmonth
experiment, a pre-incubator, which aims to accelerate the
ability for the public to make sense of open data in order to
increase their engagement around critical public issues: in the
sectors of Water, Education, Transport, and Local Counties. The
Pre-incubator experiment will test a model that will be put to use
in a broader two-year Incubator effort, endorsed and supported by
the highest levels of government, which will be led by public
mobilization agents with support from the technological
community.
In this Pre-Incubator, four Open Data Fellows have been
embedded in civil society and media organizations and are
working to build an application or service or platform around key
thematic issues. These host organizations and fellows are
conducting a close consultation process with issue expert working
groups who provide insight into specific use cases and technical

insight into available data resources. The specific outcomes of this
experiment are the creation of analytical dashboards and data tool
kits for knowledge professionals; and the creation of mass appeal
mobilizations applications/platforms for civic engagement.
The multi-stakeholder groups will then follow a Design Thinking
approach to ideate the solutions and create meaningful and useful
applications based on these insights from the data. This will be
done in five steps, following concepts derived from the Stanford
D. School Design Thinking methodologies [15], namely:
o Empathizing - observing, engaging, and immersing the
developers and subject matter experts together so as to
understand the needs of the general citizens. This will take
place in a workshop where there will be brainstorm sessions
around four thematic areas: Water, Education, Transport and
Local County Data.
o Defining -Problem statements will be formulated by the
fellows and the working groups formed. These problem
statements will be based on the synthesis of the empathy
findings in terms of compelling needs and insights, scoping
specific and meaningful challenges to solve. This will take
place in another workshop where a number of projects will
be selected with which to proceed.
o Idea-ting - This will be done around the numerous problem
statements and go further into strengthening solutions for the
selected projects. The idea-tion will be supported by a boot
camp where an initial prototype will be designed to be built
in selected teams. This event will also have a public outreach
component to help educate researchers and the broader
public about the use of open data.
o Prototyping and testing - The actual prototyping will then
follow where all the ideas generated are actualized as
applications and technology services to address the problems
identified to be solved using open data. This step will involve
different levels of prototyping and showcasing demos of the
published data applications.
3.2.1.1 The Research Process
The specific objectives of the research are to:
1) Document the Open Data Outreach process in order for it to
be replicable in other communities and countries
2) Use evaluation mechanisms of the design thinking approach
and the documentation to understand how to make the Open
Data Outreach initiative sustainable and scalable.
This research is being conducted as an intense study that involves
active participation and observation in the entire process of ideation
and development of the open data applications through the
pre-incubator model. Specifically, the study is using ethnographic
models in order to fully understand this pre-incubator model in the
development of open data applications, and uncover new and
consequential variables [7] to consider in the construction of the
larger incubator model.
This research includes an exploratory survey and initial literature
review to help determine scope of the project and verifiable
metrics for success to aid in this evaluation and analyze the
replicability of the open data pre-incubation process so as to
provide targeted recommendations for scaling up the initiative.
These have been identified so far, at a high level, as the successful
20
development of open data applications that will be scaled in the
region or continent of Africa; and the creation of an ecosystem at
the grass root level (the communities) around open data, through
the use of these applications.
The research will continue to review the documentation of event
proceedings and activities related to the process as well as
qualitative research conducted through ethnographic observation
and participatory approach, in-depth interviews and audience
analysis.
The documents of the process of building and running the open
data pre-incubator will then be critically analyzed and used to
deliver use cases and recommendations that can be used for
actionable planning in a larger incubator model. This may call for
a review strategy for sustaining such open data incubator model
by analyzing successes, weaknesses, opportunities & challenges
for making this data more ‘mainstream’.
The findings will then be presented at the end of the experiment as
use cases, recommendations, tool kits and a critical analysis of the
process that can be used for actionable planning of a similar open
data consumption product.
Overall, the specific goals of the Pre-Incubator process are to
create one app or service or platform that used at scale across
Kenyan society and drastically increases the use of open data and
the research will support this further by the recommendations
delivered for a sustainable and scalable model.
4. CONCLUSIONS
This project will contribute in creating a knowledge community
on this open data of experts and non-experts alike and spurring
conversations around this open data. The research process will not
only inform the underlying project, the pre-incubation model, but
hopes to raise new questions on how further to promote
engagement of the ordinary citizen with their government through
the usage of other mass appeal applications. This research hopes
to come up with an effective sustainable toolkit on how subject
experts and developers can interact with the Open Kenya portal
and in collaboration, build tools and services around the datasets
that can benefit all citizens in spite of their literacy levels with
regards to the platform.
As we embrace new ideas of living, applications revolving around
various sectors like Water, Education and Health will go a long
way to assist the country in transitioning to more citizen
engagement and efficient service delivery. Consequently, this will
lead to identification of proper open data innovations that solve
real problems within the society and essentially assist in achieving
the objectives with regards to the release of open data.
5. REFERENCES
[1] Beeman, H. 2011. Uses for open data
http://hadleybeeman.net/2011/01/26/uses-for-open-data/
Accessed August 2012
[2] Business Daily, Government portal must have the required
impact, 2011
http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion+++Analysis/G
overnment+portal+must+have+the+required+impact/-
/539548/1199730/-/10sesc1/-/index.html Accessed in April
2012

[3] CDF Review website, http://cdfreview.on.co.ke/ Accessed in
April 2012
[4] CCK Quarterly Sector Statistics Report. 2012, 19
http://www.cck.go.ke/resc/downloads/SECTOR_STATISTI
CS_REPORT_Q1_11-12.pdf
[5] CountyScoreCard website, http://countyscorecard.on.co.ke/
Accessed in April 2012
[6] Daily nation. Kenya frees Government data on the internet,
2011. http://www.nation.co.ke/sports/-/1090/1196768/-
/item/0/-/bdooo5z/-/index.html Accessed in April 2012
[7] Genzuk M, PH.D. A Synthesis Of Ethnographic Research,
Center for Multilingual, Multicultural Research, University
of Southern California. 1999.
[8] Halonen, A. Being Open About Data. Finnish Institute in
London, London, 2012
[9] Howard, A. Open government data to fuel Kenya's app
economy, 2011,http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/open-kenyagovernment-data.html
Accessed in April 2012
[10] Huduma Website, http://huduma.info/ Accessed in April
2012
21
[11] Madera, C. 2010 Solving Urban Challenges With Open Data
http://americancity.org/daily/entry/solving-urban-challengeswith-open-data
Accessed in August 2012
[12] MsemaKweli website,
http://msemakweli.ihub.co.ke/pages/home.php Accessed in
April 2012
[13] Open Kenya Portal. https://opendata.go.ke/ Accessed in
April 2012
[14] Rahemtulla, H., Kaplan, J., Gigler, B., Cluster, S., Kless, J.
and Brigham, C. Open Data Kenya: Case Study of the
Underlying Drivers, Principal Objectives and Evolution of
One of the First Open Data Initiatives in Africa. Open
Development Technology Alliance, 2011.
[15] Stanford D. School, Design Thinking
http://dschool.stanford.edu/use-our-methods/ , Accessed in
April 2012
[16] Were, D. Ushahidi Welcomes Kenya Open Data Initiative.
http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/07/12/ushahidiwelcomes-kenya-open-data-initiative/
accessed in April 2011

New Perspectives for Electronic Government in Brazil:
The Adoption of Open Government Data in National and
Subnational Governments of Brazil
Ricardo Matheus
University of São Paulo
ricardomatheus@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
The development of information and communication technologies
(ICTs) enabled production of bases containing raw data which can
be freely manipulated, filtered or being crossed to build new
applications. These possibilities of using this raw data and its
manipulation have been called Open Government Data (OGD).
The aim of this paper is to present the State of Art of the Open
Government Data in Brazilian National, State and Municipal
governments. Some benefits that OGD have been promoted are:
transparency promotion, and, improvements of social control and
citizen participation. The methodology used is the literature
review mainly about concepts of Open Government Data and
three case studies about Brazilian governmental initiatives of
OGD Portals. It was conducted an exploratory study of Brazilian
initiatives National and Subnational governments that aims to
verify the Brazilian level of OGD based on the eight principles of
OGD and the five stars of open linked data, the last one was
created by Tim Berners-Lee to measure the level of open data in
websites. The final considerations reveal Brazilian initiatives
adopt almost the entire principles of OGD. Further, the initiatives
are in the third stage of a completely open linked data (three
stars).
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J.1 [Computer Applications]: Administrative Data Processing –
Government
General Terms
Management, Theory
Keywords
Electronic Government; Transparency; Social Control; Citizen
Participation; Open Government Data
1. INTRODUCTION
Recently, the Information and communications technology (ICT)
development have been bringing new possibilities for promotion
of transparency and availability of public data, mainly through the
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
Manuella Maia Ribeiro
Fundação Getúlio Vargas
maiamanuella@gmail.com
22
José Carlos Vaz
University of São Paulo
vaz@usp.br
internet. Through ICTs the promotion of transparency has been
increased because ICTs allowed an easier ambient to access data
and information of public information from governments. The
possibilities of using new technologies by governments to
promote transparency, social control and citizen participation are
constantly presented in the literature [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].
The first phase of the transparency process of governments was
governmental portals of transparency, where several kind of
information, especially financial information, was published in
zipped format. This kind of publication is characterized by the
fact that it is the government who decides what and how it will be
seen. This applies to the publication of financial reports or data
non-interactively. A second phase is characterized by the
possibility of performing custom queries to databases. Some
interested parties could access government databases and interact
with them. This implies they could order structured queries
producing crossed researched of specific data or, at least allowing
filtering databases in search of detailed information. For example,
this applies to appointments to the financial implementation of the
Union, States and Municipalities in Brazil [2, 6, 7, 8, 9].
A new phase becomes possible more recently: the open
government data (OGD). Afforded by the development of ICTs,
OGD can go further publication of reports or queries to access the
databases. It became possible to offer database in its raw state, to
be freely manipulated, filtered or mixed with others, including
allowing the construction of new knowledge and applications by
civil society. Some of consequences of this new possibility of
governmental transparency are social control and citizen
participation through collaboration [10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16].
However, the limits of them are not yet fully known. Neither its
boundaries were fully exploited [17, 18, 19].
Several new applications are emerging in some developed
countries such as United States, New Zealand, United Kingdom
and Australia, as well as movements on the part of organized
sectors of society who are pressing for its implementation [11, 12,
16, 17, 18]. The pioneering example is United States of America.
The federal government created a level of openness of
government information by creating unprecedented memo on
transparency and open government requires that all actions of the
ministries themselves were based on transparency, citizen
participation and collaboration between government and society.
In addition, the Ministry of Science and Technology created the
Open Government Initiative ("Open Government Initiative") to
effect the availability of open government data [20, 21].
While civil society organizations have emerged around the world
that pressure governments to open their data in open format. In
according with [21], in the United States, the Sunlight Foundation,
OMB Watch and the League of Women Voters have created a

movement to pressure for open government data and creating
applications for society from these data. Thus, also received
support from large organizations in the country as the Open
Society Institute, the Omidyar Foundation and the Ford
Foundation.
Despite the limited knowledge available on the subject, it is
possible to envisage the emergence of OGD is appearing in many
countries of the world.
This article will explore the state of the art of using OGD in
Brazil. The methodology used was literature on subject of OGD
and an exploratory study of some of the few experiences in Brazil.
Due to its recent creation, websites that provide open data were
not analyzed by its impacts, but only their potential for promoting
transparency, social control and citizen participation by offering
OGD.
First, the paper presents a concept discussion about OGD. Then, it
was chosen three Brazilians cases to analyze through two methods
of analysis of Brazilian initiatives: the eight principles of OGD
and the five stars of linked data ranking. The data collection
occurred through structured inspection of these three OGD
Portals.
Regardless of open data might be considered in both the public
and in private, this article, as a matter of focus, is only open to
government data in government. Once the conceptual discussion,
the article identifies some of the experiences of reference and uses
them to make an exploratory reflection on the limits and
possibilities of the OGD contribute in social struggle around the
transparency practices and the relationship between government
and civil society, because the data open not only relate to the
dissemination of information but also to encourage new uses for
the citizens of public data.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Open Government Data
Open Government Data (OGD) is a term used to denote
governmental information available via the Internet in the public
domain for free use by society [17]. This concept refers to the
protection of public data as belonging to the citizen, which should
have unrestricted access to government information, advocated by
several authors [22, 17, 23], among others. It also refers to the
context of recent development of ICT, where the Internet,
databases, tools, standards and open formats allow and facilitate
the provision and access to this information.
The idea of the OGD is developed from the discussion on open
data engendered by Tim O'Reilly, owner of O'Reilly Media in
mid-2007. In the same year, along with O’Reilly’s with others
specialists joined by 30 supporters of open government to discuss
OGD and its importance to democracy [24]. At this meeting of
experts and advocates of OGD, it was developed the eight
principles OGD. These principles state that the OGD should be:
1) Complete: All public data is made available. Public data is
data that is not subject to valid privacy, security or privilege
limitations.
2) Primary: Data is as collected at the source, with the highest
possible level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified
forms.
3) Timely: Data is made available as quickly as necessary to
preserve the value of the data.
23
4) Accessible: Data is available to the widest range of users for
the widest range of purposes.
5) Machine understandable: Data is reasonably structured to
allow automated processing.
6) Non-discriminatory: Data is available to anyone, with no
requirement of registration.
7) Non-proprietary: Data is available in a format over which no
entity has exclusive control.
8) License-free: Data is not subject to any copyright, patent,
trademark or trade secret regulation. Reasonable privacy,
security and privilege restrictions may be allowed.
Civil society organizations are using these principles of
governments to levy the availability of government information.
[25] presented at an event in 2009, the three laws of open
government data:
1) A blog about the project;
2) If data is not found and indexed on the web, it does not
exist;
3) If not already open and available in machine-understandable
format, it cannot be exploited;
4) If any legal provision does not allow its replication, it is
useless.
Benefits of adopting the OGD in the field of transparency and
social control are, at least in theory, evident. The provision of
OGD tends to contribute to the increased transparency of
government, creating better opportunities for social control of
government actions. However, given the relative newness of the
topic, yet there have been no studies that show the whole of this
possibility.
A second category of benefits can also be addressed. It is the
possibility of creating new information and applications from the
open government data. In this case, transparency is not only
encouraged, but also new services may originate from the
interaction between government and society through the
exploitation of OGD. These services can be generated through
new ways of working collaboratively across the participatory
government and private institution, since the concept of OGD
avoids the vision of the citizen as a mere recipient of public
information.
The focus on the concept of citizen open government data is
emphasized by [26], pointing the concept relates to an
understanding that the way governments have their information
available allows the intelligence collectively create better ways to
work with them than the governments themselves could do. As an
example, [26] says that “it would be possible to optimize
resources in public administration, if they leach from the traffic
data in urban open format”. Thus, citizens who would take care
through the use of ICT to produce charts and graphs on traffic.
To [23], "the provision of open government data allows
information to be used in the manner and convenience of the
person concerned so that they can be mixed and matched to add
more value to the data." For this author, the purpose of the public
information is made available under the rules of open data is
overcome the limitations that exist for users of public information
can easily find, access, understand and use the public data
according to their interests and convenience [23].

Not without reason therefore that the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C), an international consortium that aims to
develop Web standards, defines government data as open: the
publication and dissemination of public sector information on the
web , shared in raw format and open, understandable of course, to
allow its reuse in digital applications developed by society [27]. In
addition, the W3C considers that governments should encourage
citizens to use the open data available by governments, ie, they
should be encouraged to reuse the data according to their needs
and wants. The [23] summarizes the purpose of this incentive:
"There is value in providing open government data if the company
has no interest in re-use them".
Likewise, the Declaration on the Public Service Open Europe
believes that public bodies must provide the government data: in
open formats and reusable, public institutions should seek to act
as a platform for building of public value. Public organizations
should offer citizens the ability to solve problems for themselves
by providing them the proper tools to do so [17]. Protection of
open data as a promoter of transparency is due to the possibilities
of making government records accessible to eliminating all
restrictions concerning technology, accessibility and legislation to
International Initiatives of Portals of Open Government Data
Worldwide, activists, international organizations and governments
are thinking about access to public information from the data
open. Although the discussion on this topic is new, there are
already some experience of government provision of open data.
Several national and subnational governments now provide their
data from the orientations of open government. Among the
countries that have policies of open data include: United States,
United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand [26, 17]. These
countries have developed national policies on access to public
data and created web portals that provide public information in
different formats. Moreover, they often encourage citizens to
create new applications and ways of using information published
in their portals.
2.1.1 The Australian, New Zealand and United
Kingdom Portals of Open Government Data
The Australian government created the portal Data Australia in
February 2010. The objective of the portal of transparency is to be
the database of public information government of this country.
They encourage us to use the information contained within the
portal to create gadgets and computer programs by users who do
social control of all information within the portal. The website of
the New Zealand government was created this year to offer
information and intelligence agencies and public bodies of
government. It has space for discussion through forums that may
be proposed by citizens.
The example of the United Kingdom intends to offer data and
information to citizens in public administration for the expansion
of government social control. It has space for the wiki, online
community, and sends in new web applications, among others. In
2008, Britain ceded public information to a competition to
develop solutions to public data named Show us a better way.
2.1.2 The United States Portal of Open Government
Data
The flagship plan for adoption of open data is the U.S. Initiatives
in this country can also be found in the sub-national governments.
According to [26], Washington DC was one of the pioneers in
developing the incentive to collaborative work between
24
government and society with public data. President Obama early
in the mandate, set policies for the promotion of transparency that
encourages the provision of government data in open format.
The memo sent by the president on January 21, 2009 to all heads
of government called the Federal Transparency and Open
Government. This memo pledged to create "unprecedented levels
of openness" in government. The president called the
representatives of the executive to work to ensure trust and
establish a system of transparency, public participation and
collaboration. The opening will strengthen democracy and will
promote efficiency and effectiveness to government "[20, 26].
The Open Government Initiative policy aimed to guarantee the
realization of this memo. Among its actions, is the portal
Data.gov, created in May 2009. The aim of Data.gov, portal
transparency of the federal government is offering information
and expand the creative use of government data through web
applications, encouraging innovative ideas to provide greater
transparency of governmental actions. The site contains
information about hundreds of government agencies and offices
separated by organ. Statistics tell visitors monthly, daily, yearly. It
also has space for participation of citizens wishing to express their
will.
2.1.3 Private Portals of Open Government Data
Besides the government experiences, there are already nongovernmental
organizations that seek to promote and support the
adoption of open data policy. For example, the Sunlight
Foundation and Project Open Government Data, Access the Open
Knowledge Foundation Info. These experiences advocate in favor
of adopting the policy of open data by governments and perform a
variety of activities from research to encourage the creation of
solutions and standards for open formats. In short, despite the
recent discussion of existence and availability of open government
data, there are already examples of governments that adopt this
theory as a public policy to promote transparency and
collaboration between government and society.
2.2 How to Measure the Level of OGD in
Governmental Portals?
One of the methods to measure the level of OGD in governmental
Portals was created by Tim Berners-Lee. It was denominated the
five stars of open linked data [27].
Actually, this method was created to “(…) categorise the
publication of open data on the Web in levels of increasing
usefulness, that encapsulate the present shared vision of the
Semantic Web as a Web of Linked Open Data, and that
individuals can use to rate their own data publication” [27].
It was divided in five categories [28]:
1) One star: available on the web (whatever format) but with an
open licence, to be open data.
2) Two stars: available as machine- readable structured data
(e.g. excel instead of image scan of a table).
3) Three stars: as (2) plus non proprietary format (e. g. CSV
instead of excel).
4) Four star: all the above plus, use of open standards from
W3C (RDF or SPARQL) to identify things, so that people
can point at your stuff.
5) Five stars: all the above, plus: link your data to other
people’s data to provide context.

3. RESEARCH APPROACH
The objective of this article is to present the State of Art of the
OGD in Brazilian National and Subnational governments. To
achieve this goal, firstly, it was done a literature review that
guided this study focused on the key concept: Open Government
Data (OGD) and its main examples in governments (United
States, Australia, United Kingdon and New Zealand) and entities
that promote OGD (Sunlight Foundation and Open Knowledge
Foundation). This allowed us to highlight the possibilities that, in
theory, the DGA can offer as tools for promoting transparency,
social control, and reuse by civil society, among others. However,
the virtually nonexistent literature on DGA in Brazil has required
an exploratory study to identify the initiatives already undertaken
by governments.
It was decided to perform preliminary research from experts and
publicity materials on the Internet, which identified experiences
promoted by the federal, state and municipal governments. After
identifying the set of experiences available, it was decided to
carry out structured visits to the following government websites
that publish open government data (one from each level of
government): DadosGov Project (Federal Government),Open
Government SP (Government of the State of São Paulo) and São
Paulo City Council (Municipal level).
Other initiatives were found such as the portal of the State of
Ceará Municipalities Court of Audits (TCM-CE) and the Public
Security Secretariat of Rio Grande do Sul State. These two
initiatives it was not chosen to a further analysis because they are
isolated experiences in their states. We were looked for initiatives
such as portals and initiatives from Executive or Legislative.
In Brazil there is still no transparency portal experience that is
associated totally with a central policy of open government data
available [26, 17, 23]. In general, cases in Brazil are far short of
international experiences, such as the United States and United
Kingdom. Therefore, the availability of open government data in
Brazil does not have a systematic policy as the United States.
Nevertheless, there are individual experiments and partial
availability of public data by some government agencies and
specific laws that encourage the adoption of open data by
governments.
The objectives of the structured inspections in these three
initiatives were to verify that the Brazilian OGD Portals achieve
the eight principles of OGD and the five stars of open linked data
presented above in the literature review.
A series of structured inspections on these websites was done
between 02/08/2012 e 04/01/2012. Data collected were used to
assess how the eight principles of open government data proposed
by [24] and the five stars of open linked data are presented in
these cases. The exploratory study was conducted because the
cases we found are recent experiences, once OGD are a very
recent issue in Brazil. Therefore, there was no way to make an
analysis of its impacts yet.
Thus, the steps of this research were:
1) An exploratory research of Brazilian governmental initiatives
of OGD through Internet search;
2) Definition of the studies cases. The conditions were:
different levels of governments, preferably of Executive or
Legislative and preferably portals.
3) Structured inspections in these cases to find how many
principles of OGD and stars they have.
25
4) Defining the results and State of Art in Brazilian OGD.
4. RESULTS OF THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES
4.1 Open Government Data in Brazilian
Federal Government
In December 2010, the federal government launched the first site
that aims to provide public data on this being an open format. The
Brazilian Portal of OGD was denominated DadosGov
(http://beta.dados.gov.br/). The project was developed by
Information Organizing Committee from the Presidency of the
Republic (IOC-PR) which consists of the following Federal
Government agencies: Office of Deputy Information for Decision
Support, President's Chief of Staff, Institutional Relations
Secretariat (SRI-PR), Department of Logistics and Information
Technology , and two federal government-owned IT companies
that provide services to government.
The aim of this website is to organize and make available to the
President, general government agencies and society governmental
information, a reliable and easily accessible. For this, DadosGov
website is structured to provide data in open format to be taken by
anyone interested. The data come from federal government
agencies, ministries and other public organizations. The table
below shows the main government agencies that provided data to
the project:
Table 1. Main data provided by DadosGov Project
Government
Organization
Ministry of
Education
(MEC)
Ministry of
Social Welfare
(MPS)
Ministry of
Agrarian
Development
(MDA)
Ministry of
Justice
(MJ)
Ministry of
Agriculture
(MAPA)
Time
Series
252
132
131
127
110
Examples of content
Childhood Education, School
Health Program, University
Scholarships (PROUNI), Student
Loans Fund for Higher
Education (FIES), among others.
Ministry branches.
Rural microcredit, Family Farm
Insurance, among others.
Services to women victims of
domestic violence, Amnesty
Commission deliberations,
among others.
Contracts for urban food
suppliyng.
Source: DADOSGOV Project (2012)
DadosGov portal like the site of the U.S. federal government,
cataloging data that were already available in public bodies, but
were not systematized in a single portal and open format. Over 30
agencies have provided historical series of public information for
use of both governments and citizens. Among the sites studied is
the one that provides more information. Due to the large amount
of data available was not possible to verify that all data presented
were the raw data.
Data are presented usually by historical series that can be
analyzed by the user via graphics, tables or records. Extractions of
the series are in the following formats: CSV, RTF, PDF, XLS, and
XML.

Another principle adopted by this site is that user identification is
not required for data extraction. Although there is no space on site
to discuss applications and other uses of the available information,
there is an incentive for citizens to use these: "The idea of linked
data formats is to allow civil society to development tools able to
read data supplied by the government and make comparisons and
analysis" [31]. Regarding to license to use the data, the site is not
clear what are the chances of reproduction and use of information
available.
In 2010, federal government, through the Secretariat of Logistics
and Information Technology of the Ministry of Planning has
initiated a project to create the Open Data National Infrastructure
(ODNI). The initiative focuses on interoperability and
standardization of information resources. It also intends to
promote best practices for the provision of open government data.
It is defined as an "integrated set of technologies, policies,
procedures and mechanisms for coordination and monitoring,
standards and agreements necessary to facilitate the storage,
access, sharing, dissemination and use of open data" [31].
Factors that motivated the ODNI launching were difficulties for
searching, accessing and reusing government data, both for the
society and the government itself. The initiative seeks to support
demands of changes in relationship between government and
society, promoting transparency, control of government by
citizens and citizen participation in policymaking. The ODNI will
use existing experiences in the dissemination of public data
available in the federal government as a starting point, including
some isolated actions in federal agencies and two centralized
operations of the federal government: the aforementioned
DadosGov portal and federal government's Transparency Portal
(http://www.portaltransparencia.gov.br/).
ODNI's staff points out as a challenge to the success of the
initiative the federal agencies involvement and a successful
consensus around a single set of concepts. Implementation
strategy for ODNI has some main elements: launching a virtual
community for collaborative work involving officials of various
public agencies, scripts and roadmaps for publishing open data,
voluntary membership by various public agencies, technical
training of civil servants in ontology modeling and
implementation of a pilot project on public procurement.
Portal was based on the availability of summary information and
statistical series in a single location on the Internet. ODNI means
a step forward from the experience of DadosGov. The ODNI's
proposal takes a different approach: to create conditions for the
various agencies to make available their data in a decentralized
way. With this, ODNI will provide integrated data with a high
level of interoperability through technologies such as Linked
Data,. This strategy will make ODNI able to foster the opening of
a much larger volume of data.
A beta version was launched in the beginning of 2012. This
version was done by civil servants and hackativists. One of the
goals of creating this new portal is to guarantee the commitment
proposed in the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a global
effort to make governments better through open government.
4.2 Open Government Data in Brazilian State
Government
The São Paulo State Government Portal created SP Open
Government portal in 2010. Its goal is to make available to civil
society, via the Internet, copies of databases and information
which is not confidential and gives unrestricted access to the
26
organs and entities of the State Public Administration. The decree
that created the portal provides the rules of data and creation of
the portal, summarized in its second article:
o Rules of provision, information, guidance and providing
access to databases, as well as to the responsibilities of the
parties.
o Conditions of use of these bases provided, supposed to be
free for any purpose or activity, safeguarding the legal
restrictions and associated regulations.
o Register of available bases, containing the identification and
detailed description of each one and identify the agency or
entity responsible.
o Tools to facilitate collaboration between users of the
available databases, including self-identification for who
obtains a copy of available basis, including information of
purpose for which the base was required; and registration and
publication of products generated through the use of bases,
identifying their authors.
The São Paulo law falls largely to the principles of open
government data to ensure the free reuse of all available nonsensitive
state data. The Open Government SP portal was released
in January 2011. The website seeks to stimulate launching of new
electronic services, promoting transparency and improving the
quality of information of interest to society by providing updated
copies of their public databases, on a free and open basis, using
the Internet. Databases provided are produced by the State
Statistical Agency (SEADE Foundation), which has most state
social and economic indicators, the Department of Treasury and
the Court of Auditors. However, the website does not provide data
from other agencies in São Paulo, i.e. not all data are available on
site. Among the information available are: Elections (information
concerning the elections in São Paulo between 1998 and 2008);
state indicators (Sao Paulo State Social Responsibility Index -
IPRS), catalogue of public services offered through the Internet;
Information from municipalities. Unlike other sites, rules
regarding use and availability of data are clear. All data available
on the site are non-sensitive and have unrestricted access. The
only requirements are that users accept the rules set out in this.
Registration is optional for accessing the data. Developers can
register applications built within the portal itself. However, for
sending and accessing applications created registering is
mandatory.
4.3 Open Government Data in Municipal
Level
The São Paulo City Council Portal has a space to present the
project “Open Data Parliament Program”. The project was created
with the purpose of making databases and non-confidential
information in electronic open format, in accordance with the
principles of public administration and observance of
internationally accepted recommendations, such as those
presented by the Open Knowledge Foundation and the
International World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The idea of a OGD Portal in the São Paulo Parliament was
defined after the seminar “The Era of Open Data” in October
2011, conducted by the São Paulo City Council.
The Portals presents:
1) International manuals of OGD such as the Open Data
Handbook [29].

2) An explanation about how civil society can open and read
archive in open format;
3) A blog about the project;
4) Some City Council data in open format.
The open data presented in the website is: a) Presence of
councilors at ordinary and extraordinary plenary sessions; b) Vote
of councilors in ordinary and extraordinary plenary sessions; c)
Budget of the Municipality of São Paulo in 2011; d) Budget
allocations from the Municipal Education in 2011; e) Ratio of
employees (updated monthly); f) Budget Execution of the
Municipality of São Paulo (since January 2010);g) Monthly
Balance of Performance Budget Revenues - Direct
Administration; and, h) Historical Series of the benefits of Aid
Accounts-General Charges In Office.
The data presented in this Portal are few in relation to all
information that has a City Council. But it is a primary and timely
data. They use mainly XML format. Despite claiming that they
follow the recommendations of international organizations, it is
not clear what are the licenses used. They also do not have a
space to present applications that use their data. The following
table summarizes how open government data principles of are
adopted by the Brazilian experiences:
Table 2. OGD principles adoption in Brazilian cases
Principles
Dados
Gov
Governo
Aberto SP
São Paulo
City
Council
No
Complete
Data
No No
Primary
Data
No No
X
Timely
Data
X X
X
Accessible
Data
X X
X
Machine
understandable
X X
X
Non
Discriminatory
X X
X
Non
Proprietary
X X
X
Free License X X
Info not
provided
Source: Created by authors from cases website
Therefore, when we compare these cases and the principles of
open government data, we can realize that most of the principles
are used in the examples of Brazil. Data are not complete and
most are not primary. However, there was still little information
available. There is also lack of clarity about the license of the data
presented in the case of São Paulo City Council.
A positive point is that they all have current data, accessible and
understandable by machines. Furthermore, it is not necessary a
register to data access.
27
5. OGD in Brazil and the Five Stars of Open
Linked Data
In the case of Tim Berners-Lee method, the Brazilian cases are in
the following phase:
1) One Star: the first stage requires that the website contains
data available independently of the format, but with an open
license. All the cases studies presented data available and an
open license. For example, Dados Gov from Federal
Government uses Creative Commons License. We found
three problems to guarantee the excellence of the first stage
in Brazilian initiatives: a) There are few data presented in
these Open Data Portals in relation to public data that
governments have; b) São Paulo City Council does not
explain clearly what open license they use; and c) DadosGov
has some data that is not open license.
2) Two Stars: All portals presented data available as machinereadable
structured data.
3) Three Stars: The Portals use mainly non-proprietary archives
such as XML, CSV and HTML, so, they achieved the third
stage.
Unfortunately, it was not found the four and five stars. To achieve
these stars, the governmental portals have to: i)Use URIs, so
people can point at their stuff, and; ii) Link their data to other data
to provide context.
6. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
The emergence of the OGD requires a shift in thinking about the
transparency of governmental actions and information. This need
is not just theoretical. The very practice of social actors involved
is creating new demands for transparency, not served by
traditional practices in electronic government.
There is a major change in the principles that guide the handling
of demands for transparency. So far, everything that was not
confidential should be made available to the public upon request,
or kept available as possible. The new framework gives rise to a
new level of demand for transparency: everything that is not
confidential should be available on the internet as open data in a
way people cannot just access data, but also create new services
and analysis with these open data.
Logically, implementing broader OGD programs will face huge
barriers, because most governments wouldn't be mobilized to
increase the level of social control over them. However, the
complexity of the issue makes it impossible to reduce it only to
the interest of governments in promoting transparency through the
OGD. Civil society has an important role, too.
In addition, comprehensive programs to spread open government
data require using data formats and technologies are not always
employed by governments themselves. Therefore it will be a
difficult task even for well-intentioned governments and surely
will took many years to reach a high level of open government
data availability.
According to [17] technology already exists for governments and
civil society to use government data as they decide. Available
technology can support new ways and new indicators of thinking
about public administration. In this way, civil society could
generate more innovation from unrestricted access to public data.
For these authors, the development of open government data
depends on: a clear policy of the Administration in regard to

access to public information, changes in public sector strategies
aiming to foster transformation of relations between state and
society. Moreover, it depends on a change in the central locus of
public organizations as interpreters of social needs” and also as
service delivery agents [17].
[30] argues that to achieve the goal of providing open government
records should be observed three fronts:
o Map of Youth and Adults School (EJA): map showing the
openings of adult education in public schools in Brazil;
o Tr3e: website that crosses over the information of
deforestation in Brazil;
o Open Parliament: website designed to facilitate access to
information about MPs in Brazil.
These civil society initiatives demonstrate how the issue is
increasingly taking up space on the agenda of organizations and
groups interested in using IT to promote democratic developments
in Brazil. Taken together with the emergence of new government
initiatives, these initiatives show a clear sign of an expanding
supply of OGD in the coming years.
Despite the existence of few theoretical and empirical data on
open government in Brazil, there is a clear expansion of national
experiences and discussions.
If we take the experience of Transparency Portal of the federal
government as a reference, it can be said that the ODNI has great
potential to accelerate the adoption of open government data
initiatives in the country. Its impact should go beyond the limits of
the Federal Government and stimulate initiatives at the
subnational level, by giving greater visibility to the idea of the
OGD, and by offering standards and roadmaps that may be
adopted by states and municipalities.
Besides the few public sites that adopt the open government data,
there is a law that deals with open data in known Freedom
Information Act, which regulate access to government
information as provided in the Constitution.
The Brazilian law on transparency emphasizes the information
technologies and communication (ICTS), in particular the
Internet, encouraging and requiring public organizations to make
the information on the World Wide Web. The internet is regarded
as a means of easy access and opportunities to reach a large
number of people.
Among the required data are public expenditures and the general
data for the monitoring of programs, activities, projects and public
works. There is an obligation of public agencies not only to
disclose such information, but also make them available so that
they are easily accessed, understood and updated.
Open government means that public data should be disclosed in
the most disaggregated level possible and in different formats.
Disclosure must attain the raw data which should be able to be
viewed on any type of machine for anyone who want to make use
of such data. Thus, the law has principles of open government
(even if not explicitly quote) for the dissemination of public
information.
Future additional studies would be useful for better understanding
demands for OGD and evaluate impacts of present and new cases
of OGD to promote transparency, social control and citizen
participation. In future studies, it would be also important to check
what are the challenges of Brazilian governments to achieve the
five stars.
28
7. REFERENCES
[1] Ribeiro, Manuella Maia. Transparency on the portals of
Federal Government: The cases of Comprasnet and portal of
transparency. University of São Paulo (USP), 2009.
[2] Pinho, José Antonio Gomes. Investigating states portals of
electronic government in Brazil: Lots of technology, poor
Democracy. Journal Public Administration (RAP), 42 (3):
471-93, MAY/JUN. 2008.
[3] Welp, Yanina. Democracy and the digital divide in Latin
America. International Conference of Direct Democracy in
Latin America, 14-15.MAR. 2007.
[4] Prado, Otávio & Loureiro, Maria Rita. Electronic
Government and transparency: evaluation of advertising the
public accounts of the Brazilian capitals. Reach Magazine,
vol.13, n.3, p. 355-372, SEP/DEC 2006.
[5] Vaz, José Carlos. Prospects and challenges for the expansion
of electronic government in the municipalities. International
Seminar on Electronic Government and Local Governments.
Brasília, 2003.
[6] Ferrer, F. & Borges, Z.. Electronic government:
transparency, efficiency and inclusion. In: E-gov.br: the next
revolution in Brazil: efficiency, quality and democracy:
electronic government in Brazil and abroad. Prentice Hall.
2004.
[7] Ruediger, Marco Aurelio. Electronic Government and
Electronic Governance - Alternative Concepts in the Use of
Information Technologies for Providing Access to
mechanisms of Civic Government and State Reform. Contest
XVI Ensayos y Monografías del CLAD Reforma del Estado y
on Modernización de la Administración Pública "Electronic
Government”. Caracas, 2002.
[8] Diniz, Eduardo Henrique et al. Electronic government in
Brazil: a historical perspective from a structured model of
analysis. Journal Public Administration (RAP). 43( 1):23-48,
JAN./FEB. 2009.
[9] Mello, Gilmar Ribeiro de & Slomski, Valmor. Electronic
Governance Index of Brazilian States : Within The
Executive Branch. JISTEM J.Inf.Syst. Technol. Manag.
(Online) [online]. 2010, vol.7, n.2, pp. 375-408. ISSN 1807-
1775.
[10] Yildiz, Mete. E-government research: Reviewing the
literature, limitations, and ways forward. Government
Information Quarterly. Volume 24, Issue 3, July 2007.
[11] Althrop D. & Ruma, L. Open Government: Collaboration,
Transparency, and Participation in Practice. O’Reilly Media.
P11-39. 2010.
[12] Nam, Taewoo. New Ends, New Means, but Old Attitudes:
Citizens’ Views on Open Government and Government 2.0.
Proceedings of the 44 th Hawaii International Conference on
System Sciences. 2011.
[13] Parks, W.. The open government principle: Applying the
right to know under the constitution. The George Washington
Law Review. 26(1), 1-22, 1957.
[14] Parycek, P. & Sachs, M. Open Government: Information
flow in Web 2.0. European Journal of ePractice. 9(1), 59-70.
2009.

[15] Robinson, David, Yu, Harlan, Zeller, William P. & Felten,
Edward W.. Government Data and the invisible hand. Yale
Journal of Law and technology, 160. 2008.
[16] Sheridan, John & Tennison, Jeni. Linkin UK Government
Data. LDOW 2010, April 27, 2010, Raleigh, North Carolina.
2010.
[17] Agune, Roberto Meizi; Gregorio Filho, Alvaro Santos &
Bolliger, Sergio Pinto. Open government SP: provision of
databases and information in an open format. III Congress
Consad of Public Management, 2010.
[18] Vaz, J. C., Matheus, R. & Ribeiro, M. M.. Open government
data and its impact on the concepts and practices of
transparency in Brazil. Cadernos PPG-AU/FAUFBA, 2010.
[19] Torkington, N.. Rethinking Open Data - O'Reilly Radar.
O'Reilly Radar. 2010.
[20] Obama, B., Memo from President Obama on Transparency
and Open Government. In D. Lathrop & L. Ruma, eds. Open
Government.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/documents/opengovernment-directive.
2010.
[21] Fung, A. & Weil, D.. Open Government and Open Society.
In: Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and
Participation in Practice. O'Reilly Media. 2010.
[22] Laporte, T.; Demchak, C., Friis, C.. Webbing governance:
national differences in constructing the face of public
29
organizations. In: GARSON, G. Handbook of public
information systems. Marcel Dekker Publishers. 2000.
[23] Diniz, Vagner. How to achieve open government data. In III
Congress Consad of Public Management, 2010.
[24] Open Gov Data. Eight principles of open government data.
http://resource.org/8_principles.html. 2010.
[25] Eaves, David. The three laws of open government.
http://eaves.ca/. 2010
[26] Silva, Daniela Bezerra. Transparency in public
interconnected. College Casper Libero, 2010.
[27] Berners-Lee, Tim. Linked Data.
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html. 2011.
[28] Shotton, David. The five stars of online journal articles – a
framework for article evaluation.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january12/shotton/01shotton.html.
2012.
[29] Open Data Handbook. http://opendatahandbook.org/. 2011.
[30] World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
http://www.w3c.br/divulgacao/. 2010.
[31] Miranda, C. & Silva, N. National Infrastructure Open Data.
www.w3c.br/conferenciaegov/05_ODNI_Christian_Nitai.pdf
. Brasília. 2010

Open Government 2.0: Citizen Empowerment through
Open Data, Web and Mobile Apps
Rodrigo Sandoval-Almazan
Universidad Autonoma del Estado
de México
rsandovala@uaemex.mx
J. Ramon Gil-Garcia
Centro de Investigación y Docencia
Económicas
joseramon.gil@cide.edu
ABSTRACT
Although the open government concept is not new, current trends
in open government imply a change in focus from the traditional
principle of accountability to a concept of citizen empowerment,
collaboration and information sharing. In this paper, we explore
the use of open data and mobile apps in the top countries
according to the UN 2010 e-Government Survey. Our exploration
suggests that, although not all countries yet offer mobile apps to
their citizens, there is a great diversity of apps to create citizen
value. Moreover, private companies and citizens are getting
involved in the creation of such apps. More research is needed to
understand ways to promote the development of this kind of
government applications.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
Design, performance, human factors
General Terms
Performance, Design, Human Factors
Keywords
Government apps, apps, mobile apps
1. INTRODUCTION
During the last years, governments around the world have
emphasized the need of a more open and transparent government
[1]. Although the idea of freedom of information and open
government can be traced back to the 50s[2], the principle has
been invigorated with the Open Government initiative from the
Obama administration. Moreover, the traditional focus for open
government was accountability, while current efforts are
emphasizing on information sharing and citizen empowerment
[3]. In fact, the US government has made available about 390,000
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Luis F. Luna-Reyes
Universidad de las Américas-Puebla
luisf.luna@udlap.mx
Dolores E. Luna
Universidad de las Américas-Puebla
dolorese.luna@udlap.mx
30
Yaneileth Rojas-Romero
Universidad Autonoma del Estado
de México
yrojasr@uaemex.mx
data sets of raw and geospatial datasets to the public through the
data.gov website. Many other States are following the US
initiative, making raw data available to the public. On the other
hand, the popularization of mobile devices and social media tools
and platforms have promoted the emergence of new forms of
interaction between organizations and the public, or even among
the public themselves[4].
Small applications running on web pages or in mobile devices (or
mobile apps) have become a wide-adopted way of interaction.
Mobile apps stores were estimated to serve 17.7 billion downloads
in 2011, and it is expected that they will serve 185 billion
downloads by 2014 [5]. It is expected that mobile computing will
replace desktop computing by 2015 [6] . Again, just in data.gov,
about 1,500 web and mobile applications (apps for short) have
been developed, more than 200 by citizens themselves. We
believe that these two trends together have the potential to
transform the relationships between government and the public.
Despite this emerging context, we still know very little about the
level of adoption of apps in government websites anrd their use.
In this way, the purpose of this paper is to give a first step to
answer this set of questions, looking for an initial categorization
of practices among top-rated governments in terms of the use of
information technologies, as well as providing some examples of
current app use in government websites. To accomplish this
objective, the paper will be divided in five main sections. This
introduction constitutes the first section. The second section
includes a literature review. The third section describes the
method that we followed to survey the websites and to classify the
apps. The fourth section includes initial results, and the final
section discusses the findings and provides some future research.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
The literature review includes social media in government, and
the trend of web and mobile apps.
2.1 Web 2.0 in Government
At least since 2008 government web sites have been including
web 2.0 tools to become more interactive with citizens [7] [8] [9]
[10]. All of these applications, although may be very different in
purpose and function, they share some common features like the
collective generation and classification of content, the integration
of communities, and the production and consumption of socially
distributed knowledge. Web 2.0 is a social network platform

ecause some of its content is user-generated –as if it were a
collective intelligence— converting into co-producers of content
and not just passive subjects who only receive information.
Interaction plays a vital role in this platform [11], and offers a
great opportunity as a way of approaching citizens and making
sure their participation enriches government efforts [12].
Wilson and colleagues proposes that web 2.0 must be understood
as “the second generation of the Web, wherein interoperable,
user-centered web applications and services promote social
connectedness, media and information sharing, user-created
content, and collaboration among individuals and organizations”
[13] (p. 2).
The Web 2.0 tools and applications have been used in government
websites in several countries [14] , [Eliason, 2006 #10752].
Lerman and his colleagues researched about social tagging using
the example of Digg [15]. They find that the use of these tools
depends on context events and not ordinary or common use for
activities.
In the near future, it looks like mobile government will adopt
more web 2.0 tools and features The different programs of the
Somus project suggest a promising trend for the use of these tools
on citizen-government interaction in the following years [16].The
use of web 2.0 in the current activities of citizens and politicians
is an ongoing work.
2.2 Desktop and Mobile Apps
Research on the development of apps is not as extensive as the
number of domains for which them have been developed. There is
some evidence that the current app movement is promoting new
development approaches and delivery channels allowing small
ventures to compete globally [5]. However, there is still
dominance of the global mobile media corporations in the market
[17]. The Apple store was the first to open on July 2008. Nine
months later one billion of apps were downloaded. On April 2010,
just 185,000 apps were available for the Iphone [18]. The offer of
apps grew with Android market (346,526 apps until January 21,
2012), the windows phone marketplace, the Samsung apps, the
blackberry App World, and Nokia Ovi Store.
In this environments, independent software developers, as well as
private and public organizations, design tailor apps with almost
any imaginable objective. In fact, many professional areas are
encouraging their members to write their own applications, by
showing its value as well as how-to guides and approaches [19]
[20] .
On the government side, apps have been proposed to provide G2G
inter-agency collaboration [21] and public services [22]. Mobile
applications have the potential to improve service delivery, as
well as efficiency and efficacy in government operations[4] .
Furthermore, mobile apps create the capability of creating
Location-based Services (LBS), such as traffic, bus or parking
applications[4]
Nowadays there are several websites and organizations that
promote the use of apps in the government. However, maybe the
most high impact applications of these mobile technologies come
when government partners with NGOs or private organizations to
allow citizens to get information, add value to it, giving it back to
government to solve important problems and create value [3] .
This implies that government will need to find creative ways of
promoting the creation of ecosystems where vendors, developers,
and citizen hackers use public information made available by
31
government or promoted to be public by government regulations
to solve important problems [3].
In summary, we think that apps expand the potential for egovernment
to allow citizens to access content, create content,
send communications to government officials, adding in some
cases value to information and allowing citizens to create
ecosystems interested in solve important public problems. One
first step that we want to do in this paper is to explore some of the
current applications that exist in government websites.
3. METHOD
In this paper, we follow the approach of Internet-mediated
research (IMR) [23], which consists of “the gathering of novel,
original data to be subjected to analysis in order to provide new
evidence in relation to a particular research question” (p. 58).In
order to make our exploration on the current adoption and use of
government apps more systematic, we decided to look for current
applications in the top 10 countries in the 2010 UNPAN e-
Government Survey [24]. Given that we did not find enough
examples in these initial countries, we decided to increase the
sample size, exploring the first 35 countries in the list,, finding
applications only in 7 out of the 35. We started our search on the
main country websites, exploring to find mobile applications
and/or publicly available data sets. We visited the English
versions of each website during January and February 2012.
4. Government Apps: an Exploratory Survey
The current section of the paper presents an overview of the use of
apps and some examples of how governments are making
available apps for citizens.
4.1 App use by Governments
Results from our initial survey are shown on Table 1. US apps are
mainly linked to the Data.gov website. The apps from U.K. are
linked to the Direct Gov site. In the case of Canada, we did not
found the official number of apps, but we identified some apps
that match our criteria. Similar cases are New Zealand and Japan.
We have four main findings from this sample. The first one, is
that the total number of apps in each country is not easy to find
given that they are not always readily available in a single
repository. On the other hand, only 7 out of 35 countries are
apparently using this kind of applications, which still seems as a
low level of adoption. The second finding is related to the use of
the apps, most of them are focus on access government content, a
very few enable citizens to interact with government sending data,
reusing it, or collaborate making comments using the apps.
Table 1. Apps and categories on egov websites in our sample
Country #Apps
UNITED
KINGDOM
Mobile
Apps
Web-based
Apps
1854 103 1751
UNITED STATES 1164 153 1011
CANADA N.A. N.A. N.A.
AUSTRALIA 80 25 55
SINGAPORE N.A. 61 N.A.
KOREA N.A. 6500 N.A.
SWEDEN N.A. 1 N.A.

As a third finding, we also found a limited number of apps related
to citizens’ relevant issues such as health or finances. We found
also a number of apps for personal development, and not related
to government information. Finally, the fourth finding is that
some apps are created not only by government, but also by
citizens, non-government organizations or consultants. Some of
these apps are developed with marketing purposes such as
acquiring clients, recognition or just to contribute for government.
In this way, open data is in fact opening the opportunity of
sharing, collaborating and disseminating knowledge through this
kind of applications.
4.2 Selected Examples of Government Apps
on Several Application Domains
In order to give a better sense of the kinds of applications that are
being made available for mobile devices, we introduce in this
section several examples of the different kinds of apps that is
possible to find in government web sites in our sample.
One kind of applications that we found involves apps addressing
the needs of individuals to search and manage information. The
example we selected is Ask Karen from the US Department of
Agriculture (see Figure 1a). Ask-Karen provides 24/7 virtual
assistance and tips on preventing foodborne illness, safe food
handling and storage, and safe preparation of meat, poultry, and
egg products.
The Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) has
developed the ACRA app. This app searchs on the agency
database to check if a business firm, company, has limited liability
partnership (LLP), limited partnership (LP), Public Accounting
Corporation (PAC) or Public Accounting Firm (PAF) is registered
in Singapore in order to validate this data. One of the main
features is to search by name or business registration number (see
Figure 1b).
(a) (b)
Figure 1. Information App: Ask Karen and Content Access
App: ACRA
A different version is the ACRA iPhone app which provides the
business community free information that would help users in
their decision-making and planning. This application is a mobile
directory search function facilitates the search of names of all
business firms, local companies, foreign companies, limited
liability partnerships (LLP). A complementary feature is
ASKACRA Mobile, which allows to have easy access to a FAQs
section on related business.
We found applications that can be used for educational purposes.
“Libraries for Ottawa” is an application providing access to the
information of different libraries in the region (Figure 2a). The
application provides name, address, phone number and location
32
using Google Maps, hours of operation. It is important to mention
that this application is an independent development that uses data
from the official website. The author is SKB Wireless
Technology.
Another kind of applications we found can be categorized as
simulation apps. For example, an online financial health checker
has been launched to help people make the most of their money in
the UK website. The application offers money advice on the basis
of a series of queries to the user. Application developers declare
that they care about confidentiality of the user answers. The
author is Direct Recruit LTD (see Figure 2b).
(a) (b)
Figure 2. Educational App: Public Libraries and Simulation
Software: Health Check
One last type of apps that we were able to identify constitutes a
mobile enterprise application. GovPro is a remarkable example
for e-procurement and purchasing of Government. This
application delivers news, product trends and events in the
government market place. The Author is Penton Inc (see Figure
3).
Figure 3. Enterprise Software: GovPro
These are only few examples of the current diversity of mobile
applications and its use in government.
5. FINAL REMARKS
In this paper we have presented some initial findings related to the
use of mobile apps on e-government portals of the top countries
according to the United Nations 2010 survey on e-Government
[24]. Only 7 of the 35 selected countries have adopted this kind of
applications by the time we did the review. Similarly to main
corporations, governments may consider to include a single
repository of government apps to improve discoverability, as it is
one of the main determinants of app adoption by the citizen. Even
this small sample size, governments are fostering the use of apps
to interact with open data. We can not measure this impact yet,
because only a few government websites make available the

information of their apps. However, further research could show
this new trend as a facing change on the government strategy for
interact with citizens.
Previous research reports that government portals expand their
capabilities by using web 2.0 tools, empowering citizens to
collaborate with government and other NGOs to produce relevant
information and solve important citizen problems. That is to say,
governments expands their own limits when a citizen can send
reports of problems with public services or safety problems,
allowing government to respond faster, and overtime,
accumulating information to respond better [3]. Our initial
exploration suggests that most common applications are still those
to access information, and that we are still short of applications
that will increase government-citizen collaboration.
If analysts are correct in their predictions of the predominance of
mobile over desktop devices by 2015[6], the initial trend reported
here has the potential of transforming the current ways in which
government attempts to get in touch with their constituencies,
moving to a digital convergence of voice, text and multimedia in
the citizen’s smartphone. More research is needed on the new
roles that government portals should play in this transformation
process.
Our research provides some preliminary evidence that suggests
government portals are changing direction [7]. Also citizens are
using open data for their own purposes and developing new apps
to interact with government data. This change on the relationship
among citizen-Government interaction must be analyzed and
promoted as a new trend of collaboration and coproduction.
Finally, current trends and analysis suggest that ecosystems of
citizens, vendors and developers will be created around
government open data, and most analysis are quite optimistic [3].
There are also other potential constraints related to attitudes of
citizens towards privacy, credit card adoption or language [25].
This paper is then a first step in the direction to understand the use
of government mobile apps, its evolution and impact on
government innovation.
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research is partially supported by the Consejo Nacional de
Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) in Mexico under grant No.
107154. Any opinions expressed in this material are those of the
authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of CONACYT.
7. REFERENCES
[1] Scholl, H. J. and Luna-Reyes, L. F. Transparency and
openness in government: a system dynamics perspective. In
Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 5th International
Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance
(Tallinn, Estonia, 2011).
[2] Parks, W. The Open Government Principle: Applying the
Right to Know under the constitution. The George Washington
Law Review, 26, 1 1957), 1-22.
[3] Nath, J. Reimagining government in the digital age. Fall, City,
2011.
[4] Trimi, S. and Sheng, H. Emerging trends in M-government.
Communications of the ACM, May2008), 53-58.
[5] Anthes, G. Invasion of the mobile apps 2011, p 18-18.
[6] Milam, L. and Avery, E. J. Apps4Africa: A new State
Department public diplomacy initiative. Public Relations Review,
38, 2 2012), 328-335.
33
[7] Sandoval-Almazan, R. and Gil-Garcia, J. R. Are E-
Government Portals Becoming Central Components for Public
Information Sharing Networks? An Initial Exploration of Local
Governments in Mexico. Government Information Quarterly,
Forthcoming2011).
[8] Reynolds, W. N., Weber, M. S., Farber, R. M., Corley, C.,
Cowell, A. J. and Gregory, M. Social media and social reality.
City.
[9] Mennecke, B. E., Mc Neill, D., Roche, E. M., Bray, D. A.,
Townsend, A. M. and Lester, J. Second Life and Other Virtual
Worlds: A Roadmap for Research. Communications of the
Association for Information Systems2008), 371-388.
[10] Kavanaugh, A., Fox, E. A., Sheetz, S., Yang, S., Li, L. T.,
Whalen, T., Shoemaker, D., Natsev, P. and Xie, L. Social Media
Use by Government : From the Routine to the Critical. Computers
and Society2011).
[11] Haythornthwaite, C. Democratic Processs in Online Crowds
and Communities. In Proceedings of the Conference for
Democracy and Open Government (Austria, May 2011, 2011),
[insert City of Publication],[insert 2011 of Publication].
[12] Woods, E. Web 2.0 and the public sector - Public Sector -
Breaking Business and Technology silicon.com Driving Business
Through technology, City, 2007.
[13] Wilson, D., Lin, X., Longstreet, P. and Sarker, S. Web 2.0: A
Definition, Literature Review, and Directions for Future Research.
AISNET.org, City, 2011.
[14] de Kool, D. and van Wamelen, J. Web 2.0: A New Basis for
E-Government? , City, 2008.
[15] Lerman, K. User Participation in Social Media: Digg Study.
2007 IEEEWICACM International Conferences on Web
Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology Workshops,
02007), 255-258.
[16] Näkki, P., Bäck, A., Ropponen, T., Kronqvist, J., Hintikka,
K. A. and Harju, A. Social media for citizen participation Report
on the Somus project. City, 2011.
[17] Mascaro, C. M., Novak, A. and Goggins, S. Shepherding and
Censorship: Discourse Management in the Tea Party Patriots
Facebook Group. IEEE, City.
[18] Isaacson, W. Steve Jobs Biography. Simon & Schuster;,
2011.
[19] Pocatilu, P. Developing Mobile Learning Applications for
Android using Web Services. City, 2010.
[20] B. Boardman No app for that? Write one! Industrial
Engineer: IE, 44, 3 (Marzo 2012.), 44–48.
[21] Beer, D., Kunis, R. and Runger, G. A component based
software architecture for e-government applications. Ieee, City,
2006.
[22] Estevez, E. and Janowski, T. Programmable Messaging for
Electronic Government - Building A Foundation. LNCS,
Springer, City, 2007.
[23] Hewson, C. Internet-mediated research as an emergent
method and its potential role in facilitating mixed methods
research. Guilford Press, City, 2008.
[24] United Nations Global E-Government Development Report
2010. City, 2010.

Session 2
E-democracy & Participation 1

A Logistic Multilevel Model for Civic Engagement and
Community Group Impact in the Digital Age
B. Joon Kim
Department of Public Policy
Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne
Fort Wayne, Indiana, 46805
+1-260-481-0133
ABSTRACT
kimbj@ipfw.edu
Prior research has demonstrated that a citizens’ socioeconomic
status is a significant determinant of the extent of citizen
involvement via ICT [18]. Others have focused on its impact on
civic engagement in terms of community group impacts, finding
that such groups play an important role in increasing citizen
involvement within democratic processes [8]. Thus, previous
research has examined effects aggregated at the ‘individual level’
and ‘group level,’ respectively. This paper seeks to reconcile these
levels in order to assess the impact of ICT on civic engagement.
Our study examines the interplay of individual level and
community group level factors through analysis of the data from a
household survey (N=717) taken in Blacksburg, Virginia in 2005.
This study identifies the idiosyncratic influences at both levels by
applying a multilevel model (specifically, a logistic hierarchical
linear model). In particular, we verify the positive impact of
community groups utilizing ICT in increasing civic engagement.
This research will be used to form the basis of a comparative
study of civic engagement through eGovernment portals, mobile
technology and social media, and to assess their impact on
facilitating group communication and sensemaking.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and
Organization interfaces-Collaborative Computing.
General Terms
Measurement, Human Factors, Theory
Keywords
E-governance, Civic Engagement, Information and
Communication Technology, Community Group Impact,
Hierarchical Linear Model.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
34
Stephen W. Kleinschmit
Department of Public Policy
Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne
Fort Wayne, Indiana, 46805
+1-260-481-6351
kleinscs@ipfw.edu
1. INTRODUCTION
Information and communication technology (ICT) has the
potential to significantly increase citizen participation within
democratic community processes [6, 9]. Such technology has also
been credited with establishing new forms of social interaction
among citizens and governmental agencies. Web 2.0 technologies
are also providing new mechanisms for civic engagement,
political expression and public discussion [19], while others have
found that these technologies are important for facilitating and
augmenting the dynamics of political and civic engagement [9,
12]. The use of ICT can be used to as a mechanism to reverse the
decline of social capital in community groups. Putnam [13]
describes the steady decline of group membership in the United
States, which has led to a complimentary decrease in community
involvement. Though he attributes some of this decline to the
isolation effect of internet communication, paradoxically online
communication can also be used to foster civic engagement and
political expression, particularly when it is used to acquire and
share information within community groups. [8, 9].
Previous research has focused on exploring the effect of ICT on
civic engagement, modeling its effects at the ‘individual level’
and ‘group level’ respectively. This study applies a multilevel
model to analyze the community group impact on civic
engagement, in an effort to reconcile their effects. Therefore, the
main research question is; Does the use of ICT affect the nature of
civic engagement for citizens affiliated with community groups?
Additionally, this study also examines; What effects do different
types of community group affiliations, group ICT use (email,
listserv, online discussion boards and websites, including blogs)
have on the civic engagement of individual citizens? To study and
discuss these questions in more detail, this paper is divided into
four sections. First, this paper explores previous studies about the
relationship between ICTs and online civic engagement in
general. Next, we provide an overview of our research methods,
with an emphasis on our explaining our hierarchical linear
models. Then, the preliminary findings are presented before we
discuss the implications of these findings.
2. CONCEPTURAL BACKGROUND
2.1 Civic Engagement in the Digital Age
This study focuses on the civic engagement through the use of
Information and Communication Technology (ICT). When we
discuss the relationship between ICT and civic engagement, there
are three different perspectives we use to explore this relationship:

two polarized (optimistic or utopian and negative or pessimistic)
views and a skeptical standpoint [1, 7]. Optimists insist that
interactive ICT improve connections between citizens and public
bureaucrats, improve public policy-making processes and grow
trust by promoting government transparency and accountability.
With the adoption of interactive technology, improvements to
public deliberation and participatory democracy can be realized [2,
17]. Therefore, ICT is viewed as a means for invigorating
democracy. Conversely, pessimists argue that such mechanisms
for discourse are less likely to mobilize citizens and more likely to
reinforce the power and status of political elites [4, 12]. The
promise of true participatory democracy online is thus undercut
by the problem of demographic representativeness; those who use
it are significantly younger, wealthier and more educated than the
average person [4].
Finally, scholars representing the skeptical standpoint argue that
the ICT neither improves nor reduces civic engagement [1, 14].
Margolis and Resnick suggest that ICT is taking on the features of
ordinary life [11], and Putnam [14] insists that such measures are
likely to displace personal engagement and thus may fail to
generate social capital. Furthermore, some argue there is little
evidence to support a significant relationship between the
evolution of ICT use and levels of civic engagement [1]. As
suggested by the dispute among the polarized perspectives and the
skeptical view, the nature and extent of the impacts of the ICT on
civic engagement are not yet fully understood. Each point of view
has shortcomings. Nevertheless, it can serve a useful
supplementary function. The ICT had not yet profoundly
impacted social trends, but felt it would play an important part of
explaining the contemporary context of a person’s overall civic
and political life. Subsequent developments such as Facebook,
iPods, instant messaging, and text messaging have shown that
citizens, particularly younger generations, are particularly
“plugged in.”
2.2 Bridging Individual and Group Levels of
Analysis: A Logistic Multilevel Model
Past studies have investigated the relationship between ICT use
and civic engagement by modeling behavior at the individual
level, while also considering effects at the group (contextual)
level. By examining both levels through the same level of
analysis, the results were potentially insignificant or
underestimation of variability across levels. According to Katz
and Rice’s panel study of national survey data in the United States
(1995, 1996, 1997, and 2000), internet users were significantly
more likely to belong to at least one local group than non-internet
users. At the same time, on an individual level, the internet has
provided a platform for a significant number of additional forms
of political activity [7].
This paper focuses on detecting the group effects on individual
citizens’ level of civic behavior. In other words, how much their
community group (aggregate) level of ICT use and political
interests affect an individual’s level of civic engagement, while
controlling for their demographic characteristics. Explaining this
effect requires a statistical model that addresses a hierarchically
structured data problem. For example, a multistage sample must
be used to model the effects of the group: first, we aggregate data
at higher levels of organization (e.g., community groups), and
next we sample the sub-units from the available units (e.g.,
individual members from each community group). In such the
35
individual observations are clustered, thus are not truly
independent. To accurately assess their effects, there is a need to
differentiate fixed group effects from the random effects of
individuals. Citizens within the same community group tend to
share similar traits. Because of selection processes (e.g., groups
aggregate those with similar socioeconomic status or interest) and
because of common history, many citizens share the same
affiliation. As a result, the average correlation (the so-called
intraclass correlation) between variables shared by individual
members of the same group will be higher than the average
correlation between variables shared by those from different
groups. Standard statistical tests lean heavily on the assumption
of the independence of the observation. If this assumption is
violated (and in multilevel data this is almost always the case), the
estimates of the standard errors of conventional statistical tests are
much too small, resulting in many spuriously significant results.
Hierarchical linear model estimation accounts for nonindependent
observation at the group level [15]. In this study, a
logistic multilevel model is used, then this study estimates
the effects of group level characteristics on an individuals’
level of volunteerism, after controlling for other demographic
variables 1 . Level two consists of group variables and level one
consists of individual variables. The equations estimated for the
base model of this study are:
Level 1:
π ij =logistic ( β 0 j + β1
j poleff ij + β 2 jrtrust
ij + β 3 jedu
ij + β 4 jage
)
ij
Level 2:
β0 j = γ 00 +γ 01grpictuj + u0 j
β 1 j = γ 10 + u 1
β 2 j = γ 20 + u 2
β 3 j = γ 30 + u 3
β 4 j = γ 40 + u 4
3. METHODS
In order to achieve a more in depth investigation of citizens
affiliated with community groups, this paper uses a logistic
multilevel analysis (a two level model) with a single binomial
dependent variable, volunteer. The outcome individual averages
that are used as 1group level variables are often interpreted as
‘direct and contextual effects.’ To facilitate contributions to the
reconciliation between these levels of analysis, the following
hypothesis is examined:
o Hypothesis: Individual civic engagement (volunteer work)
would be greater in local groups with higher group ICT
(email, listserv, online discussion boards, and websites,
including blogs) use, taking into account individual
citizens’ psychological characteristics (the level of political
efficacy and the extent of social trust) and socioeconomic
variables (age and education).
1 To develop a parsimonious model, we included variables which focused on
our research question. However, we also tested control variables which
were revealed significant effects in prior studies such as education, income
and age. We then excluded statistically insignificant controlling variables.

3.1 Dependent Variable
Civic Engagement: (Variable name: volunteer 2 ): “whether you
(individual citizens) are doing volunteer works or not” (Scale:
0=no, 1=yes).
3.2 Independent Variables
3.2.1 Individual Level Variables
Political Efficacy (Variable name: poleff): the extent to
agreement that “sometimes local politics and government seem so
complicated that person like me can’t truly understand what’s
going on (Scale: 1- 4) (1=strongly agree, 2=somewhat agree,
3=somewhat disagree, 4=strongly disagree)
Social Trust (Variable name: rtrust): the likelihood of answering
to “what extent do you think most people in the local area can be
trusted” (Scale: 1-4) (1=not at all, 2=not very much, 3=somewhat,
4=very much)
Control variables (education and age): the answer of “what is the
highest level of formal education you have completed” (converted
scale: years) and the answer of “in what year were you born”
(converted scale: years)
3.2.2 Group Level Variables
Group ICT Use: (Variable name: grpictu) within your local
group, group use of ICT for communication (email/listserv, online
discussion boards, and websites including blogs) (scale: 0=never
used all three items at any groups - 9=used all items at all three
groups)
3.3 Data and Measures
This study is based on household telephone survey data from the
town of Blacksburg, Virginia and surrounding areas in 2005
(spring 2005; N=717; 40% response rate). As part of larger
research project (National Science Foundation IIS-0429274),
survey questions cover current ICTs use and practice among local
citizens, local community groups and government representatives.
In particular, the author is interested differences among individual
citizens affiliated with local groups and their ICT use for civic
engagement.
4. FINDINGS
This study examined a logistic multilevel model for detecting the
local group effects on civic engagement, with respect to the
individual citizens’ likelihood of doing volunteer work. To
understand the effect of ICT use of community groups, the model
takes into account individual citizens’ political efficacy, level of
trust on other local people, the level of education and age in the
lower individual level. Group Internet use constitutes the group
level variable. The following shows the results of logistic
multilevel model without two.
x
Applying the logistic transformation e
g(
x)
=
to these estimates
x
1+
e
1.
5107
produces an estimated volunteer rate of 81.9% ( e
= ) based on
1.
5107
1+ e
all individual citizens (typical probability). The result shows that
2 In this study, we used the volunteerism as a measure of civic engagement.
36
there is statically significant intraclass correlation (random effect:
p

through aggregating, shaping, and cultivating collective public
interest, will, and competence via ICT in the digital ages. The
results suggest a positive association between citizens’
involvement in community groups of their civic engagement with
group ICT use. Although there are several limitations such as
small sample size and limited group level data, this paper presents
ways to adapt and to present the potential use of multilevel
analysis to examine civic engagement through logistic multilevel
models. This study seeks to contribute to the understanding of
growing evidence that ICT can be used as a useful mechanism for
increasing the civic engagement of citizens affiliated with
community groups.
6. REFENCES
[1] Bimber, B., Information and American Democracy:
Technology in the Evolution of Political Power. New York:
Cambridge University Press, New York, 2003.
[2] Browning, G., Electronic Democracy: Using the Internet to
Transform American Politics, 2nd ed. Medford, NJ: Cyber
Age Books, Medford, NJ, 2002.
[3] Castells, M. The Rise of the Network Society. The
Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 1,
Blackwell, Oxford, 1996.
[4] Davis, R., Politics Online: Blogs, Chartrooms, and
Discussion Groups in American Democracy. Routledge, New
York, NY, 2005.
[5] Gallant, L. M., Boone, G. M., and Heap, A. Five heuristics
for designing and evaluating web-based communities. First
Monday: Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet, 12, 3, 2007,
1-15.
[6] Galston, W.A. Civic education and potlical participation.
American Political Science Assocaition, College Park, MD,
2004.
[7] Katz, J. E., and Rice, R.E., Social Consequences of Internet
Use: Access, Involvement, and Interaction. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002.
[8] Kavanaugh, A., Zin, T.T., Rosson, M. B., Carroll, J. M.,
Schmitz, J., and Kim, B. J., Local groups online: Political
learning and participation. Journal of Computer Supported
Cooperative Work (Published Nov. 16). 2006. Available
online at:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/tk770mu72w4v6483/fu
lltext.pdf.
[9] Kim, B. J, Kavanaugh, A, and Hult, K. Local Community
Groups and Internet Use: Examining Contents of Local
Community Groups’ Websites. The International Journal of
Technology, Knowledge and Society, 2, 7, 2007, 207-221.
[10] Lukensmeyer C. J. and Torres, L. H. Public Deliberation: A
Manager’s Guide to Citizen Engagement. IBM Center for the
Business of Government, 2006.
[11] Margolis, Michael., and David Resnick, D., 2000. Politics As
Usual: The Cyberspace. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications,. 2000.
37
[12] Norris, P., Digital divide: Civic engagement, information
poverty and the Internet. Cambridge University Press, New
York, 2001.
[13] Putnam, R. D. Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social
Capital. Journal of Democracy, 6, 1995, 65-87.
[14] Putnam, R.D. Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of
American community. Simon and Schuster, New York, NY,
2000.
[15] Raudenbush, S., Bryk, A., and Congon, R. HLM:
Hierarchical linear and nonlinear modeling. Sage, Newbury
Park, CA, 1998.
[16] Raudenbush, S., and Bryk, A. Hierarchical Liner Models:
Application and Data Analysis Methods (2 nd ed.) Sage,
Thousand Oak, CA, 2004.
[17] Rheingold, H., The Virtual Community. Addison-Wesley
Publishing, 1993.
[18] Schlozman, K. L., Verba, S., and Brady, H. E. 2010. Weapon
of the strong? Participatory inequality and the internet.
Perspectives on Politics, 8(2), 487-509.
[19] Shah, D. V., Cho, J., Everland, W. P., and Kwak, N.
Information and Expression in a Digital Age: Modeling
Internet Effects on Civic Engagement. Communication
Research, 32, 5 (Oct. 2005), 531-565.

Designing Online Deliberation Using Web 2.0
Technologies: Drafting a Bill of Law on Internet Regulation
in Brazil
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we describe the formatting guidelines for the role of
institutions and political practitioners in designing online
consultation projects. As a case study we evaluate the Brazilian
government-run initiative known as Marco Civil Regulatório that
used web 2.0 tools to draft a bill of law on Internet legislation
with the aid of citizen’s participation. Findings presented in this
article are based on a set of interviews held with policy makers
responsible for designing and promoting the aforementioned
project.
This article contributes to the debates on how deliberative rules
and technology overlap in early stages of policy design. Our case
study supports the argument that Internet has potential to provide
a democratic space, but public consultations need to be
established, funded, promoted and regulated; tasks that are
performed by institutions (not by technology or citizens alone).
For that reason, institutions are key to understand how web 2.0
technologies can be useful for citizens and governments in
designing tools for consultation, deliberation and decision-making
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4.1 [Computers and society]: Public Policy Issues
General Terms
Management, Design, Theory, Legal Aspects
Keywords
Online consultation; E-democracy; web 2.0
1. INTRODUCTION
Previous research on the use of web 2.0 tools for online
consultations has argued that design matters. As Wright and Street
claim, “political choices are made both about the format and
operation of the online discussion … we should view deliberation
as dependent on design and choice, rather than a predetermined
product of the technology” [12]. At the same time, authors have
argued that institutions matter to a great extent. As Fischer argues
“not that institutions cause political action; rather, it is their
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
Fabro Steibel
LAMIDE/PPGCOM/ UFF (Brazil)
CTS/FGV/RJ (Brazil)
ofabro@ofabro.com
38
discursive practices that shape the behaviors of actors who do …
structural relationships give shape to both social and political
expectations and the possibility of realizing them” [4].
Inspired by both arguments, this article explores the conceptual
gap between focusing either on design or on institutions and
presents an analysis of the role played by institutions in designing
deliberative tools. Our evidence is based on interviews held with
political practitioners who participated in the design of the Marco
Civil Regulatório case (hereafter noted as MCR). The MCR was a
government-run initiative that during 90 days of online
consultation received more than two thousand contributions from
the general public, which were later “translated” by interviewees
into a Bill of Law sent to Congress. This article focuses on policy
decisions political practitioners concerning the design of web 2.0
tools for online deliberation, and we explore how institutional
characteristics affects the role of technology used for online
consultations.
This article is divided in three sections: the first section presents
our theoretical framework on the role of design and institutions in
online consultations, our methodological framework and presents
the case study here addressed. The second section discussed the
influence of institutions and institutional context in the design of
online consultation portals. The last section presents the emerged
conceptual framework to analyze similar cases and some lessons
learned.
We expect this article to contribute to the debate about the role of
institutions in using technology for development and democracy.
Our evidence shows that institutions sponsoring the MCR
initiative were key to understand how web 2.0 technologies were
made useful for citizens and governments to collaborate,
deliberate, take decisions and – hopefully – to connect.
1.1 Methodology
Findings presented in this article are based on a set of interviews
held with policy makers responsible for designing and promoting
the MCR project. The three main objectives of this research are:
(a) formulating hypotheses on what contextual elements favored
the launch of the MCR project; (b) evaluating how deliberative
rules and technology overlapped in early stages of policy design;
and (c) mapping good practices regarding the mix of different web
2.0 technologies on designing online deliberation experiences for
drafting legislation purposes. The source of data used in this
project comes from eight in-depth interviews conducted with six
public servants, academics and web designers responsible for
planning and executing the MCR project, selected based on a tworound
sampling procedure. All interviews were semi-structured

in-depth expert interviews, and were analyzed based on a mixedmethod
approach to qualitative data analysis [10].
1.2 About the Case Study
Generally speaking, the Marco Civil Regulatório project (MCR) is
seen as enormously successful. Defining what “success” means in
terms of deliberative practices requires defining normative
standards by which democracy is being evaluated, which is far
from being a settled matter [3, 5, 6, 8]. Nonetheless, considering
that the MCR project is the first of its kind in Brazil, that during
the consultation project their webpage received around two
thousand contributions from the general public, that later projects
refer to it as a keystone reference, and most importantly, that the
project succeeded in translating the concerns received online into
a draft legislation to be sent to Congress, we can argue that the
MCR project was indeed enormously successful.
The government’s decision to run public consultations projects to
make informed decisions is far from a novelty in public
administration. In Brazil, for example, they are even regulated in
specific legislation (D4176/2000). However, what makes the
MCR project new is not the government’s decision to run a public
consultation on how to regulate the Internet, but rather the
decision to run it with the aid of Internet itself. Expanding the
locus of debate from physical spaces (such as the hearing rooms
located in the capital city of Brasilia) to an open and public URL,
capable of hosting a policy debate online, is something
interviewees perceive to have never been before. Interviewees
recall some isolated cases where online technology has been used
by government to “consult” experts or common citizens, and they
remember cases of the government considering running public
consultations online, but the MCR project is perceived as the
pioneer of its kind, something so important that interviewees
describe it as an event that “upgraded” how public consultations
are run in the country.
The MCR project is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Justice (the
project's initiator) and the Centre for Technology and Society
(CTS, hosted at the think thank foundation Getúlio Vargas, in Rio
de Janeiro). Apart from these two organizations, the project also
received direct support from the Ministry of Culture, and indirect
assistance from other governmental bodies (i.e., the Ministry of
International Relations), and ad hoc contributions from civil
society organizations and several Internet activists. As such, the
MCR project was a government initiative, which, with the aid of
an important think thank, and of civil society, established itself as
a one-of-a-kind online policy debate forum.
The general objective of the MCR project was to draft an Internet
Law to be submitted to Congressional vote. The bill was designed
to suggest a set of legal principles and rights to guide future
Internet legislation in the country, and the whole consultation
experience was designed to be based on online collaborative
practices. The project ran from October 2009 to May 2010, and it
resulted in an online forum where politicians, academics, artists,
NGOs, companies, individuals and other stakeholders with an
interest in the topic could post, blog, debate and comment on the
possible design of the future Internet legislation.
1.3 The Use of Technology for Deliberation
The MCR project made use of several web 2.0 tools (mainly
Wordpress platform, Twitter, rss feeds, and blog) and it was
39
divided in two rounds of discussion: during the former people
were invited to comment on a “white paper” with a set of general
ideas that broadly oriented the future draft; during the latter
people were invited to comment on the draft legislation as
formatted to be sent to Congress. As interviewees describe the
process, the first round of debate tested a set of normative
standards, pre-defined by those sponsoring the initiative, that were
considered important to be included in future legislation; while
the second round focused on receiving feedback on the draft law
itself.
What is important to notice is that during both periods of
consultations users could comment only on pre-defined topics,
said by interviewees to focus on three axes of discussions:
individual and collective rights (i.e., privacy, freedom of speech,
and access to rights), principles related to intermediaries (i.e., net
neutrality and civil liability), and governmental directives (i.e.,
openness, infrastructure, and capacity building). Therefore,
although the online consultation project was a collaborative
practice, one initiative open for the general public to engage and
share their opinions, citizens were invited mostly to offer
suggestions, but not to decide on what topics were open for
debate, nor on what writing the final draft would have.
According to interviewees, the MCR project started in
September/2009, when public servants from the Ministry of
Justice invited policy experts from the Centre of Technology and
Society to design the online platform. Two months later, the
website was launched and the consultation period started
(remaining open until mid 2010, when the final draft of the law
draft was concluded). During the two periods of consultation over
2,000 contributions from individual users, governmental and nongovernmental
entities were received. Policy makers were
responsible for gathering comments and writing the final draft
bill, which, as concluded, includes 25 articles divided into 5
chapters concerning users’ rights and general principles for the
regulation of the Internet.
Analyzing the interviews we can argue that the MCR project was
based on three main tenets: first, it aimed to design legislation
based on solid judicial grounds, a legal piece of work ready to be
sent for Congressional hearings; two, it aimed to create policies
capable of securing existing and future individual rights over the
web; third, it intended from the start to be based on collaborative
practices and public debate constructed with aid of web 2.0 tools.
Interviewees constantly refer to the union of these three tenets
(judicial grounds, oriented to secure individual rights and based
on a collaborative online debate) as key motivations behind the
MCR project and as the keystones of their online consultation
initiative.
2. INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT
Analyzing data referring to this topic, we identify four contextual
elements that need to be taken into consideration, namely: the
engagement of cyber activists around the social movement known
as “Mega não”; the think tank activities of CTS in opposing the
Lei Azeredo’s legal principles; the political agenda of the new
executive branch who welcomed defining Internet as a social
right; a shared understanding amongst policy makers that
regulating a collaborative environment such as the Internet
required the use of collaborative practices such as the ones found
in the online world.

2.1 The Lei Azeredo
If we analyze the main reasons mentioned by interviewees to
justify why the MCR initiative emerged, most of events and
contexts mentioned by interviewees make direct reference to the
Lei Azeredo. The Lei Azeredo was a Bill of Law sent to the
Lower chamber in 1999 (PL 84/99), and to the Senate in 2003
(PLS 89/03). The Bill focused on regulating crimes over the
Internet, framing Internet policy mainly from a Criminal Law
perspective rather than from a Civil Law framework. The Lei
Azeredo was heavily criticized by cyber activists, think thank
organizations and particularly by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s
(Lula) government (2002-2010) for trying to regulate crimes over
the Internet in a context where civic rights over the web were still
not defined. In fact, as interviewees claim, the projects name
“Marco Civil” (“Civil Regulatory Framework” in English) was
chosen precisely to make clear their opposition to discussing
criminal codes of conduct prior to securing civil rights and
obligations related to Internet use.
2.2 Cyber Activism
The Lei Azeredo attracted, from the start, fierce criticism inside
and outside online forums of debate, but it was mostly after 2009,
with the launch of a blog know as “Mega não”, by the cyber
activist João Caribé, that social opposition to the Lei Azeredo
gained a coherent voice. The “Mega não” movement fuelled an
intense activism in blogs, twitter and other social media that not
only attracted even more online activists to the cause, but also
received media coverage from niche national media and also
motivated protest marches in a number of cities, having also
themed important Internet-related events of the year [9].
Interviewees argue that the existence of the “Mega não” social
movement played a key role in the overall success of the MCR
project. It is argued that those who were closely engaged with the
“Mega não” movement were also those who pioneered the
comment section of the project’s website; not only, activists
linked to the “Mega não” movement were also said to be the ones
who helped to publicize the MCR initiative by using their own
twitter hashtags and blog networks to comment on the initiative.
Interviewees mention that, at first, cyber activists were suspicious
that their “bottom up” movement would be overlooked by the “top
down” initiative they were being invited to join; nonetheless,
interviewees say that gradually most “Mega não” supporters
started to trust the MCR initiative as a real opportunity to push
forward their own policy interests what, in return, attracted even
more contributors and publicity to the MCR website.
2.3 Policy Activism
Another key element mentioned by interviewees refers to the
policy activism of CTS. CTS was already known nationally and
internationally for its policy agenda in favor of open source
software, creative commons license, and other topics related to
technology, law and society. Specifically in relation to the Lei
Azeredo’s debate, CTS was also known for their two reports
criticizing the draft bill proposal, which is perceived by
interviewees to have increased their influence on government
bodies, academics, and cyber activist networks.
As interviewees from the Ministry of Justice claim, CTS’s public
policy views were amongst the top reasons why they were called
to co-author the MCR project. The Ministry of Justice was said to
welcome CTS not only due to their opposition to the Lei Azeredo,
40
but also based on their shared ideas of designing online
collaborative venues for policy making. And as interviewees from
CTS argue, they welcomed the Ministry of Justice’s invitation
because they perceived the initiative as an opportunity to push
forward their own policy agenda, as much as a promising
opportunity to influence politicians to support in the future policy
debates based on collaborative online practices.
2.4 Government’s Support
The third element mentioned by interviewees as decisive in
launching the MCR project was the executive government’s
support. President Lula’s speech at the 2009 FILS international
open-source conference is mentioned as the starting event for the
entire initiative. During his speech, the president explicitly
opposed to the Lei Azeredo’s proposal calling instead for an
alternative bill securing Internet civic rights. Lula’s speech
however was far from an isolated event; it simply illustrated a
broad agenda pushed forward by the incumbent government to
understand Internet as a challenging way of thinking civic social
relations and governance. Experiences using Internet for policy
making precede Lula’s government, backing to 1999 when IRC
chat technology and blogs have been pilot for policy making
inside government. Interviewees nonetheless stress that it was
after Lula’s presidency start in 2002 that uses of Internet for
policy development expanded. The role of the Ministry of Culture
is mentioned as illustrative of this point, two projects in particular.
The first, known as “Pontos de cultura”, linked government’s
financial support to local cultural centers to the provision of
Internet access to local community. The second, know as
CulturaDigital.br, invited citizens to create and share their blogs
and digital identities in a public and open-source Wordpress-based
platform in order to foment policy deliberation online.
2.5 Collaborative Policy Making Framework
The last contextual element mentioned by interviewees refers to
the emergence of new ways of combining law, society and
technology. Due to the emergence of collaborative and networkbased
technology, interviewees needed to re-conceptualize how
their institutions understood knowledge production. CTS, the
Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Culture had pioneered in
previous years several experiments investigating alternative
governance models based on technology. CTS, for example, had
been influential in supporting the use of the Creative Commons
License; the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Culture
piloted the portal Culturadigital.br, inviting cyber activists and
hackers to share their opinions online. It is within this panorama
that interviewees said to have welcomed the MCR project: as an
opportunity to try out alternatives to the traditional governmentcentered,
closed-doors process of policy making. As one
interviewee phrases it, the MCR initiative was a “symbiotic
movement between the way you define policy making, and the
object of policy regulation … and it is within this ‘happy
marriage’ between these two elements that we define what we
aimed to achieve”.
3. DESIGNING TECHNOLOGY FOR
DELIBERATION
One way to understand how policy forums are affected by web 2.0
tools is evaluating, when public consultations are over, what
answers citizens provided to government and what uses

government made of citizens’ contributions. These questions refer
to the analysis of later stages of policy making, and do not reflect
the analysis provided here. From a different starting point, this
section focuses on earlier stages of deliberative processes,
specifically evaluating how policy makers decided before the
public was invited to contribute online what policy questions were
open or closed for deliberation, and what technologies would be
used to mediate such debate.
In the case of the MCR project, understanding what policy issues
were open or closed was straightforward – the MCR website
reserved one page to list all topics open for discussion (i.e., civil
responsibility of Internet users, right of expression, privacy and
net neutrality) and another to list all topics closed for debate (i.e.,
copyright, data protection and child pornography). The list of
issues mentioned in the webpage was included in the interview’s
questionnaire, and interviewees confirmed that in general terms
these topics were the ones actually open and closed for
deliberation.
Nonetheless, beyond defining what issues are open or closed for
discussion in policy debates (i.e., beyond defining on what people
deliberate over), designing rules for policy debates requires also
identifying and selecting tools to aid people and institutions to
share their opinions with each other (i.e.., deciding on how people
deliberate). In “offline” policy forums, such as the ones regularly
run by the Congress with the aid of public meetings rooms, policy
makers have to decide how large meeting venues have to be, what
time and date meetings will take place and how present speakers
can effectively share their opinions. In policy forums held online,
similar decisions need to be made, addressing other issues such
as: how people will have access to the forum’s website, what
coding language will the webpage be written in, how comments
will be visualized online, and how people will post their opinions.
3.1 Designing Rules for Technology Use
Due to the pioneer nature of online projects like the MCR
initiative, we notice that designing rules to decide what people can
debate over is a much simpler task than deciding on how
technology is used for deliberation. As interviewees argue, they
made decisions on what issues to deliberate over based on several
background research tools they had at hand: they identified policy
topics already under discussion in other spheres of government,
planned to select topics that would increase chances of receiving
support inside Congress, and favored topics that were likely to
increase their project’s audience. Based on such analyses (which,
by the way, are very similar to those available in “offline” policy
consultations), policy makers had plenty of sources of input to
strategically decide on what mix of policy issues was likely to
increase the overall success of the project.
The same does not apply when we analyze policy makers’
decisions about how technology should be used for deliberation.
As interviewees repeatedly point, the MCR project was a very
experimental and challenging initiative. Interviewees report none -
or at the most very few - previous projects to serve as models,
relying mostly on their own private experience or ad hoc
inspiration. Above all, interviewees say to have mainly decided on
what technology to use based on a trial-and-error basis, reason
why the most important source of input information mentioned in
this regard is feedback provided by users reflecting decisions they
had already taken.
41
Interviewees say for example to have chosen to use Wordpress
based on the open-source nature of this technology; moreover,
they also say they took this decision based on their personal
expertise in running blogs of their own, as well as based on their
awareness of the initiative Culturadigital.br run by the Ministry of
Culture (that was later used to host the project website). The
decision to create a comment section based on a “paragraph-byparagraph”
lay-out, for example, was also generally inspired on
some previous knowledge they had of the “The public index”
project [11], which required, nonetheless, several improvements
before it met their needs. Even decisions on what technology
decisions to continue or discontinue were made based on ad hoc
information: the overall lay-out of the comment section for
example received positive feedback, which resulted in an
improved lay-out implemented for the second phase of
consultation; the use of a “thumbs up/down” voting system
however was removed shortly after implementation due to bad
feedback received.
3.2 Emerged Conceptual Framework
Based on the interviews’ analyses, designing online consultation
with the aid of web 2.0 is a very innovative task. However, we can
find at least three common themes around the uses of Internet for
policy making that have been largely documented before [7],
namely: (a) the will to use of the Internet as a platform for
political discourse, (b) the collective intelligence emergent from
political Web use, and (c) perpetual experimentalism in the public
domain. The former two themes describe quite well interviewees’
expectation during the early stages of the MCR project. For
example: selecting the CulturaDigital.br portal to host the
project’s webpage is justified based on the will to foster new
Internet forums of political debate; inviting citizens to deliberate
online is justified based on the will to follow CTS’s goal of
designing new collaborative ways of knowledge production.
It is however the last theme (i.e., the perpetual experimentalism)
that we most highlight in describing the MCR initiative. To some
extent, online consultations resemble designing a complete new
environment for policy making. For example: policy makers were
required to understand the essence of tools such as Twitter and
email and decide if they were good or not for online
consultation’s use. Based on their previous experience with
offline policy forums, interviewees were willing to avoid the oneto-few
communication flow in favor of a many-to-many flow.
Hence their decision (reached after a try-and-error period) of
using Twitter (but blocking the use of email) to interact with the
general public. In other words, the MCR project is clearly a case
study where experimenting new forms of communications is a
mandatory task that political practitioners have to deal with during
theirs daily routine.
After the end of their project, interviewees perceive to have left
two challenges unanswered. The first refers to the bridging the
online world barrier. Publicizing the MCR’s initiative beyond
those who already had an interest in the topic is described as a
very difficult (but still mandatory) task. Interviewees say to have
attended as many offline conferences and events as possible, and
to also have targeted media venues to increase their reach and
visibility. Even so, considering the geographic and social
characteristics of the country, the overall understanding is that the
online barrier has been only merely scratched. The second
challenge refers to controlling political outcomes of the

experience once the consultation is over. Draft legislation have no
power of law, and more than one year has passed and it has not
being voted in Congress. As interviewees perceive, online
consultations increase the visibility of the drafted legislation, its
speeds the process of preparing draft legislation for a vote, and it
reduces the chances of politicians suggesting U-turn amendments.
Nonetheless, at the end, the result of the deliberative experience
will only be translates as legislation when and if the Congress
votes on it.
3.3 Lessons Learned
As we can conclude when we compare how “offline” and “online”
policy forums, decisions taken during early stages of designing
policy forums about what to deliberate over are much similar
between online and offline experiences than the same comparison
between how technology is used for deliberation in offline and
online experiences. The experimental and rapidly changing nature
of initiatives such as the MCR project does not mean that policy
decisions taken by policy makers are randomly taken; at the same
time, they do challenge the understanding of how well-established
policy making practices (such as mapping competing policy
agendas before deciding on what policy agenda to adopt) interact
with experimental practices of policy making with the aid of web
2.0 tools.
As the third section of this article discussed, we need to
understand first how institutions, technology and people interact
to create a successful and stimulating online policy forum. The
section suggested as hypotheses four contextual elements needed
to start an online consultation project, namely (a) a governmentbased
institution with a real interest in direct public participation,
(b) an active online community with a strong interest in the topic
under discussion, (c) an active think thank institution willing to
bring its own expertise and influence to the project, and (d) a web
2.0 interface capable of engaging policymakers and citizens in a
coherent narrative structure for deliberation.
The fourth section continued the debate around the importance of
institutions, evaluating how technology and deliberative norms
interact in online consultation projects. The section focused on
how policy makers decided on what issues to deliberate over, and
how technology would be used to mediate deliberation; It also
compared challenges faced by political practitioners in designing
online and offline policy forums, focusing on four key decisions
policy makers have to make during early stages of online
consultation initiatives, namely: (a) what policy issues should be
open or closed for people to deliberate over; (b) what technologies
to use to mediate the debate; (c) how and when to moderate
contributions; and (d) how to translate contributions into a
properly formatted legal policy document.
3.4 Conclusion
The main argument pushed forward in this article is that
understanding the role of web 2.0 tools in designing online
consultation forums requires understanding the role of institutions
sponsoring the use of such technology for policy making
purposes.
Without direct support of government-based institutions (in this
case, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Culture), as well
as the support given by sponsoring think tank institutions (in this
case, the Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade, FGV/RJ),
42
contributions of the general public shared with the aid of web 2.0
would be unable to result in policy change. In fact, in a
comparative analysis of the MCR project with a governmentsponsored
similar initiative in Uruguay [1], we argued that
achieving (or not) support of government-based institutions,
particularly in the case of Latin American experiences, is a vital
criterion to evaluate the overall project success.
The MCR project is not a case of success due the role of
technology itself; instead, the findings presented here show that
the project succeeded mainly due to the participation, expertise
and engagement of institutions sponsoring the initiative. In other
words, although technology is a key element to understand the
uniqueness of the MCR project, web 2.0 tools mattered because of
the institutions that moderated the use of technology for policymaking
objectives in the first place. We thus support the
arguments of Blumler and Coleman who say that “for democratic
participation to have a meaningful impact upon political outcomes
there is a need for inclusive and accountable institutions that can
provide a space for consequential interaction between citizens and
their elected representatives” [2] (p. 3).
4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project is funded by the Fundación Comunica (Project
Impacto 2.0) and by the Singapore Internet Research Centre
(Project SIRCA II). The International Development Research
Centre (IDRC), Canada, sponsored both projects.
Version Note: This paper received constructive feedback
from the ICEGOV reviewing process. Due to the nature of the
project, improvements were still on course by the submission
deadline of 6th Aug 2012. An extended version of the paper
including new material on theoretical framework, future research
recommendations, and methodology design will be available at
the http://ofabro.com website by 10th Oct 2012.
5. REFERENCES
[1] Beltramelli, F. et al. 2012. La web 2.0 y la consulta de
políiticas púublicas en Améerica Latina: el caso del
Marco Civil en Brasil y el caso uruguayo sobre TV
Digital en una perspectiva comparada. Alaic. (2012).
[2] Coleman, S. and Blumler, J.G. 2009. The Internet and
democratic citizenship : theory, practice and policy.
Cambridge University Press.
[3] Coleman, S. and Gøtze, J. 2001. Bowling Together :
Online public engagement in policy deliberation.
Retrieved January. Hansard Society.
[4] Fischer, F. 2003. Reframing public policy : discursive
politics and deliberative practices. Oxford University
Press.
[5] Gomes, W. 2007. Transformações da política na era da
comunicação de massa. Paulus.
[6] Habermas, J. et al. 2004. After Habermas : new
perspectives on the public sphere. Blackwell Pub. :
Sociological Review.
[7] O’Reilly, T. 2005. What Is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and
Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.
Author’s webpage.

[8] Putman, R.D. 1994. Making Democracy Work: Civic
Traditions in Modern Italy [Paperback]. Princeton
University Press.
[9] Santarem, P.R. da S. 2010. O direito achado na rede: a
emergência do acesso à Internet como direito
fundamental no Brasil. UNB.
[10] Steibel, F. and Coleman, S. 2011. The problem of
negative advertising: content-based regulation of political
43
advertising in Brazil and in the US. Institute of
Communications Studies. University of Leeds.
[11] The Public Index: 2012. http://thepublicindex.org/about.
Accessed: 2012-01-13.
[12] Wright, S. and Street, J. 2007. Democracy, deliberation
and design: the case of online discussion forums. New
Media & Society. 9, 5 (Oct. 2007), 849-869.

E-Participation in the Era of Web 2.0: Factors Affecting
Citizens’ Active E-Participation in Local Governance
Jooho Lee
University of Nebraska at Omaha
6001 Dodge Street
Omaha, Nebraska 68182
1-402-554-2756
jooholee@unomaha.edu
ABSTRACT
The study develops a model of active e-participation and tests it in
the context of local governance. By building on and extending the
existing literature on citizen participation, technology acceptance
model and social networks, the study asserts that citizens’
perceptions of the intrinsic and instrumental value of participation,
and the strength of their social networks are associated with their
active e-participation. Using the 2009 E-Participation Survey data
collected from Seoul Metropolitan Government, we found that eparticipants
actively use e-participation when they perceive a
greater intrinsic value of e-participation. By further analyzing
Male and Female models separately, we also found that male eparticipants
who perceive greater instrumental value of eparticipation
are likely to use e-participation actively. The
findings, however, indicate that women who perceived a greater
intrinsic value of e-participation and are embedded in weaker
offline social networks are likely to actively use e-participation.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.4.3
General Terms
Management, Human Factors
Keywords:
E-Participation, TAM, Intrinsic and Instrumental Motivation,
Social Networks
1. INTRODUCTION
Recently, government embraces Web 2.0 – various networked
applications as a platform for user-generated information and
collaboration on the Web [1] – to facilitate various forms of
electronic participation (e-participation) such as online policy
forums. E-participation is broadly defined as web-based
applications enabling government to provide information and
support “top-down” engagement, and/or to foster “ground-up”
efforts to empower citizens in order to gain their support [2]. In
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights
for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be
honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to
republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior
specific permission and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 -­‐ 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-­‐1-­‐4503-­‐1200-­‐4/12/10…$15.00.
44
Soonhee Kim
Syracuse University
306 Eggers Hall
Syracuse, New York 13244
1-315-443-1282
soonheekim@maxwell.syr.edu
this research, we focus on a “ground-up” approach to eparticipation.
A growing body of literature has touted eparticipation
as a means of facilitating greater citizen participation
in the policy making process. The literature, however, has left
significant gaps in our understanding of the motivational and
social factors affecting citizens’ active use of new technology in
the context of citizen participation. Considering that eparticipation
using Web 2.0 is primarily driven by citizens, not
government, the potential of e-participation is problematic when it
is not actively used by citizens. To fill some of these gaps, this
study explores how citizens’ active use of e-participation is
facilitated by their perceptions of intrinsic and instrumental values
of e-participation and strength of social networks where citizens
are embedded in an offline setting.
To test research hypotheses, the study uses the 2009 E-
Participation Survey data collected from the members of Cheon
Man Sang Sang Oasis (hereafter Oasis), which is an eparticipation
program run by Seoul Metropolitan Government
(SMG) in South Korea since 2006. As a form of online policy
forum, the Oasis has served as an e-participation tool for citizens
to participate in policy making, especially the policy agenda
setting process [3]. Using Oasis, citizens view, submit and share
their ideas and suggestions on SMG policies associated with
community and governance issues. Specifically, the Oasis is
equipped with Web 2.0 functions to offer well-organized and
systematic services including participants-led creation of their
policy inputs on proposed SMG policies and collaboration with
other participants to share their policy inputs and feedback.
2. MODEL AND HYPOTHESES
From the citizens’ perspective, this study focuses on two types of
citizen participation values. The intrinsic value of citizen
participation has been supported because it is an essential means
of building and sustaining democratic systems by enabling
citizens to be more educated, developed, and informed [4].
Advocates of the instrumental value have highlighted that citizen
participation serves as a means of affecting and monitoring
government bureaucracy, which enhances citizens’ control over
administrative process and, in turn, promotes a sense of ownership
and empowerment [4, 5].
The second stream of research reviewed for the development of
study model is the technology acceptance model (TAM). The
essence of TAM is that individuals adopt IT applications when
they perceive usefulness and ease of use of the IT applications [6].
TAM has been widely extended by embracing new constructs
such as trust (see Venkatesh et al [7] for review) in diverse
research context [8].

The third stream of studies reviewed is social network theory.
Social network literature has considered social networks as
resources in which people can access information, gain social
support and receive recognition through their social networks [9].
Advocates of strong social networks argue that people embedded
in strong social networks enjoy benefits in terms of accessing
information, exchanging social support and receiving recognition
easily and promptly [10]. Proponents of weak social networks
emphasize that people embedded in weak social networks can be
provided a better opportunity to access diverse groups of people
and, in turn, to gain nonredundant and new information, to enjoy
autonomy, and to manage them with a lower cost [11].
By building on and extending the existing literature on citizen
participation, TAM, and social networks, this research asserts that
citizens’ use of e-participation is affected by their perception of
intrinsic and instrumental values of e-participation, and the
strength of their offline social networks.
2.1 Intrinsic Value of e-Participation
The intrinsic value of e-participation refers to citizens’ perception
of developmental, educative, and informative effects of their eparticipation
in the policy decision making process [5, 6]. The
underlying theory of the intrinsic value relies on intrinsic
motivation in that motivation for active participation mainly stems
from inside an individual rather than from any external rewards
such as political gains.
Proponents of the intrinsic value of citizen participation have
highlighted that citizen participation serves as a leverage to
promote self-esteem and self-fulfillment and develop the attitudes
and skills of citizenship [12]. Also, citizen participation provides
an opportunity to be better informed of their community issues
[13]. Through the experience of citizen participation, citizens gain
a sense of belonging in their community, which facilitates their
willingness to learn more about community issues [4, 13].
Moreover, citizen participation allows citizens to learn the art of
deliberation and compromise, foster an active and public-spirited
moral character and, in turn, realize their potential contribute to
the community [4]. Thus, it is likely that citizens are motivated to
actively use e-participation when they perceive greater intrinsic
value created in the process of e-participation.
H1: E-participants who perceive greater intrinsic value of eparticipation
are more likely to actively use e-participation.
2.2 Instrumental Value of e-Participation
This study also asserts that citizens’ active use of e-participation is
extrinsically motivated. Extrinsic motivation theory emphasizes
that individuals perform a behavior to achieve instrumental values
such as economic and political rewards [14]. In TAM, the
perceived usefulness construct has been used to capture the role of
individuals’ extrinsic motivation in adopting new technology [15].
In the context of e-participation, instrumental value indicates eparticipants’
perceptions of influence on governmental decision
making. Gaining political rewards such as greater influence on
government may serve as a motivation to actively use eparticipation.
Also, as e-participation is based on Web 2.0, social
rewards such as recognition are available to e-participants in that
e-participants and government bureaucrats observe and interact
one another by posting and replying to citizens’ ideas or
comments. It is likely that e-participants are aware of an
opportunity to receive social rewards from peer e-participants and
45
government by using e-participation. Thus, political and social
rewards serve as incentives for e-participants to actively use eparticipation.
H2: E-participants who perceive greater instrumental value of eparticipation
are more likely to actively use e-participation.
2.3 Strength of Social Networks
Strength of social networks refers to the extent to which
individuals intensively interact with others [11]. This study argues
that e-participants embedded in strong offline social networks are
likely to actively use e-participation. Due to the nature of online
interaction (e.g. chat with anonymous friends), people tend to be
connected to one another through weak social networks [16]. Thus,
online social networks can serve as a complementary means for
mobilizing resources such as new information at a lower cost.
Also, e-participants who already have strong offline networks are
likely to have greater ability in using e-participation. Citizens’ eparticipation
can be considered as less active if they simply search
for information and observe the postings of others. The lack of
active e-participation barely creates an opportunity for eparticipants
to build online social networks. Thus, to build online
social networks through e-participation program, e-participants
must initiate interactions by being exposed to peer e-participants
such as through posting their suggestions or replying to others’
postings in the e-participation programs. It is likely that people
embedded in strong offline social networks are equipped with
knowledge about how to initiate, build, and sustain social
networks, which enhances their capability to use e-participation
actively.
H3: E-participants embedded in strong offline social networks are
likely to actively use e-participation.
3. RESEARCH METHOD
To test research hypotheses, we used the 2009 E-participation
Survey data collected from a web-based survey. The sample frame
was 10,136 citizen members of Oasis who have posted at least one
suggestion over the last three years. 1,076 participants responded
to the survey (response rate of 10.6 percent).
For the test of the hypotheses, this research used one survey item
(i.e. the number of suggestions posted by individual users on the
Oasis program) to measure active e-participation. The survey
participants were asked to indicate the extent to which they posted
their suggestions on Oasis using a 6-point scale ranging from
“Never” (1) to “More than 10 suggestions” (6).
We used four survey items to measure e-participants’ perception
of the intrinsic value of e-participation. By modifying Davis’s [8]
perceived usefulness scale, we used four items to capture
perceived instrumental value. The participants were asked to
indicate the extent to which they agreed with the those items using
a 5-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to
strongly agree (5). To measure e-participants’ strength of social
networks, this study used five items regarding the frequency of
going out with different social groups. Five items were designed
with a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from “Every Day” (1) to
“Once a Year” (7). Correlation among the items was slightly
lower than threshold (Cronbach Alpha=.67). The average scores
of the five items were used in the analysis.
As control variables, we included perceived ease of use, social
altruism, political participation, trust in government and e-

participation experience. As one of core construct of TAM,
perceived ease of use was included as a control variable. To
measure perceived ease of use, this study used the average scores
of four survey items with 5-point Likert scale (Cronbach
Alpha=.83). To measure social altruism, we used a single item as
to respondents’ volunteer experience. This item was rated on a 7point
Likert scale ranging from “Never” (1) to “Every Day” (7).
To capture the degree of political participation, we measured
voting participation. We used an index of dummy variables that
include the 2008 Presidential Election, 2008 National General
Election, 2006 Seoul City Mayor Election and 2006 Seoul
Council Member Election. To control for the effect of trust in an
IT service provider, this study used a measure of trust in the
government who provides the e-participation programs. Trust in
government is measured by a single item: Do you trust that SMG
works in your best interests? The item was rated on a 5-point
Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree
(5). E-participation experience captures the ability of eparticipants
with regard to the use of Web 2.0 technologies. This
study includes it as a control variable in order to control the effect
of the difference between experienced and inexperienced
participants on the degree of e-participation activities. The
respondents were asked to indicate the length of membership in
Oasis. This question was scaled from 4 years (1) to less than 1
year (4). To capture the effects of respondents’ socio-economic
status on active e-participation, we included gender, age,
education, and income as control variables.
4. RESULTS AND IMPLICATIONS
Table 3 shows the results of OLS regression analysis of two
models. Model 1 is a baseline model with only control variables
while Model 2 includes three independent variables plus control
variables. Consistent with H1, Model 2 demonstrates a positive
and significant relation between perceived intrinsic value of eparticipation
and active e-participation, which confirms prior
empirical studies on the effect of intrinsic motivation on new
technology adoption [17]. However, H2 and H3 are not supported
by the data.
Model 1 Model 2
Beta (S.E) Beta (S.E)
Perceived Intrinsic Value .20** (.09)
Perceived Instrumental Value .10 (.09)
Strength of Social Networks -.07 (.05)
Perceived Ease of Use .04 (.07) -.07 (.08)
Social Altruism .11*** (.03) .12*** (.03)
Voting Participation .02 (.04) .03 (.04)
Trust in Government .26 *** (.05) .19*** (.06)
E-participation Experience .16 *** (.04) .17*** (.05)
Male .23 ** (.11) .28** (.11)
Age .03 *** (.00) .03** (.00)
Age 2 -.00 *** (.00) -.00*** (.00)
Education .04 (.04) .05 (.04)
Income .01 (.03) .02 (.03)
N 874 816
Adjusted R .14 .15
F 14.93 *** 12.35***
Note: For two-tail tests; * p < .10; ** p < .05; *** p < .01
Table 3 OLS Regression Results: Aggregated Model
46
The results also show that male e-participants reported posting a
greater number of suggestions than female e-participants. This
finding is inconsistent with recent empirical studies on the role of
gender in Web 2.0 such as social media use [17]. To better
understand the role of gender in active e-participation, we further
analyze the data by disaggregating the sample into two groups:
male and female samples. The results of Chow test allowed us to
test two groups separately using male and female data sets
(F=4.60, p < .001). Table 4 shows the results of a separate OLS
analysis of male and female data sets.
Male Model Female Model
Beta (S.E) Beta (S.E)
Perceived Intrinsic Value .12 (.11) .35** (.16)
Perceived Instrumental Value .18* (.11) -.12 (.16)
Strength of Social Networks -.02 (.06) -.19** (.09)
Perceived Ease of Use -.09 (.09) -.05 (.12)
Social Altruism .16*** (.04) .06 (.05)
Voting Participation .10* (.05) -.06 (.06)
Trust in Government .18** (.07) .13 (.11)
E-participation Experience .14** (.05) .26*** (.08)
Age .03*** (.01) .02*** (.01)
Age 2 -.00*** (.00) -.00 (.00)
Education .03 (.05) .10 (.08)
Income .03 (.04) .00 (.05)
N 619 196
Adjusted R .14 .14
F 9.78*** 3.74***
Note: For two-tail tests; * p < .10; ** p < .05; *** p < .01
Table 4 OLS Regression Results: Male and Female Models
Table 4 shows that only perceived instrumental value is
significant in the Male model, while perceived intrinsic value and
strength of social networks are significant in the Female model.
The findings imply that male e-participants are more likely to put
a greater number of postings in the e-participation program
because they might perceive e-participation as a means of
acquiring a sense of ownership, influence, and/or empowerment
[18]. Meanwhile, female citizens’ active use of e-participation is
influenced by their perceptions of greater intrinsic value. Female
e-participants are more likely to use e-participation actively
because they might perceive e-participation as a means of being
informed, educated and developed [19].
In addition, the results exhibit that there are gender differences in
the effects of social networks on active e-participation. The Male
model shows that there is no significant relationship between the
strength of social networks and active e-participation. However,
Female model depicts the negative and significant effects of the
strength of social networks on active e-participation. That is,
female respondents reported that they actively use e-participation
when they are embedded in weaker offline social networks. In an
offline setting, underrepresented groups of people are often
embedded in low-density networks or take peripheral positions
[20]. In weak social networks, women are likely to face structural
constraints in order to express their interests, to access
information, and to receive recognition in a timely manner. These
constraints may serve as motivating factors for women to seek
active e-participation as a supplementary tool for expressing their

interests, gaining access to information, sharing information with
others, and receiving recognition.
5. CONCLUSION
This exploratory study contributes to e-participation literature by
uncovering both motivational and social factors affecting citizens’
active e-participation. The study findings imply that local
governments may need to pay more attention to how to design and
evaluate e-participation programs to enhance the extrinsic value of
e-participation to facilitate male e-participants’ active eparticipation.
In order to better understand female participants’
use of e-participation, further attention should also be paid to how
to design e-participation programs to improve their intrinsic value
and understand the structure of offline social networks where
female participants are embedded. At least, three limitations
should be noted: external validity, cross-sectional research design
and online social networks. The results of this study could be
outcomes of unique citizen engagement evolution that are affected
by South Korea’s historical, political, and cultural contexts.
Accordingly, more in-depth case studies in various regions and
countries are needed to advance active e-participation models in
local governance. Also, we suggest longitudinal research in order
to better understand the factors affecting the sustainability of
active e-participation. Since this study analyzed the role of offline
social networks on active e-participation, it is limited to
understanding how online social networks affect e-participation
behavior. Therefore, future studies are needed to extend the study
model by incorporating the role of online social networks.
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank Seoul Metropolitan Government
for supporting this research project.
7. REFERENCES
[1] Wikipedia. Web 2.0. Accessed July 25 th , 2012,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
[2] Macintosh, A., and Whyte, A. Towards an evaluation
framework for eParticipation. Transforming government: People,
Process & Policy, 2, 1 (2008), 16-30.
[3] Tambouris, E., Liotas, N., and Tarabanis, K. A framework for
assessing e-participation projects and tools. Proceedings of the 40 th
Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. 2007.
[4] Roberts, N. Public deliberation in an age of direct citizen
participation. American Review of Public Administration. 34, 4
(2004), 315-353.
[5] Box, R., Citizen Governance: Leading American Communities
into the 21st Century. Sage Publication, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2007.
[6] Davis, F., Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and
user acceptance of information technology, MIS Quarterly, 13, 3
(1989), 319-339.
47
[7] Venkatesh, V., Morris, M., Davis, G., and Davis, F. User
acceptance of information technology: Toward a unified view.
MIS Quarterly, 27, 3 (2003), 425-478.
[8] Schaupp, L. C., Carter, L., and Hobbs, J. E-file adoption: A
study of U.S. taxpayers' intentions. Computers in Human
Behavior. 26, 4 (2010), 636-644.
[9] Ibarra, H., Kilduff, M., and Tsai, W. Zooming in and out: Connecting
individuals and collectives at the frontiers of organizational network
research. Organizational Science, 16 (2005), 359-371.
[10] Lee, J., and Kim, S. Exploring the role of social networks in
affective organizational commitment: Network centrality, strength
of ties, and structural holes. American Review of Public
Administration, 41 (2011), 205-223.
[11] Granovetter, M. The strength of weak ties. American
Journal of Sociology, 78 (1973), 1360-1380.
[12] King, C., and Stivers, C. Government is US: Public
Administration in an Anti-Government Era. Sage Publications,
Thousand Oaks, CA, 1998.
[13] Patterman, C. Participation and Democratic Theory,
Cambridge University Press, New York, 1975.
[14] Deci, L. Intrinsic Motivation. New York, Plenum Press, 1975.
[15] Venkatesh, V., and Davis, D. 2000. A theoretical extension
of the technology acceptance model: Four longitudinal field
studies. Management Science. 46 (2000), 186–204.
[16] Easley, D., and Kleinberg, J. Strong and weak ties. In
Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly
Connected World. Cambridge University Press, NY. 2010, 47-84.
[17] Hampton, K., Goulet, L., Rainie, L., and Purcell, K. Social
Networking Sites and Our Lives. Pew Research Center’s Internet
& American Life Project, Washington D.C.
[18] Prentice, D. A., and Carlsmith, K. M. Opinions and
personality: On the psychological functions of attitudes and other
valued possessions. In Why we evaluate functions of
attitudes. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, 2000, 223-248.
[19] Bozionelos, N., and Bozionelos, G. Instrumental and expressive
traits: Their relationship and their association with biological sex.
Social Behavior and Personality. 31 (2003), 423-430.
[20] Burt, R. Structural holes: The social structure of competition.
Harvard Business Press, Cambridge, M.A. 1992.

Genres of Communication in Activist eParticipation:
A Comparison of New and Old Media
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we examine the genres of communication in an
activist case in a Norwegian municipality. As genres evolve over
time, and the emergence of new genre properties is a sign of a
mature technology, we compare the genres used in traditional
paper-based media with the genres used in social media, to
examine the maturity of social media as a medium for activist
eParticipation. We also discuss the usage patterns of traditional
vs. social media, and their relation to the public sphere. Our
findings indicate that so far, the genres used for activism in social
media are very similar to their offline counterparts, with some
new genres and genre characteristics emerging. Social media is
moving towards maturity, but still has a way to go.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4. [Computers and Society]
General Terms
Measurement, Documentation, Human Factors, Theory
Keywords
eParticipation, Social Media, Genre Theory, Public Sphere
1. INTRODUCTION
Our media and communication habits are increasingly moving
towards the digital domain and to social media. While political
communication has been lagging behind, this area is also
increasingly becoming digitized [1, 2], and as such is forced to
change in order to adapt to the logic of two-way communication
media [3]. This move towards new media has been hastened by
what is perceived as a lessening of civic engagement in traditional
channels. Voter turnout is in decline [4], there are fewer members
of political parties, and less interest for political participation and
debate [5]. These perceived threats to democracy have led
government towards a number of projects where digital media is
used in an attempt to boost participation and civic engagement [2,
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
Marius Rohde Johannessen
University of Agder, dept. of Information Systems
Service box 422, NO-4604 Kristiansand, Norway
+47 38 14 17 14
marius.johannessen@uia.no
48
6, 7].
The public sphere, said to have disappeared in the age of mass
media, has re-emerged online [8, 9]. But how new is the online
public sphere? How much has political communication online
been adapted to the two-way, inclusive logic of “new” media?
To answer this question, we look towards genre theory. Genre
theory tells us that communicative acts recurring over time, with
similar form and function, can be analyzed and categorized into a
set of communication genres [10]. Genres used within an
organization or a given context can further be categorized into a
repertoire of suitable genres for a given context [11].
When moving from “old” to “new” media, genres from the old
medium will typically be copied as-is and used for some time in
the new. After some time, new genres emerge, and old ones are
adapted to fit the new medium. The maturity of a medium can to
some degree be measured by examining the genres of the new and
old medium [12]. Maturity is in this case understood as the degree
to which the actors involved in using the medium agree on the
conventions and rules for the medium, as well as the emergence of
new genres, or old genres which are adapted to the functionality
of the new medium.
In this paper, we identify the genre systems used for political
activist communication in new and old media, through a case
study of an urban development project in a mid-sized Norwegian
city. The actors involved in the case have used both traditional
print media, social media and the Internet in their communication,
and this allows us to categorize the same message as different
genres in different media.
In addition, we discuss these findings against the ideals of the
public sphere [13]. Are the new media mature enough to cater for
a public sphere, or are we still in transition between the “old” and
“new”? And if there is an online public sphere in this case, what
kind of public sphere is it? Finally, we discuss how social capital
impacts participation and the public sphere.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section two presents
our theoretical foundation, consisting of the public sphere, genre
theory and social capital. Sections three and four outline the
research method we have applied, and presents a thick case
description. In section five we present our findings, which are
separated into the genre analysis of the new and old media, and an
analysis of the extent to which these genre systems support a
public sphere. Finally, we present our conclusions, limitations and
some possibilities for future research.

2. THEORETICAL FOUNDATION
2.1 The Public Sphere
The Public Sphere is defined as “that domain of our social life in
which such a thing as public opinion can be formed”. An
autonomous “place” where citizens can debate government policy
and act as an informal correction when governments step out of
bounds [14], separated from the state and economic interests [14,
15]. The public sphere can be understood as a mediating layer
between government and citizen, where citizens discuss and agree
on issues of public interest, as It is “the interaction between
citizens, civil society, and the state, communicating through the
public sphere, that ensures that the balance between stability and
social change is maintained.” [16]
The existence of a public, which is aware of itself and able to
form an opinion, is essential for the Public Sphere. When the
bourgeoisie class began to challenge the power of the church and
state during the formation of the European nation states in the 19 th
century, we saw the first modern example of the public forming
an opinion. Before, in the feudal age, the church and kings of
Europe had no use for a public in the modern sense of the word,
as the kings and nobility had no electorate to hold them
accountable for their decisions [17]. In modern representative
democracy this has changed. After the initial formation of the
European nations followed two devastating world wars, several
nations falling back from democracy to dictatorship, and back to
democracy, and all of this has contributed to a strengthening of
the western world’s belief in democracy and governments’
accountability to the public [17].
Public opinion can be understood as the shared understanding of
an issue, reached through debate by rational citizens [18] , and is
considered a necessary function in a modern democracy: “The
public sphere is an essential component of sociopolitical
organization because it is the space where people come together
as citizens and articulate their autonomous views to influence the
political institutions of society” [16].
Some claim the Public Sphere no longer exists, due to the spread
of mass media and commoditization of information, along with
the disappearance of the old “salons” and other physical spaces
where the bourgeoisie assembled and debated. When everyone are
allowed to participate, the public sphere holds no value [19]. This
view is controversial, and has been criticised for being overtly
elitist and for not taking into consideration the changing times we
live in (Hartley, 1996). Rather than longing for the salons of old, a
number of researchers have pointed to the Internet as the medium
for modern day Public Sphere [8, 9, 20, 21]. Studies of political
participation indicate that Internet use has led to an increase in the
public’s political interest [22], and it is claimed that the Public
Sphere of today is no longer a physical place. Rather, it is found
in the media and in networks and acts as the
“cultural/informational repository of the ideas and projects that
feed public debate.” [16].
There is, however, a problem with the online Public Sphere.
Online activities, even more so than their offline counterparts,
tend to be focused around people’s interests, at least in the
Norwegian context. It is a lot easier to pick and choose only that
which we are interested in when we move around on the Internet
[23]. Interest-based communities and segregation can easily
become a democratic problem. When people socialize only with
others who have the same interests, points of view and likes and
49
dislikes, we lose that space in society where people of diverse
backgrounds can assemble, debate, and shape public opinion [24].
And while the Internet is promising, not everyone agrees that we
currently have a functioning Public Sphere. A lack of attention to
issues of public interest, our habits as online consumers as well as
general political disinterest can explain why the internet has not
revitalized the public sphere to the extent some scholars have
expected [25].
Habermas, who has been criticized for being elitist, redefines the
public sphere to better suit the current media environment. He
concludes that two things are needed for a networked and mediabased
Public Sphere: “mediated political communication in the
public sphere can facilitate deliberative legitimation processes in
complex societies only if a self-regulating media system gains
independence from its social environments and if anonymous
audiences grant a feedback between an informed elite discourse
and a responsive civil society.”[26].
Several scholars have operationalized the requirements for a
Public Sphere. Dahlberg [13] has identified six requirements: A
public sphere must be Autonomous from state and economic
power. It should be based on a rational-critical discourse, where
participants are engaged in reciprocal critique of normative
positions that are criticisable rather than dogmatic claims.
Participants must be reflective, and critically examine their
cultural values, assumptions, and interests, as well as the larger
social context. Participants must attempt to understand the
argument from the other's perspective. Each participant must
make an effort to make known all information relevant to the
particular problem under consideration, and everyone is equally
entitled to introduce and question ideas and issues.
Trenz & Eder [27] presents four ideal-types of the Public Sphere,
thereby extending the requirements made by Dahlberg. A Public
Sphere can be discourse-based, based on political protest, on
political campaigning, or simply on consensus. Another issue that
can be measured, especially in cases of online activism, is the
extent to which the online activity is linked with the mainstream
media, and through that to the wider public sphere.
2.2 Social Capital
While the public sphere is the ideal public debate should be
striving for, the concept of social capital can be used to explain
who participates [28]. Social capital refers to
“connections among individuals – social networks and
the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise
from them … ‘social capital’ calls attention to the fact
that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a
sense network of reciprocal social relations. A society of
many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily
rich in social capital.” [29]
Some claim that a high level of social capital is an important
factor in explaining the Scandinavian welfare societies. despite
high taxes, big government and a relatively flat income structure,
the Scandinavian countries are among the richest countries in the
world [30]. The high amount of social capital in Scandinavia acts
as “grease” for transactions, lowering the cost of doing business,
as there is less need for formalized contracts and expensive legal
agreements (ibid.).

Social capital is often measured in terms of individual and
institutional trust and reciprocity, and divided into bonding and
bridging social capital. Trusting individuals lowers barriers to
participation and simplifies transactions, as there is less need for
written contracts and other control measures. Institutional trust
indicates that government institutions such as police, judicial
system and administration are functioning well. Reciprocity, the
degree in which people are willing to give something back when
they receive something, is another measure of social capital [31,
32].
There are several types of social capital. Bonding social capital is
the connections between individuals in a group, such as the
traditional village or a local community. Bridging social capital is
the connection between different groups, where individuals in a
group have ties to individuals in other groups [29]. A third type of
social capital is “maintained social capital”, the ability to keep
one’s connections also when one is physically separated from
them [33].
In Information Systems, social capital have been used to measure
both how technology affects social capital, and how social capital
affects development of technology [32]. Other studies have shown
that the characteristics and user population of social networking
services is important for the level of social capital and for the
outcome of political debate on such sites [34]. And that spending
time in front of screens can increase social capital, depending on
the activities we are conducting [35].
2.3 Genres of Communication
Genre theory has been applied to study communication patterns in
a number of eParticipation studies [36-39]. Genres can act as a
tool for studying the role of communication in social processes
[10]. Genres develop over time, in the interaction between
predefined rules for communication and the people that are
communicating. Genres are useful when studying social media
use in eParticipation, as the introduction of new media over time
often leads to new communication practices which genre theory
allows us to map and analyze [38]. By studying communication
genres instead of the technology used to communicate, we can
discover how communication changes and evolves over time [11].
Genres can be defined using the 5w1h-method By asking where,
why, when, who, what and how, we can uncover the purpose,
contents, placement in time, location, participants, structure and
medium for communication [40, 41]:
o Where tells us where the communication takes place, the
medium being used, or the physical location.
o Why explains the purpose of the genre, as understood by
those using it.
o When refers to the time where communication takes place.
For example, the “job application” genre is enacted when
applying for a job, and needs to be in by a set date.
o Who defines the actors involved in communication, the
sender and receiver of the genre.
o What is the content of the genre, and defines what is being
communicated, and any relations to other genres.
o Finally, How describes the technical needs for delivery of the
genre, for example which medium is being used, or any other
technical necessities.
50
Genres are further identified by having a common content (themes
and topics of the conversation) and form (physical and linguistic
features), as well as technological functionality in genres enacted
through electronic media [12]. A common mistake is to confuse
genre and medium, especially when including functionality in the
analysis. E-mail is a medium, while the job application sent via email
is the genre [10].
It is possible to go beyond single genres, and look at the genre
system. Genre systems are collections of genres that belong
together [41]. For example, the previously mentioned job
application is part of a system where the job listing comes first,
followed by the job application and some kind of feedback on the
application. When examining an entire genre system, we can
analyse communicative practices over time, and how new genres
emerge and influence the ways we communicate [11].
By analysing the genre system of different media, we can see if
there are differences between how the genres are enacted, and
identify the genres that are most used by participants in an
eParticipation project (ibid.). By applying genre theory in the
study of new media forms, we get a more comprehensive analysis
than what we would get from only looking at the functionality of
the technology behind the new medium [11].
3. RESEARCH METHOD
The research was framed as a qualitative case study, of which this
paper is one in a series of planned publications. The objective of
qualitative research is “understanding…by investigating the
perspectives and behavior of the people in these situations and the
context within which they act” [42], and qualitative methods are
appropriate for exploratory studies and for examining how
something happens [42, 43]. The case study examines the
phenomenon in its “natural setting”, collects data from multiple
sources, and the researcher may have limited knowledge about the
outcome of the research [44]. Case studies are particularly suited
for research on new phenomena where the actors’ experiences and
interpretations and the wider context are important factors [45].
Our initial objective for the project as a whole was to explore and
understand how social media was being used by activist groups in
a Norwegian municipality. As part of that objective, the research
question for this paper is how are the genre systems of old and
new media used for activist communication, and how do these
genre systems fit with the public sphere ideal?
The urban planning case was chosen for the following reasons:
The process has a long history, dating back almost 30 years. This
provides rich insights into the process, and especially into how the
introduction of social media has changed the way the actors
communicate. The number of people involved also made access to
interview subjects easy. Further, the first author has followed the
case as a citizen over several years before engaging in it from a
research perspective, which leads to a thorough understanding of
the case context. There is a risk of bias, but we have attempted to
minimize this risk through a constant analysis and questioning of
our findings.
The data used in this case was collected between February and
November 2011. We made 12 semi-structured interviews with
representatives related to the case: Members of the city council
(4), officials from the city administration responsible for
developing the plans (2), the private investor’s representative (1),
local media (1 + informal meetings and e-mail with 2 others),

epresentatives from the three main activist groups (3), and one
representative from the regional governments heritage
department. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. The
interviewer gave a brief introduction to the research project, and
asked the respondents to talk freely within the context of the case.
Interviews should be supplemented by other forms of data [46].
For the findings reported in this paper, this mainly consists of
postings from Facebook groups and letters to the editor. These are
the basis for the genre analysis.
In addition, we attended one workshop meeting and two city
council meetings, where field notes were made and written out.
All documents relevant to the case between 2007 and 2011 that
were made available by the city council were collected and
analyzed. This includes minutes from council meetings,
consultancy reports, architectural plans, formal hearing documents
and the results of two surveys made in relation to the development
project. These data sources are not used explicitly in this paper,
but nonetheless influence our conclusions and as such should be
mentioned.
The data was analyzed using genre theory and the 5W1H
framework [41] to identify the genre systems of old and new
media. Old media is represented by the print edition of the local
newspaper, while new media is represented by several Facebook
groups related to the case. The analysis was inspired by a genre
analysis of a municipal online discussion board [36].
Finally, we wanted to examine how the genre systems of old and
new media were related to the public sphere. This examination
was used following the framework of [28], where several
constructs of a public sphere are measured, including the amount
of social capital among the participants.
4. CASE DESCRIPTION
The case is about a cove of 5 acres, located about 1 km from the
city center of a Norwegian mid-sized city (40.000 inhabitants).
There are two land owners: a private investor and the local
municipality own about 50% each.
Over the past 30 years, there have been a number of plans for
development of the cove. In the 1980’s, the city council decided
to build a new harbor in the area, but the development was halted
and the only structure built was the local hub of a national freight
company, resulting in the cove becoming a no-man’s land of car
parks and freight trucks. The area is very attractive for
development, as it is by the sea and also the last open area close to
the city center in a city where the topography makes development
difficult.
There is strong agreement in the population that something should
be done about the cove. No one is pleased with the current
situation. Between 2001 and 2006 a number of plans were
presented. In 2007, the city council agreed on an area
development plan, and in 2008, the municipality invited several
architect firms to draw new plans for the area based on this
development plan. Plans were presented for a mainly residential
project consisting of six five-story apartment buildings, with the
ground floor reserved for business purposes. The idea behind the
plans was to create a new urban district, with shops, restaurants
and apartments. This was to be an extension of the current city
center.
51
When these plans were presented, local opposition began to arise.
The local residents’ association started campaigning against the
development by talking directly to politicians, writing to the local
newspaper, and setting up stands and organizing protest concerts.
Their main argument was that this was the last area close to the
city center which could be developed into a green recreational
park. They also organized a campaign to have politicians
sympathetic to their cause voted in to the city council in the 2007
municipal election, and succeeded so well that the plans were
downcast by the new city council in 2008.
One year later, new plans were presented. This time the plans
were only for the parts of the area owned by the private investor,
and consisted of three high-rise residential buildings. The idea
behind these plans was that with these high-rise buildings, the city
would have room for a recreational park on the remaining 2.5
acres owned by the municipality.
Once again the residents’ association protested, and this time new
activist groups were formed and joined the opposition. The new
groups consisted of creative professionals, local historians and
heritage people. They still argued for a recreational park in the
entire 5 acre area, but also introduced arguments for retaining the
area’s historical heritage by preserving the view from the sea to
the old wooden houses in the surrounding hills. Once again the
activist groups were able to stop the proposed plans.
In 2010, the municipality restarted the process, and decided to
come up with a new area development plan. After being criticized
for not listening to the citizens when the past plans were laid out,
the municipality decided to run this as an inclusive process.
In 2011, they arranged three workshops prior to the plans being
developed by the city administrators. One of them was open to the
public. The other two were for invited groups only, but included
all three new activist groups, as well as public and private
organizations with a stake in the area. In total, 30 different groups
and organizations were invited to these workshops. Workshop
participants got four different alternatives to work with: The entire
area as a recreational park, 25%, 50% and 75% development. One
plan for each of these alternatives were presented and discussed in
the final workshop.
The workshop participants were somewhat skewed towards
activists and others who opposed housing and industrial
development. The private investor did not attend the workshops,
nor did other stakeholders who had an interest in development.
This would later be used as an argument for development.
In addition to the workshops, an online survey was distributed to
the general public and presented at the final workshop. The survey
was based on the same alternatives as the workshops, and
respondents were also asked a number of questions about which
activities they wanted in the area, where buildings should be
erected etc. 55,7% of the respondents (N=688) reported they
wanted at least half the area for a recreational park.
The local newspaper distributed another survey two months after,
with similar results. Around half the respondents wanted a mix of
recreational park and urban development in the area. Respondents
were also asked how important they considered this case to be,
and 40% reported it to be important or very important.

Both surveys were open to interpretation, which lead developers
and activists to argue a great deal about what was the true public
opinion in the matter.
Several respondents, both activists and government officials, have
called this a sham process, and claimed that politicians had no
intention other than to soothe the opposition. When faced with
these charges, politicians have denied them in the interviews,
claiming they created the workshops and surveys in an honest
attempt to be more inclusive.
The municipal administration used the input from the workshops
and survey, and came up with 9 alternatives for the new area
development plan. At this stage only the building footprint, how
much of the cove to set aside for buildings, was discussed. The
argument for this was that previous debates had tried to cover too
much, which lead to no decision on the overall plan. The
administration supported an alternative which meant 75% of the
area was to be developed, and the city council voted in support of
this in a council meeting held late March 2011, with 21 votes
against 18.
In august 2011 the city council assembled again, to vote on
building heights and the contract for development with the private
investor and his partners. After long debate, which included a vote
on a change to the area plan passed in the last meeting, the council
again voted in the support of development, with 24 votes against
14.
Both meetings had a large audience consisting mainly of activists
aged between 40 and 70. There were few, if any, people under the
age of 35 present, in spite of activist claims that youth were very
engaged in the case and were big supporters of a recreational park.
In both meetings, activists created a lot of disturbance, causing the
mayor to threaten to close off the meeting to the public. After the
August meeting, activists were furious, claiming the politicians
had failed to listen to the public.
In the autumn of 2011 there was a new municipal election. Once
again the activists created a pamphlet showing how people could
vote if they wanted “park-friendly” politicians in the new city
council, who could re-open the case. The lists were distributed
online, through a web site, were promoted on Facebook and also
spread through physical means and word of mouth.
Although not a complete success, the activists were once again
able to influence who got elected to the city council. About 400
people seemed to follow the activists’ advice.
At the time data collection ended (November 2011), the previous
city council’s decision had not been up for discussion in the new
city council, and the new mayor has told the media that it is not
likely the case will be reopened.
However, the activists have vowed to keep on fighting, and at the
time of writing have complained to regional authorities about
procedural errors in the existing resolution. The complaints will
most likely not be heard, at least not lead to changes in the
development plans.
Even though it seems as if the activists have lost their fight, there
is no doubt that citizen initiated participation has had considerable
influence in this case. The activists have, through their targeted
efforts, managed to influence the composition of two city
councils, have made the city council swing against development
several times, and through this they have delayed development for
52
almost 5 years, and forced the city to concessions such as the
workshops and survey, as well as the creation of several reports
on noise, pollution and other issues.
5. FINDINGS
In this section the findings from the genre systems of print media
(letters to the editor) and social media (Facebook groups) are
presented, followed by an analysis of how the two systems rate in
terms of contributing to the public sphere.
5.1 Genre Systems
The individual genres were identified through applying the
5W1H-method to letters to the editor in the printed edition of the
local newspaper, and postings on Facebook groups created to
discuss the case. In order to examine the genre system, additional
columns for the system were added, as well as a column showing
the relation between genres. These additional columns were
inspired by [36].
Earlier research conducted by the author has shown that there are
three objectives for why politicians choose to communicate in
digital media. These are dialogue with citizens, contributions from
citizens, and involvement in party activities [39]. Effective
political communication should thus address these.
These objectives can be interpreted and as genres in their own
right. Table 1 shows the three objectives as genres.
The genres identified in the discussion spaces we are observing
can be analyzed as to which of these “genre objectives” they
support (table 2), and this knowledge can be applied by site
administrators and politicians in such a way as to facilitate the use
of genres which are most likely to lead to the desired objective.
Table 1: Political objectives as genres
Dialogue Contribution Involvement
Why Involve citizens in
public debate
Knowledge
about citizen
concerns
Raise funds.
Get people to
volunteer
When Continuous Election time Election time
What Conversation
between citizens
and
politicians/citizens
and citizens
Who Politicians, party
members, citizens
Q&A. Voter
stories
Politicians,
party
members,
voters
Competitions,
membership
forms,
information
Voters,
sympathizers
Where SNS, web site SNS, web site SNS, web site
How Encourage
dialogue.
Open and personal
language. Citizengenerated
content.
Encourage
contributions
and questions
from voters
Competitions,
theme sites,
crosspublication

While letters to the editor could be said to be a genre in itself,
there are some significant differences in style and form. As could
be expected from a mature medium, there are a limited number of
genres to be found. Except for the “poem” genre, the main
difference between the genres in the letters to the editor section
lies in the level of formality and how the arguments are presented.
Some letters are kept in a formal tone and based on facts, while
others are more personal, some bordering on libelous. In the
beginning there were several voices represented, but as the case
progresses the activists, who were against development, produced
the vast majority of letters. Letters tend to become more
aggressive over time, with a somewhat increased focus on
individuals and less on formal, fact-based debate. As it is mainly
those opposing development who write to the paper, there is little
direct debate.
However, a number of the writers address politicians by name,
citing things the politician(s) said in council meetings or other
places.
All in all, the genre system of the editorial column functions well
for disseminating ones ideas, somewhat well for debate (although
the slow speed of print means you have to pay close attention if
you want to catch who is addressing whom), and the majority of
letters are at least somewhat fact-based and formal. The genres in
this system are presented in table 2. The first two rows describe
the purpose and actors of the genre system (letters to the editor),
while the rest of the table is a 5W1H analysis of the individual
genres identified within the genre system.
System:
why
System:
whose
Table 2: Genre system in newspaper editorial section
Promote and conduct debate about local issues
Owned and edited by the local newspaper. Open to
everyone, but editors decide who gets printed
Genre Opinion, formal Opinion, informal
Where Newspaper Newspaper
Why
When
Who
What
How
Convince others
through presenting
facts
Continuously, more
when case is
processed in city
council or during
election time
Activist to
citizen/politicians
Developer to
citizen/politicians
Presents a view,
followed by
supporting facts and
arguments
Letters are sent to
the editor and
Convince others through
appeals to emotions
Continuously, more when case
is processed in city council or
during election time
Activist to citizen/politicians
Presents a view, supported by
emotional statements or
unsupported views
Letters are sent to the editor
and published.
53
Relation
to table1
published.
Dialogue,
contribution
Dialogue
Genre Poem Personal attacks
Where Newspaper Newspaper
Why
When
Who
What
How
Relation
to table1
Gain attention
through an unusual
genre
Infrequently, no set
pattern
Activist/citizen to
citizens
Short rhymes,
aimed at touching
people’s emotions
Letters are sent to
the editor and
published
Vent own feelings, discredit
the one being attacked
Continuously, more when case
is processed in city council or
during election time, or when
newspaper editorial have
written positively about
development
Activist to
politicians/developer/news
editor
None None
Points to previous letter or
quote and argues against it.
Some simply claim the person
being attacked is less gifted
because s/he means what s/he
means
Letters are sent to the editor
and published.
All the Facebook groups we found were run by activists, and most
of the participants in the groups were either activists or citizens
supporting the activists’ opposition to development. There were
also a lot of passive members who did not contribute in the
discussions on the wall, whereof some were representatives of the
city council or the media that joined in order to follow what the
activists were saying and planning.
There are some noteworthy differences between the two genre
systems. In social media we see many of the same genres, but also
some new ones where functionality of the medium plays an
important role. The links genre makes use of the networked nature
of the Internet to provide fast access to information stored
elsewhere, and link targets often contain multimedia content.
Multimedia also helps to enrich some of the other genres. The
formal and informal opinion genres are present in both the “old”
and “new” media, but are enacted somewhat differently in new
media. In the Facebook groups we see a lot of images and also
some videos made by the activists to show how the planned
development will impact the surroundings. These provide
valuable extra information that can be difficult to present in a
printed medium with limited space.
On the other hand, the postings on Facebook tend to be shorter,
and there is less fact-based discussion and postings seem to be
more improvised, which provides less information than the longer
and more thought-out letters to the editor.
Another difference is the spontaneous “greetings/cheers” genre,
where people will congratulate each other, or citizens will write a
short post to show their support for the activists’ case. This kind

of informal communication is not likely to be printed, as it does
not contribute to the debate, but nonetheless acts as important
feedback and perhaps a moral boost to the activists.
System:
why
System:
whose
Table 3: Genre system in social media
Activist groups fighting against the planned
development
Owned by activist groups or individuals, open to
everyone but mostly participants are opposed to
development
Genre Opinion, formal Opinion, informal
Where Facebook group wall Facebook group wall
Why
Convince others
through presenting
facts
When Ongoing Ongoing
Who
What
How
Relation
to table1
Activist to
activist/citizen
Presents a view,
followed by supporting
facts and arguments.
Often with links,
pictures, video
Group members post
messages on wall
Present short opinion on
something
Activist to activist/citizen
Presents a view,
supported by emotional
statements or
unsupported views.
Sometimes with links,
pictures, video
Dialogue, contribution Dialogue
Group members post
messages on wall
Genre Call to action Personal attacks
Where Facebook group wall Facebook group wall
Why
When
Get people to act on
something
Before city council
meetings or other
events where there is a
need to do something
Who Activist to activist
What
How
Relation
to table1
Invites people to
participate in
demonstrations, contact
politicians or cast their
vote in a certain way
Group members post
messages on wall
Discredit opponents
Ongoing
Involvement None
Activist to developer,
politicians
Often unprovoked short
comments claiming a
named person or group
are in the wrong
Group members post
messages on wall
Genre Links Greetings/cheers
Where Facebook group wall Facebook group wall
Why
When Ongoing
Who
Inform others about
content posted
elsewhere
Activist to
activist/citizen
Congratulate each other
after victories, raise
morale
When the city council
vote in favor of activists
Activist/citizen to
activists
54
What
How
Relation
to table1
Links to other online
spaces, often
multimedia content
Group members post
messages on wall, often
with a short comment
Dialogue None
Positive comments about
a recent event, or about
the activists’’ work
Group members post
messages on wall
5.2 Public Sphere and Social Capital
The second part of the research question was how these genre
systems contribute to the public sphere. To measure this the
framework of [28] is applied. The framework analyses the public
sphere using Dahlberg’s criteria for a public sphere (see section
2.1), as well as looking for network effects to help spread the
content of the discussion to more people, the type of community
being supported, and the type of public sphere being supported.
As social capital is said to influence who participates in a public
sphere, social capital is also measured using the constructs
mentioned in section 2.2. Together, these constructs helps us to
understand how the communication spaces we are examining
supports a public sphere, and thus how valuable they are in
maintaining democratic ideals.
Table 4: Public sphere characteristics of "old" media
Theory Concept Case observations
Public
sphere
Social
Capital
Dahlberg’s
criteria
Partially present, but participants
are not attempting to understand the
others’ perspective. Debate is fairly
rational and reflective
Network effects Letters are read and distributed to
others, and often answered or
followed up in new letters.
community Readers and writers all belong to
the same local community, some
have regular contact outside of
editorial columns
Type of PS Discourse-based (after some time
more towards political protest)
Bridging Letters are read by both those who
agree with and those who oppose
the author’s position
Bonding Shows others of the same opinion
that they are not alone, helps bring
the community closer together (for
activists. The developer is more on
his own).
Trust &
reciprocity
Maintained
social capital
Is less of an issue in old media, as
there is an editorial middleman who
decides what is printed and not.
Writers address each other by name,
even though they may not meet in

person.
Table 5: Public sphere characteristics of social media
Theory Concept Case observations
Public
sphere
Social
Capital
Dahlberg’s
criteria
Network
effects
Discourse is more one-way and
less argument-based than in the old
media, as there are mainly activists
taking part in these groups.
Postings can be re-posted on the
walls of group members, helping to
spread the ideas presented to a
larger audience.
Community There is a sense of shared
objectives and common interest in
the groups, which help create a
sense of community.
Type of PS Political protest. There are very
few posts disagreeing with the
activists.
Bridging There is little evidence of bridging
social capital. Content seems to
stay within the group. However, it
was not possible to measure the
extent to which content was
reposted on individual’s walls.
Bonding Greetings/cheers genre as well as
the general sense of agreement
contributes to bonding social
capital.
Trust &
reciprocity
Maintained
social capital
Participants in the groups trust
each other, which is natural as long
as there is a common goal
Not easy to measure, but there is
certainly contact and discussion
between the members in the group.
While there are differences between the two genre systems, they
each contribute to the public sphere in their own way. The genre
system of traditional media is perhaps better suited to support a
traditional Habermasian public sphere, where people of different
opinions come together to discuss and debate. Letters printed in
the newspaper are more reflective and argumentative than posts in
social media, and reach a bigger audience than just those who
already agree with the author of the letter or post. However, the
editorial column is only as good as the people writing to it, and
over time the activists view is almost the only one present, making
it less a space for debate and more of a one-way communication
channel.
The genres in social media are less in line with Habermas’
traditional public sphere ideals, but works great to support a
political protest public sphere. Activists and their supporters have
55
a place to meet, where they can discuss, support each other, share
information and maybe recruit new members. And there is also
the added value that some journalists do use social media in their
work, to discover new issues and find new sources. Sometimes
social media gives them ideas for stories they would otherwise not
have written. An informal e-mail survey sent to the journalists in
the local newspaper confirms that this happens.
Also, the network and bridging effects of social media are
potentially a lot stronger. We do not see these effects very
strongly in this particular case, perhaps because the case is
localized to a small geographical area, and mainly concerns the
inhabitants of that area. The users of social media already belong
to the same physical community, which means there is less need
for virtual networking.
6. CONCLUSION AND LIMITATIONS
This paper has examined the genre systems of the letters to the
editor column in traditional print media and in social media, with
the purpose of uncovering differences and similarities between the
two systems, and to measure if social media is beginning to
produce media-specific genres for eParticipation, and what this
means for the public sphere.
The findings indicate that we are beginning to see new genres in
social media, as well as old genres being reinvented to better suit
the functionality of new media. The addition of multimedia
content to existing genres is one example of this. While we cannot
say that social media has matured, we can conclude by saying that
social media is moving ever more towards maturity.
New media has room for a bigger variety of genres than
traditional print media, and their instant feedback allows for a
faster dialogue and more participants. This does however come at
a price. Contributions in social media are often less well thought
through, and not backed up by facts and rational arguments in the
same way as we see in the traditional media. In that sense, the
strength of the new is also its weakness.
In terms of contributing to the public sphere, both genre systems
do that, each in their own way. Traditional media better supports
the Habermasian ideal of rational discourse, while social media is
a good supporter of the political protest public sphere. As the
examined social media groups are so homogenous, there is little
debate going on. Social media does have a place in the wider
“general public sphere”, as a source of information for news
journalists. As tables one through three show, some genres are
better suited than others for those who want to contribute to the
political debate and to gain the attention of politicians. Genres that
accommodate one of the three political objectives could perhaps
be seen to contribute more to the public sphere than genres that do
not address these objectives.
There are some limitations to the findings in this paper. As they
are based on one single case, it is not possible to generalize the
findings outside of the case context. Other cases in different
contexts would perhaps provide very different results. Future
research efforts could include examining how the different genres
should be enacted to support the objectives in table 1, and through
them the public sphere. Also, more research is needed on how the
added functionality of new media can contribute to eParticipation,
if certain media are better suited than others for a given genre, and
what combination of genres and media would be likely to provide

good results for the concrete objectives of various activist
campaigns.
7. REFERENCES
[1] Macintosh, A., A. McKay-Hubbard, and D. Shell, Using
Weblogs to Support Local Democracy, in E-Government:
Towards Electronic Democracy2005. p. 1-12.
[2] Tambouris, E., N. Liotas, and K. Tarabanis, A Framework
for Assessing eParticipation Projects and Tools, in Hawaii
International Conference on System Sciences2007: Hawaii.
[3] Jackson, N.A. and D.G. Lilleker, Building an Architecture of
Participation? Political Parties and Web 2.0 in Britain.
Journal of Information Technology and Politics, 2009. 6(3):
p. 232-250.
[4] Gray, M. and M. Caul, Declining Voter Turnout in Advanced
Industrial Democracies, 1950 to 1997. Comparative Political
Studies, 2000. 33(9): p. 1091-1122.
[5] Østerud, Ø., F. Engelstad, and P. Selle, Makten og
demokratiet. En sluttbok fra makt- og
demokratiutredningen2003, Oslo: Gyldendal akademisk.
344.
[6] Sæbø, Ø., J. Rose, and L. Skiftenes Flak, The shape of
eParticipation: Characterizing an emerging research area.
Government Information Quarterly, 2008. 25(3): p. 400-428.
[7] Brandtzæg, P.B. and M. Lüders, eCitizen 2.0: The Ordinary
Citizen as a Supplier of Public Sector Information, 2008,
Ministry for Government and Administration Reform: Oslo.
[8] Papacharissi, Z., The Virtual Sphere: The Internet as Public
Sphere. New Media and Society, 2002. 4(1): p. 9-27.
[9] Gimmler, A., Deliberative Democracy, the Public Sphere and
the Internet. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2001. 27(4): p.
21-39.
[10] Yates, J. and W.J. Orlikowski, Genres of Organizational
Communication: A Structurational Approach to Studying
Communication and Media. The Academy of Management
Review, 1992. 17(2): p. 299-326.
[11] Orlikowski, W.J. and J. Yates, Genre Repetoire: The
Structuring of Communicative Practices in Organizations.
Administrative Science Quarterly, 1994. 39(4): p. 541-74.
[12] Shepherd, M. and C. Watters. The evolution of cybergenres.
in System Sciences, 1998., Proceedings of the Thirty-First
Hawaii International Conference on. 1998.
[13] Dahlberg, L., The Internet and Democratic Discourse:
Exploring The Prospects of Online Deliberative Forums
Extending the Public Sphere. Information, Communication &
Society, 2001. 4(4): p. 615 - 633.
[14] Habermas, J., The Public Sphere, in Jürgen Habermas on
Society and Politics: A reader, S. Seidman, Editor 1989,
Beacon Press: Boston.
[15] Frazer, E., The Problem of Communitarian Politics. Unity
and Conflict1999, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[16] Castells, M., The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society,
Communication Networks, and Global Governance. The
56
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, 2008. 616(1): p. 78-93.
[17] Merriman, J., A history of modern Europe: From the French
Revolution to the Present. Vol. 2. 1996, New York: W.W
Norton & Company.
[18] Habermas, J., The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeoise
society1991, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
[19] Webster, F., Information Management and Manipulation:
Jürgen Habermas and the Decline of the Public Sphere, in
Theories of the Information Society1995, Routledge:
London.
[20] Dahlgren, P., The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political
Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation. Political
Communication, 2005. 22: p. 147-162.
[21] Poster, M., Cyberdemocracy: The Internet and the Public
Sphere, in Internet Culture, D. Porter, Editor 1997,
Routledge: New York/London.
[22] Gibson, R.K., W. Lusoli, and S. Ward, Online Participation
in the UK: Testing a ‘Contextualised’ Model of Internet
Effects1. The British Journal of Politics & International
Relations, 2005. 7(4): p. 561-583.
[23] Tewksbury, D., The Seeds of Audience Fragmentation:
Specialization in the Use of Online News Sites. Journal of
Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 2005. 49(3): p. 332-348.
[24] Calhoun, C., Community without Propinquity Revisited:
Communications Technology and the Transformation of the
Urban Public Sphere. Sociological Inquiry, 1998. 68(3): p.
373-397.
[25] Muhlberger, P., Human Agency and the Revitalization of the
Public Sphere. Political Communication, 2005. 22(2): p. 163-
178.
[26] Habermas, J., Political Communication in Media Society:
Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The
Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research1.
Communication Theory, 2006. 16(4): p. 411-426.
[27] Trenz, H. and K. Eder, The Democratizing Dynamics of a
European Public Sphere. European Journal of Social Theory,
2004. 7(1): p. 5-25.
[28] Johannessen, M.R., Social Capital and the Networked Public
Sphere: Implications for Political Social Media sites, in The
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
(HICSS-45)2012: Maui, Hawaii, USA.
[29] Putnam, R.D., Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of
American Community2000, New York: Simon & Schuster.
[30] Svendsen, G.T. and G.L.H. Svendsen, Social Kapital - en
introduktion2006, København: Hans Reitzels Forlag.
[31] Ahuja, S., M.A. Pèrez-Quiñones, and A. Kavanaugh, Local
conversations 2.0, in Proceedings of the 10th Annual
International Conference on Digital Government Research:
Social Networks: Making Connections between Citizens,
Data and Government2009, Digital Government Society of
North America.

[32] Yang, S., H. Lee, and S. Kurnia, Social Capital in
Information and Communications Technology Research:
Past, Present and Future. Communications of the Association
for Information Systems, 2009. 25: p. 183-221.
[33] Ellison, N.B., C. Steinfield, and C. Lampe, The Benefits of
Facebook “Friends:” Social Capital and College Students’
Use of Online Social Network Sites. Journal of Computer-
Mediated Communication, 2007. 12(4): p. 1143-1168.
[34] Pasek, J., E. More, and D. Romer, Realizing the Social
Internet? Online Social Networking meets Offline Civic
Engagement. Journal of Information Technology & Politics,
2009. 6(3&4): p. 197-215.
[35] Turnšek, M., “The Digital Youth Revolt?” Young People and
eParticipation, in Understanding eParticipation:
Contemporary PhD eParticipation research in Europe, A.
Avdic, et al., Editors. 2008, Örebro University Library:
Örebro.
[36] Päivärinta, T. and Ø. Sæbø, The Genre System Lens on E-
Democracy. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems,
2008. 20(2).
[37] Sæbø, Ø., Understanding Twitter Use among Parliament
Representatives: A Genre Analysis, in Electronic
Participation, E. Tambouris, A. Macintosh, and H. de Bruijn,
Editors. 2011, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg. p. 1-12.
[38] Sæbø, Ø. and T. Päivârinta, Autopoietic cybergenres for e-
Democracy? Genre analysis of a web-based discussion
board, in Hawaii International Conference on System
Sciences2005.
57
[39] Johannessen, M., Genres of Participation in Social
Networking Systems: A Study of the 2009 Norwegian
Parliamentary Election, in Electronic Participation, E.
Tambouris, A. Macintosh, and O. Glassey, Editors. 2010,
Springer Berlin / Heidelberg. p. 104-114.
[40] Yoshioka, T., et al., Genre taxonomy: A knowledge
repository of communicative actions. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst.,
2001. 19(4): p. 431-456.
[41] Yates, J. and W. Orlikowski, Genre Systems: Structuring
Interaction through Communicative Norms. Journal of
Business Communication, 2002. 39(1): p. 13-35.
[42] Kaplan, B. and J. Maxwell, Evaluating the Organizational
Impact of Healthcare Information Systems, in Qualitative
Research Methods for Evaluating Computer Information
Systems, J. Anderson and C. Aydin, Editors. 2005, Springer
New York. p. 30-55.
[43] Marshall, C. and G. Rossman, Designing Qualitative
Researh: 3rd Edition1999, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
[44] Benbasat, I., D.K. Goldstein, and M. Mead, The Case
Research Strategy in Studies of Information Systems. MIS
Quarterly, 1987. 11(3): p. 369-386.
[45] Cresswell, J.W., Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative,
and Mixed Methods approach2009, Los Angeles: Sage.
[46] Walsham, G., Doing interpretive research. European Journal
of Information Systems, 2006. 15(3): p. 320-330.

Internet voting: fatally torn between conflicting goals?
Marco Prandini
Università di Bologna
Viale del Risorgimento, 2
40136 Bologna, Italy
Tel. +39 05120 93867
marco.prandini@unibo.it
ABSTRACT
More than a decade after the first enthusiastic attempts at
deploying Internet voting, there is still only a single case of
continued adoption for the election of a political body. In this
paper we illustrate the motivations behind the apparent failure of a
process that, at a first sight, looks desirable for many reasons. We
analyze the most relevant efforts in the field, which can be
grouped in two main lines: those grounded on a strong formal
foundation, and those designed to achieve maximum participation.
From the analysis, we derive a set of desirable features, classify
the systems according to their ability to achieve them, and
conclude that no system is currently able to strike a convincingly
positive balance between them.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
C.2.0 [Computer-communication networks]: General-security
and protection; H.5.4 [Information interfaces and
presentation]: Hypertext/Hypermedia-user issues; K.4.1
[Computers and society]: Public Policy Issues-regulation; K.6.5
[Management of computing and information systems]:
Security and Protection-invasive software
General Terms
Security, Verification.
Keywords
Internet voting, security, privacy e-democracy.
1. INTRODUCTION
From the first appearance of democracies, there has been a
constant evolution of the voting processes, to cope with the
growth of the voting base without sacrificing its characteristics of
accuracy, privacy and accessibility. While in the beginning it was
deemed appropriate to openly express one's own will by raising a
hand, nowadays complex devices have appeared to ensure fair and
efficient collection of large numbers of ballots, possibly
containing votes about many different topics, and their tallying
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
58
Marco Ramilli
Università di Bologna
Via Venezia, 52
47521 Cesena, Italy
Tel. +39 05120 93867
marco.ramilli@unibo.it
according to various kinds of algorithms. Quite obviously, the
latest steps of this evolutionary process involve the usage of
computers and of the Internet.
Electronic voting machines and automatic tallying workstations
took over manual/mechanical casting and tallying procedures,
with the main goal of speeding up the whole voting process and
making it less error-prone. The results were mixed. Twenty years
ago the determination of an election result would take up to a few
days, and the procedures for the verification of contested results
were even slower (and arguably reliable). Nowadays computerbased
systems make it possible to compute the results almost in
real time. Reliability did not see the same improvement, because
there is an intrinsic disadvantage of computer-based systems when
compared to traditional ones: computers inevitably process ballots
in a way that cannot be kept under the voter's control.
Consequently, the voter is forced to surrender a significant part of
his trust in the voting system to the organizational apparatus that
runs the election (the electoral body hereinafter).
In order to face this responsibility, the electoral bodies started to
develop technical and organizational standards for the verification
of standalone computerized voting machines. They had not
finished settling on truly comprehensive procedures, when one
more paradigm shift was proposed towards the building of an
Internet-based voting system. Internet voting is supposed to
exhibit many advantages, especially in terms of accessibility, but
it pushes the control over the correct behavior of the process
farther away from the voter, and from the bodies that run the
election as well.
In this paper, we start by summarizing the foundational works
about Internet voting and then proceed to quickly illustrate three
Internet voting systems, which serve as valid representatives for
different conceptual approaches to the subject. We discuss their
relative merits and issues, before drawing conclusions.
2. AN OUTLINE OF INTERNET VOTING
At the very beginning of the past decade, Internet voting was
beginning to draw interest as a platform for binding, large scale
elections. The first structured analysis of the characteristics of
Internet voting is presented in the final report [5] of the California
Internet Voting Task Force (IVTF), which was convened by the
Secretary of State to study the feasibility of using the Internet to
conduct elections in California, and included more than two dozen
experts in the field of data security, elections and voter
participation.

In March 2000, just a couple of months after the release of the
IVTF report, the presidential preference primary of the Arizona
Democratic party provided a real test case, as the first legally
binding political election to offer voters the possibility to cast
their ballots from the location of their choice. The experience is
well documented in a “pro vs. con”' face-to-face paper where Joe
Mohen and Julia Glidden [16] described the most significant
advantages of voting over the Internet, experienced firsthand as
they actually ran the election on election.com, whereas Deborah
M. Phillips and Hans A. von Spakovsky [19] played the
counterpoint by outlining the few but deeply worrying issues that
arose, mainly due to the insecurity of computer-based systems.
2.1 The Pros
“Universal Access” plays the main role in the list of the Internet
voting advantages. In its simplest acception, universal access is
the possibility to vote from every connected place, during an
extended period, but it has more important aspects than freedom
from lines at the polling station. It makes possible for people with
disabilities to have specific tools tailored to their needs and
enabling them to cast their votes. It allows people living far from
city centers, without cars or any public transport, to reach the
ballot box in a few clicks. These enfranchisement opportunities
are also seen as a way to stimulate participation in countries
where the voters turnout is low.
Economic advantages appear to be obvious with the adoption
Internet voting systems. Indeed Internet voting could eliminate the
need to set up many polling places, to print paper ballots in the
millions, or to organize committees spread all over the country to
direct and to monitor the elections. Internet voting is much
cheaper, quicker and easier to protect from traditional threats such
as physical security of the polling places and of the ballots.
Multi-cultural countries would enjoy the possibility of easily
designing multilingual ballots, so that voters not familiar with the
official language could vote using on their native language. Voters
who cannot read could exploit text-to-speech libraries and be
guided to the expression of their vote by a voice. Finally, Internet
voting systems are especially convenient for the first and foremost
group of citizen which they were originally thought for: overseas
residents, such as military or diplomats who must be outside their
country for job reasons [9].
2.2 The Cons
The issues with Internet voting are both of technical and of social
nature. On the technical side, when compared to electronic voting
solutions based on polling stations, there are three aspects that
make security problems of Internet voting stand out. First, there is
no real possibility of assessing the integrity of voters' terminals.
Injected malware could manipulate the voter's ballot without
being detected. Second, some of the control exercised over the
voting process is shifted to the central processing facilities that
collect votes and count them. The opportunity to curb illicit
manipulation is pushed farther away from the voters and their
representatives, traditionally monitoring the polling places. The
network that connects these two ends is itself subject to attacks.
While cryptography can protect the integrity and privacy of the
transmitted ballots, there is not much that can be done against
denial-of-service attacks, which flood the network preventing the
system to work at all.
59
Also on the social side, at least three issues arise. The first derives
from the disappearing physical protection provided by the polling
place. It is very difficult to prevent voters casting ballots on their
personal computers from getting (or be forced to get) proofs of
what/who they voted for. This could exacerbate phenomena such
as vote selling, “family votes”, and coerced voting. The second
issue regards universal access. While at a first glance the Internet
would appear as an equalizing medium, in reality the most
disadvantaged parts of the population would probably be less
capable of using an advanced system than they are of
understanding traditional ballots, provided they can access a
computer and a network connection at all. Third, some
experiences lead to think that voter's turnout is not increased by
the convenience of the system. In certain cases it was even
lowered, possibly by the feeling that the election was nothing
more than another Internet gadget instead of an important
occasion to meet, discuss, and form a political opinion.
2.3 Three Approaches to Internet Voting
We are interested in comparing projects which have very different
origins, and correspondingly different approaches to security.
Remotegrity [6] was born in the academia to integrate formal
security proof of ballot handling correctness. It is an absentee
voting system implemented at the George Washington University,
which allows to choose among multiple voting methods. Used
during the 2011 election in Takoma Park, Maryland, Remotegrity
gave the citizen the ability to independently verify that their votes
had been correctly recorded without revealing how they voted.
This property is referred to as “end to end (E2E) verifiability”,
and it is built on the Scantegrity [7] system.
Helios [1] was developed by the initiative of a no-profit
organization (http://heliosvoting.org/) focused on the voters right
to control their votes. It has been used in many elections; the
website claims more than 25,000 votes cast at the time we are
writing. Helios defines a stronger concept of verifiability than
Remotegrity does: it gives the ability to verify if a vote has been
correctly counted for in the election results, not simply correctly
recorded. Helios calls this property “true verifiability”.
The Estonian voting system [10] was “built to work” by the
government. Estonia is not the only country having evaluated
Internet voting for politically relevant elections, yet it can
certainly represent the whole category of government-sponsored
Internet voting systems, having the longest history of
development and usage of such systems. Moreover, comparative
analyses show many similarities with other nations' alternatives
[23, 11, 21]. The Estonian Internet voting system is meant to
supplement the traditional methods of voting. Voters can vote on
their computer/smart-card-based systems or mobile phones, but
also override the votes cast on these systems by voting at the
polling station.
2.4 Evaluation of the Existing Systems
The discussion in sections 2.1 and 2.2 allows to list a set of
positive features and advantages that Internet voting systems
should exhibit, and a set of problems and drawbacks that Internet
voting systems should avoid to introduce. We measure how well
the aforementioned systems perform with respect to these sets in
Table 1.

Expected pros
Possible cons
Location- and timeindependent
Multimedia /
multilanguage
Economy
Technological
discrimination
Security issues -
client side infections
Security issues -
server side
manipulation
Security issues -
denial of service
Privacy - vote
selling
Privacy - coercion
Table 1. Internet voting measured against the desired advantages and possible disadvantages
3. DISCUSSION
More than a decade ago, a few but significant security problems
related to the infrastructure backed the criticism of Internet voting.
Now, the same problems have been all but solved in a convincing
way. Motivated attackers can disenfranchise voters by means of
DDoS campaigns. Viruses infecting the I/O interface of voters'
computers enable large-scale alterations or privacy breaches no
matter how sophisticated the voting protocol is. From a
conceptual viewpoint, most of these issues can be addressed and
solved as technology advances, but the experience teaches us that
even in strictly controlled environments there is a significant
margin for errors in design and implementation. The road towards
effective conformance testing of voting machines installed in
polling places has been long. It went through deep review of
systems initially adopted without a transparent process
guaranteeing their security [12, 4, 17]. It led to ample public
discussions in the U.S.A [24, 3] as well as in the European Union
[15] that were incorporated in the track for defining public
standards [22, 8]. Still, there is ample margin for enhancements
[13, 18, 20]. Thinking that the same level of security can be
attained in uncontrolled user computers is unrealistic.
There are examples of formally-designed systems, like Helios and
Remotegrity, that allow voters to detect manipulations. They
neutralize the effect of successful attacks against any component
of the chain leading from the voter's intention to the tallied ballot.
They failed, until now, to achieve widespread acceptance,
possibly because their principles are too complex, or because
there is no authoritative political body pushing for their adoption.
The Estonian case is the exact opposite. The unquestionable
success of the parliament elections appears to be strongly tied not
to the solution of the mentioned issues, but rather to the social
context. Estonians are (rightly) proud of the technological
advances that enable such a small nation to achieve self-
Remotegrity Helios Estonian
Almost completely
(paper-based credentials)
Almost (constrained by the
paper alternative)
Costly (web + mail + polling
places)
No (browser based +
traditional alternatives)
Manipulation can be
detected
Manipulation can be
detected
Possible, especially serious
in the verification phase
Possible but very hard
Possible (subtraction of
authentication pack)
60
Completely
(browser based)
Completely
Optimal (web
only)
Somewhat, no
alternatives to the
Internet
Malware can
sniff votes
Manipulation can
be detected
Possible
Malware can
sniff votes
Possible (in
presence)
sustainability 1 . They gladly accept the word of their government
as regards the security of the voting process, rather than asking for
a process that would enable them to verify the correctness of the
election themselves. The government reinforced this orientation
by designing a system that can be more or less understood by a
large part of the population. In this scenario, proposing
enhancements that make the system slightly harder to understand
but much more secure could have a counter-intuitive effect of
lowering trust. So, trust is where apparently there are less reasons
for it to be; however, the fact that the whole Estonian egovernment
infrastructure was held captive under a DDoS [14]
should be a clear reminder that even the most proactive and
involved player cannot always defeat its opponents.
Moreover, Internet voting is affected by some fundamental issues
that technology cannot completely address. Often, trust in the
system would require the simultaneous satisfaction of
contradicting requirements. Systematic coercion perpetrated
through infected computers can be mitigated by allowing
overwriting of votes, but maintaining both Internet- and paperbased
systems in parallel operation causes confusion and defeats
the economic purpose of Internet voting. Vote selling is enabled,
albeit with different severity, by the same receipts that allow
verifiability and are needed to secure the process end-to-end.
Innovative technological components like the Trusted Platform
Module could greatly increase the robustness of voting clients, but
at the same time introduce new system requirements that limit the
concept of universal access. Solutions at the state of the art could
further aggravate the discrimination of the weakest groups of
citizens, who already suffer digital divide for real,
notwithstanding the false perception that as new generations enter
1 In the words of their president:
http://valits.us/icegov2011keynote
Almost completely (tied to
ID card or GSM coverage)
Almost (constrained by the
paper alternative)
Costly (web + phone +
polling places)
Traditional alternatives, but
special devices needed for
remote voting
Malware can hijack GUI
Valid votes can be
discarderd, fake votes added
Possible
Very hard (votes can be
overwritten later)
Possible (in presence or
through hijacked GUI)

society the gap will close [2]. The most intractable issue however
is the lack of privacy and protection the polling place gives to
voters. Some Norwegian politicians have referred to “family
voting” as a reason to abandon Internet voting altogether [11].
In conclusion, it is our opinion that after a decade of
experimentation Internet voting is not ready for large scale
deployment yet. The different experiences presented in this paper
prove the strong desire to devise solutions to the main problems.
End-to-end verifiable ballots represent a key step towards
independence from “absolute” security of every component of the
voting chain. Significant real-world use cases like Estonian
elections help bridging the gap between technology and citizens.
Whether the combination of these two driving forces will be
successful in producing really trustworthy systems, and in
advancing awareness enough for people to properly use them, it is
still very hard to foresee.
4. REFERENCES
[1] B. Adida. Helios: web-based open-audit voting. In SS'08:
Proceedings of the 17th conference on Security symposium,
pages 335-348, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2008. USENIX
Association.
[2] F. Belanger and L. Carter. The digital divide and internet
voting acceptance. In Digital Society, 2010. ICDS '10. Fourth
International Conference on, pages 307-310, Feb. 2010.
[3] H. S. Berger. Testimony concerning the TGDC 2007 draft
revision of the voluntary voting system guidelines. Mar. 17,
2008.
[4] Bishop, M., Blaze, M., Vigna, G., et al.,. University of
California red team reports on voting systems, 2007.
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections vsr.htm.
[5] California Internet Voting Task Force (California Secretary of
State). A report on the feasibility of internet voting, Jan 2000.
http://www.ss.ca.gov/executive/ivote.
[6] R. Carback, D. Chaum, J. Clark, J. Conway, A. Essex, P. S.
Herrnson, T. Mayberry, S. Popoveniuc, R. L. Rivest, E. Shen,
A. T. Sherman, and P. L. Vora. Scantegrity II municipal
election at Takoma Park: The first e2e binding governmental
election with ballot privacy. In USENIX Security Symposium,
pages 291-306. USENIX Association, 2010.
[7] D. Chaum, A. Essex, R. Carback, J. Clark, S. Popoveniuc, A.
Sherman, and P. Vora. Scantegrity: End-to-end voter-verifiable
optical-scan voting. Security & Privacy, IEEE, 6(3):40-46,
May-June 2008.
[8] Council of Europe. Recommendation Rec (2004) 11. Council of
Europe, 2004.
[9] Federal Voting Assistance Program. The uniformed and
overseas citizens absentee voting act overview.
http://www.fvap.gov/reference/laws/uocava.html.
[10] S. Heiberg, P. Laud, and J. Willemson. The application of ivoting
for Estonian parliamentary elections of 2011. In
Proceedings of the Third VOTE-ID International Conference,
Sep. 2011.
61
[11] K. Hole and L. Nestas. Building and maintaining trust in
internet voting. Computer, PP(99):1, 2012.
[12] D. Jefferson, A. D. Rubin, B. Simons, and D. Wagner.
Security Analysis of the Secure Electronic Registration and
Voting Experiment (SERVE). Aug. 2004.
[13] R. Krimmer, S. Triessnig, and M. Volkamer. The
development of remote e-voting around the world: a review
of roads and directions. In Proceedings of the 1 st
International Conference on E-voting and Identity, VOTE-
ID'07, pages 1-15, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007. Springer-
Verlag.
[14] M. Lesk. The new front line: Estonia under cyberassault.
Security & Privacy, IEEE, 5(4):76-79, July-Aug. 2007.
[15] M. McGaley and J. P. Gibson. A critical analysis of the
Council of Europe recommendations on e-voting. In
Proceedings of the 2006 USENIX/Accurate Electronic Voting
Technology Workshop, 2006.
[16] J. Mohen and J. Glidden. The case for internet voting.
Commun. ACM, 44(1):72-85, Jan. 2001.
[17] H. Pardue, A. Yasinsac, and J. Landry. Towards internet
voting security: A threat tree for risk assessment. In Risks
and Security of Internet and Systems (CRiSIS), 2010 Fifth
International Conference on, pages 1-7, Oct. 2010.
[18] S. Peisert, M. Bishop, and A. Yasinsac. Vote selling, voter
anonymity, and forensic logging of electronic voting
machines. In HICSS, pages 1-10. IEEE Computer Society,
2009.
[19] D. M. Phillips and H. A. von Spakovsky. Gauging the risks
of internet elections. Commun. ACM, 44(1):73-85, Jan. 2001.
[20] M. Prandini and M. Ramilli. Taking the best of both worlds:
A comparison and integration of the U.S. and EU approaches
to e-voting systems evaluation. In HICSS, pages 1-10. IEEE
Computer Society, 2011.
[21] G. Schryen and E. Rich. Security in large-scale internet
elections: A retrospective analysis of elections in Estonia,
The Netherlands, and Switzerland. Information Forensics
and Security, IEEE Transactions on, 4(4):729-744, Dec.
2009.
[22] Technical Guidelines Development Committee, editor.
Voluntary Voting System Guidelines Recommendations to the
Election Assistance Commission. U.S. Election Assistance
Commission, Aug. 2007.
[23] M. Volkamer, O. Spycher, and E. Dubuis. Measures to
establish trust in internet voting. In Proceedings of the 5 th
International Conference on Theory and Practice of
Electronic Governance, ICEGOV '11, pages 1-10, New York,
NY, USA, 2011. ACM.
[24] D. Wagner. Joint hearing of the house committee on science
and the committee on house administration. Testimony on
voting system standards. July 19, 2006.

Session 3
Policies 1

A New Roadmap for Next-Generation Policy-Making
Francesco Mureddu
Tech4i2 Ltd, UK
43B Mill Road, Leicester, UK
francesco.mureddu@tech4i2.com
Gianluca Misuraca
European Commission, JRC IPTS
C/ Inca Garcilaso, 3 - Seville, Spain
gianluca.misuraca@ec.europa.eu
ABSTRACT
In the last thirty years the role of the government has moved
consistently away from services provision to regulation. Society
and economy has become more interconnected, unstable and
unpredictable than ever, and citizens are keener to engage in
complex policy making. Within this context, traditional tools for
policy making, based upon the perfectly rational representative
agent maximizing its own utility in a general equilibrium
framework, have been demonstrated to be unable to predict and
cope with some of today’s most pressing challenges, such as the
financial crisis and climate change. Despite the explosion of data
availability, the possibility to analyse them through
crowdsourcing and large scale collaboration, the advance in
modelling and simulation tools for assessing non-linear impact of
policy options, the full potential offered by the new instruments
for policy making has yet to be achieved. Therefore policy makers
have not yet at their disposal a set of instruments able to cope with
the needs stemming from their decision making activities.
In order to meet those needs the project CROSSOVER “Bridging
Communities for Next Generation Policy-Making” is elaborating
a demand/driven “International Research Roadmap on ICT tools
for Governance and Policy Modelling”, which links the needs and
the activities of policy-making with current and future research
challenges.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
I.6.0 Simulation and Modeling - General
General Terms
Management, Measurement, Performance, Economics
Keywords
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
62
David Osimo
Tech4i2 Ltd, UK
43B Mill Road, Leicester, UK
david.osimo@tech4i2.com
Stefano Armenia
Sapienza University of Rome CATTID
P.le Aldo Moro, 5 - 00185 Rome, Italy
armenia@cattid.uniroma1.it
Governance Analysis and Evaluation, Policy Making 2.0,
Modelling and Simulation, System Dynamics, ICT Tools,
Stakeholders’ Engagement
INTRODUCTION
The role of the government in the last century has not decreased
as the common wisdom would suggest. In fact it has increased
until the end of the ‘70s, and remained stable for the following 30
years. However, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system
together with its associated Keynesian policies marked the switch
from a service provision role of the government towards a
regulatory one, often in novel areas such as environment,
telecommunications and technology [20]. As we will see, as
governments are much more involved in “steering” than in
“rowing”, today more than ever the role of the policy maker has
become difficult due to new challenges. Nowadays, society and
economy are more interconnected, unstable and unpredictable
than they have ever been. As pointed out by [25], we live in the
age of “Extremistan”, a world of “tipping points” [23], “cascades”
and “power laws” [4], where extreme events are “the new normal”
[12].
The policy issues of our age can be addressed only through the
collaboration of all the components of the society, including the
private sector and individual citizens [11]. In fact only changes in
the daily behaviour of citizens can help to tackle challenges such
as climate change, consumable resources and sustainability of the
health system. As clarified by the UK Prime Minister, David
Cameron, "the success of the Big Society will depend on the daily
decisions of millions of people" 1 .
In addition citizens are more than ever willing to engage in
complex policy decision making according to the emergence of
the "Gov 2.0 paradigm" offering new opportunities to enter into
data production, analysis and decision-making. On the other hand
this participation is often fruitless as it is limited to conversations
on social networks, blogs and twitter and a real impact has been
achieved only in specific, highly advertised cases that led to a
massive mobilisation. Moreover the participation seems to be
limited to individuals highly interested and motivated in policy
issues. Finally, seldom the human nature is able to take into
account the long-term impact of our choices, as short-term
impacts are more predictable and visible [16]. However, in an
1 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12443396

interconnected, unstable and unpredictable world the long-term
impact of the policy choices might have unintended
consequences.
In this view, traditional policy-making tools are flawed as they
assume an abstract and unrealistic human being: perfectly rational
(utility maximizing), consistent (not heterogeneous), atomised
(not connected through networks), wise (thinking long-term) and
politically committed. In fact most of the current policy modelling
and simulation practices are rooted on traditional mathematical
models, linear econometric tools or dynamic stochastic general
equilibrium models, based upon the perfectly rational
representative agent maximizing its own utility in a general
equilibrium framework. As shown by [18], all these tools may not
be consistent when applied in the public policy context.
At any rate, today we see the possibility of an ICT-enabled policymaking
model taking full account of the complexity of human
nature. There is a number of social modelling and simulation tools
already available, buy they are built for ad-hoc purposes and
suffer a lack of scalability. In fact there is a tendency to reinvent
and develop “own” models and simulation tools so that adoption
of a policy modelling approach still demands a lot of resources
preventing returns to scale to be fully enjoyed [5][6].
Nevertheless there are several main trends impacting the current
and future policy making: the explosion of data availability given
by the open government data movement and the data provided by
sensors and citizens, the growth of research dedicated to analyzing
those data through crowdsourcing and large scale collaboration,
the improvement of modeling and simulation tools assessing the
possible non-linear impact of policy options. These trends clarify
the need for the next generation of policy making models.
To this end, the CROSSOVER “Bridging Communities for Next-
Generation Policy-Making”, which is a Coordination and Support
Action (FP7-ICT-2011-7, No. 288828) financed by the European
Commission under the objective ICT-7-5.6 – “ICT Solutions for
governance and policy modeling” aims to:
o Bring together and reinforce the links between the different
global communities of researchers and experts by animating
knowledge exchange across communities of practice.
o Reach out and raise the awareness of non-experts and
potential users, with special regard to high-level policymakers.
o Establish the scientific and political basis for long-lasting
interest and commitment to next generation policy-making,
by focusing on a demand-driven approach, involving policymakers
and defining a collaborative stakeholders’
sustainability plan.
More in particular the CROSSOVER project is elaborating a new
International Research Roadmap on ICT Tools for Governance
and Policy Modelling, which aims to provide a clear outline of
what technologies are available now for policy-makers to improve
their work, and what could become available tomorrow. The
roadmap has a demand-driven approach: rather than focusing on
the technology, it starts from the needs and the activities of
policy-making and then links to the current and future research
challenges.
63
The project builds on the CROSSROAD 2 model 3 and roadmap 4
with the aim to reach a stronger focus on policy modelling. More
precisely CROSSOVER focuses on two Grand Challenges (GC),
already part of the CROSSROAD roadmap, which are more in
line with the current workprogramme priorities: GC1 - Policy
Modelling and GC2 – Data-powered Collaborative Governance.
Each Grand Challenge embeds a number of research challenges in
governance and policy modelling.
The aim of this paper is therefore to present the new research
roadmap on ICT Tools for Governance and Policy Modelling
aimed at providing an outline of what technologies are and will be
available to meet the needs of policy-makers. The structure of the
paper continues as follows. Section 2 identifies the methodology
applied for this research. Section 3 describes the research
roadmap. Finally section 4 offers some conclusions and future
research directions.
METHODOLOGY
The roadmap is being developed by the means of desk-based
review (e.g. literature review and meta analysis), discussion and
interviews with experts, and crowdsourcing 5 . More in particular
we define a technology roadmapping exercise, which is a strategic
planning approach to identify the actions and funding decisions
needed to boost technological development and innovation. The
term “roadmap” refers to the main purpose of this approach, i.e. to
chart an overall direction for technology development or usage
[7].
On the one hand the roadmap constitutes a shared vision, able to
inspire collaborative and interdisciplinary research, and between
academia, business, civil society and government. On the other
hand it is a useful tool, able to provide support and orientation to
policy-modelling also after the end of the project. The potential of
roadmapping is significant in the domain of ICT for governance
and policy modelling as it can constitute an important input in the
selection of future research priorities by highlighting the emerging
themes and key technological applications (ICT tools) likely to
impact on policy in the coming years. Furthermore roadmapping
is one of the “recommended best practices” for the selection of
priorities in R&D programmes since it does not only identify the
bottlenecks that need to be addressed within a realistic time frame,
but it can also lead to a high degree of consensus if potential
beneficiaries are involved in the agenda-setting process [17].
THE RESEARCH ROADMAP
As mentioned above, the new International Research Roadmap on
ICT Tools for Governance and Policy Modelling builds on the
previous CROSSROADS roadmap. However the new exercise
represents an improvement in many respects. First, the roadmap is
built following a demand-driven approach: rather than focusing
exclusively on technology, the present roadmap starts from the
2 CROSSROAD - A Participative Roadmap for ICT research on
Electronic Governance and Policy Modelling www.crossroad-eu.net
3 For a presentation of the CROSSROAD model of ICT for governance
and policy modelling please refer to Osimo et al. (2010)
4 For the CROSSROAD white paper and research roadmap please refer to:
http://crossroad.epu.ntua.gr/files/2010/02/CROSSROAD-
State_of_the_Art_Analysis-White_Paperv1.00.pdf
5 The roadmap in commentable format has been published in the project
website and has been disseminated through the http://www.crossoverproject.eu/UserSurvey.aspx

needs and the activities of policy-making and then links to the
research challenges. In fact on the one hand each research
challenge has a direct correspondence to a benefit stemming from
policy making 2.0 tools (i.e. what need does the methodology and
ICT tool address), such as:
o Detect and understand problems before they become
unsolvable
o Generate high involvement of citizens in policy-making
o Identify “good ideas” and innovative solutions
o Reduce uncertainty on the possible impacts of policies
o Encourage behavioural change and uptake
o Detect non-compliance and mis-spending
o Understand the impact of policies
On the other hand each research challenge is explicitly linked to a
traditional activity of policy-making, based on the conventional
policy-making cycle:
o Agenda setting: basic analysis on the nature and size of
problems at stakes are addressed, including the causal
relationships between the different factors
o Policy design: development of the possible solutions, the
analysis of the potential impact of these solutions, the
development and revision of a policy proposal
o Adoption: this is the most delicate and sensitive area, where
accountability and representativeness are needed. It is also
the area most covered by existing research on e-democracy
o Implementation: often considered the most challenging
phase, as it needs to translate the policy objectives in
concrete activities, that have to deal with the complexity of
the real world. It includes ensuring a broader understanding,
the change of behaviour and the active collaboration of all
stakeholders.
o Monitoring and evaluation: make use of implementation
data to assess whether the policy is being implemented as
planned, and is achieving the expected objectives.
Second, in CROSSOVER, more emphasis is put on cases and
applications: each research challenged is enriched with inspiring
cases bearing a global perspective. Furthermore the new roadmap
bears a stronger focus on ICT for Governance and Policy-
Modelling, by dropping more peripheral grand challenges of
Government Service Utility and Scientific Base for ICT-enabled
Governance 6 . Finally, the project is elaborating a “living”
roadmap, accompanied by an online repository of tools, people
and applications.
Let us now describe the two Grand Challenges composing the
roadmap.
The GC1 - Policy Modelling concerns the development of tools
and methodologies able to design an efficient and effective
decision making process, capable of detecting emergencies,
anticipate future events and evaluate the impact of different policy
choices. Furthermore GC1 fosters the engagement of the
stakeholders in models building and in the evaluation and
simulation of policy making.
The GC2 – Data Powered Collaborative Governance is related
6 On this see CROSSROAD, 2012.
64
to the fact that the current citizen participation scene is
characterised by an engagement of highly committed people only,
and by an involvement that rarely stimulates genuine action.
However there are several complementary research areas in ICT
for governance and policy modelling that have the opportunity to
address the need for collaboration and behavioural change
throughout different technological layers: enhanced data
availability through public linked data and participatory sensing,
analytical capability through opinion mining and visual analytics,
and action-oriented tools such as simulation and serious gaming.
These trends mutually reinforce each other to offer a new
opportunity for future ICT for governance and policy modelling.
For each Grand Challenge the roadmap describes a number of
research challenges highlighting their definition, the potential
opportunities for governance, the state of the art of market and
research, the existing challenges/gaps, the recommended research
themes and most importantly the inspiring application cases.
GC1 encompasses the following research endeavors:
o Systems of Atomized Models
o Collaborative modelling
o Easy access to information and knowledge creation
o Model validation
o Interactive simulation
o Output analysis and knowledge synthesis
On the other hand GC2 encompasses the following research
challenges:
o Big Data
o Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis
o Visual Analytics
o Serious Gaming for Behavioural Change
o Open Government Data
o Collaborative Governance
o Participatory Sensing
o Identity Management
CONCLUSIONS: CLOSING THE LOOP OF
POLICY-MAKING
The last 30 years witnessed a change in the government role, from
services provider to mere regulator. At the same time the role of
the policy makers became increasingly difficult. This because, as
[25] points out, we live in the age of "Extremistan", a world in
which society and economy are more than ever interconnected,
unstable and unpredictable. This extreme instability takes place
not only in negative forms such as the financial crisis and the
global warming but also in positive development, such as the
continuous emergence of new players and business models on the
market. Unfortunately the current tools available for policy
design, implementation and evaluation are not suitable for
capturing this complex and interconnected nature. The cause of
this may be found in the fact that current tools are rooted on
traditional mathematical models (rational expectations), linear
econometric tools or dynamic stochastic general equilibrium
models.
Alternative tools, based on complexity science and enabled by the
explosion of data availability, are yet to be widely adopted. To
support policy makers in meeting the challenges of implementing
more appropriate tools for policy-making, the CROSSOVER

project is elaborating an updated version of the “International
Research Roadmap on ICT tools for Governance and Policy
Modelling”, initially designed as part of the CROSSROAD's
project in 2010.
As for the partial results of our exercise, on the one hand we
designed the research challenges in relation to specific needs of
the policy makers. For instance: systems of atomized models and
model validation are related to early detection and understanding
of problems; collaborative modelling and visual analytics are
related to generating high involvement of citizens; immersive
simulation is related to reducing the uncertainty on the possible
impacts of policies; opinion mining is related to the need of
identify “good ideas” and innovative solutions; and finally open
data is related to the need of detecting non-compliance and misspending,
as well as to understanding the impact of policies.
On the other hand we were able to connect the research challenges
to specific phases of the policy cycle:
o Agenda setting: in this phase take place the identification and
analysis of problem. Within this scope, visualization and
opinion mining can help to identify the problems at an early
stage, while advanced modelling techniques are used to
disentangle the casual relationships behind the problem as
well as to understand the causal roots that need to be
addressed by policy
o Policy design: on one side immersive simulations support
decision-makers by taking into account unexpected impacts
and relationships, in order to facilitate the choice of the most
effective option. On the other side collaborative governance
enables then to develop further and fine-tune the most
effective option, for example through commentable
documents
o Policy implementation: social network analysis,
crowdsourcing and serious gaming ensure awareness, buy-in
and collaboration from the widest range of stakeholders
o Monitoring and evaluation: Open data and sentiment
analysis, alongside advanced visualization techniques, allow
stakeholders and decision makers to better monitor execution
and can be used to evaluate the impact of the policy
As for future research, the roadmap is being published and
disseminated in commentable format in order to seek input and
validation from stakeholders (on the importance of the proposed
research challenges), researchers (on the actual research carried
out on the proposed challenges), and finally policy makers (on the
actual adoption of the proposed tools). Furthermore it is ongoing
an online survey of ICT needs and challenges of policy makers
which will inform the last version of the roadmap.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND DISCLAIMER
The research activity leading to this paper has been funded by the
European Commission under the activity ICT-7-5.6 – “ICT
Solutions for governance and policy modeling” within the
Coordination and Support Action (FP7-ICT-2011-7, No. 288828)
CROSSOVER project “Bridging Communities for Next
Generation Policy-Making”.
The views expressed in this paper are purely those of the authors
and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an
official position of the European Commission.
65
REFERENCES
[1] Bowman, B., Debray, S. K., and Peterson, L. L. Reasoning about
naming systems. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst., 15, 5 (Nov.
1993), 795-825.
[2] Alexopoulos, C., and Kim, S. (2002). Output Data Analysis for
Simulations. Proceedings of the 2002 Winter Simulation Conference.
San Diego (CA), 8-11 December 2002.
[3] Alexopoulos, C., and Seila, A. (1998). Output Data Analysis. In J.
Banks, Handbook of Simulation: Principles, Methodology,
Advances, Applications and Practice. New York: John Wiley.
[4] Barabasi, A. L., 2003. Linked: How Everything is Connected to
Everything Else and What it Means for Business and Everyday Life,
Plume Books.
[5] CROSSROAD (2010), White Paper on State of the Art in ICT for
Governance and Policy Modelling, Lampathaki, F., Koussouris, S.,
Charalabidis, Y., Askounis, D., Mouzakitis, S., Passas, S., Tsavdaris,
H., Osimo, D., De Luca, A., Armenia, S., Bicking, M., Wimmer, M.,
Misuraca, G..
[6] CROSSROAD, (2012) Paving the Way for Future Research in ICT
for Governance and Policy Modelling, Charalabidis, Lampathaki,
Askounis (Eds), Bookstars Publishing, available at:
http://crossroad.epu.ntua.gr/files/2010/02/CROSSROAD_Book-vfallinon.pdf
[7] De Laat, B., 2004. Conditions for effectiveness in Roadmapping: a
cross-sectional analysis of 80 different exercises. EU-US Scientific
Seminar on New Technology Foresight, Forecasting & Assessment
Methods
[8] Goldsman, D. (2010). Simulation Output Analysis. Speech at School
of ISyE. Georgia Tech, Atlanta (GE), 26 May 2010.
[9] Goldsman, D., and Nelson, B. (1998). Comparing systems via
simulation. In J. Banks, Handbook of Simulation: Principles,
Methodology, Advances, Application and Practice. New York: John
Wiley.
[10] Goldsman, D., and Tokol, G. (2000). Output analysis procedures for
computer simulations. Proceedings of the 2000 Winter Simulation
Conference. Orlando (FL).
[11] Goldsmith, S. and Eggers, W.D., 2004. Governing by Network: The
New Shape of the Public Sector, Brookings Institution. Available at:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Governing-­‐‑Network-­‐‑Shape-­‐‑Public-­‐‑Sector/
dp/0815731299.
[12] Hinssen, P. (2010). The New Normal. MachMedia NV
[13] Kelton, W. (1997). Statistical Analysis of Simulation Input.
Proceedings of the 1997 Winter Simulation Conference. Atlanta
(GA)
[14] Law, A. (2006). Simulation Modelling and Analysis. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
[15] Lessig, L. (2009). Against transparency. The New Republic.
Retrieved from http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/againsttransparency
[16] Misuraca, G., (2012). eGovernance 2.0: implications of social
computing on public services, in Public Services, Governance and
Web2.0 Technologies: Future Trends in Social Media, a Book edited
by Ed Downey and Matthew Jones, January 2012 - http://www.igiglobal.com/book/public-service-governance-webtechnologies/56009
[17] Misuraca, G., Broster, D. and Centeno, C. (2011). Digital Europe
2030: Designing scenarios for ICT in future governance and policy
making, in Government Information Quarterly, Special Issue
10/2011, Elsevier Publishing

[18] Moss, S., (2010). Policy Modelling, Open Collaboration and The
Future of eGovernance. Crossroad Call for Papers
[19] Nakayama, M. (2002). Simulation Output Analysis. Proceedings of
the 2002 Winter Simulation Conference. San Diego (CA)
[20] OECD. (2005). Modernising government: the way forward. Paris,
France, OECD.
[21] Osimo, D. et al., 2010. The CROSSROAD Roadmap on ICT for
Governance and Policy Modeling.
66
[22] Sargent, R. (2009). Verification and Validation of Simulation
Models. Proceedings of the 2009 Winter Simulation Conference.
Austin (TX), 13-16 December 2009.
[23] Schelling, T.C., (1969). Models of segregation. The American
Economic Review, 59(2), pp. 488-493. Available at:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1823701.
[24] Schlesinger, M. (1979). Terminology for model credibility.
Simulation, 32(3), 103-104.
[25] Taleb, N. (2008). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly
Improbable. Penguin.

Best International Practices for Access, Ownership and
Use of Information and Communication Technologies for
People with Sensory Disabilities
Marco Peres
Universidad Externado de Colombia
Calle 28 # 13 A- 24 apartment 1304
Bogotá, D.C.- Colombia
+571 4612653
marco.peres@uexternado.edu.co
ABSTRACT
This paper aims to describe the results shown by the consultancy
report requested by the Ministry of Information Technologies and
Communications of Colombia, which highlights the programs and
projects for national and international access, ownership and use
of information technologies and communications for people with
sensory limitations in countries like Colombia, Mexico, Spain,
United States, Canada and Brazil. The dimensions underlying the
research are related to the appropriation of ICTs in education, in
access to employment and social integration, the use of electronic
means for political participation and access to the range of cultural
activities and recreation in this community.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4. [Computers and Society]: Public Policy Issues
General Terms
Documentation
Keywords
Sensory impairment, digital inclusion, digital literacy
1. INTRODUCTION
According to Article nine of the UN Convention on the Rights of
Persons with Disabilities, it is the obligation of States: "... so that
people with disabilities to live independently and participate fully
in all aspects of life, take appropriate measures to ensure access
for people with disabilities on an equal basis with others, the
physical environment, transportation, information and
communications, including computer systems and information
technologies and communications, and other facilities open to the
public or public use, both in urban and rural areas .. 1 "as well as,
implementing programs that facilitate the use and ownership of
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
1 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1964930
67
Paula Suárez
Universidad Externado de Colombia
Carrera 64 # 24-47 apartment 503,
Bogota, Salitre, Colombia
+57 313 8306908
paucasuarez@gmail.com
the means necessary to include this population in the dynamics of
socioeconomic and political development that generate on their
own information technology and communications. Means and
measures taken by States must have in mind then, the existence of
gaps in digital literacy, access to education and electronic media,
faced by people with disabilities, so it has to generate public
policies and focus on the needs of this group, differentiating by
type of limitation, age and educational level.
Thus, our research shows that those experiences that we can deem
successful are those in which States have taken the characteristics
of the group in different contexts and settings, created inclusion,
access to public education, health, government and employment
into account, with all possible means of interaction to eradicate
drawbacks to people with disabilities.
2. CONTEXT
The world report on disability made by the World Health
Organization (WHO) in association with the World Bank Group,
estimates that ... more than one billion people worldwide live with
some form of disability, of whom nearly 200 million experience
considerable difficulties in its operation 2 , hence governments are
concerned in creating enabling factors for this population with
regard to access to essential services for normal daily activities,
since the number of people with limitations grows and their
situation is exacerbated by poverty and exclusion.
The need for digital literacy in the population with disabilities is a
reality and a priority on the agendas of governments. At the latest
World Summit on the Society of Information, UNESCO and
CEPAL agreed that ICTs are a useful tool for achieving
development and equity. 3 The provision of information
technology, and digital literacy, defined as the ease of access and
use of information technology and communications 4 , turns out to
be of the essence to create a favorable scenario. These policies
targeted at people with sensory disabilities, (defined as those who
suffer from hearing impairments, visual or both) are necessary,
since the benefits related to literacy, range from the ease in the
normal course of daily activities to the full exercise of citizenship.
2 http://www.who.int/disabilities/world_report/2011/accessible
_es.pdf
3 http://bvs.sld.cu/revistas/aci/vol13_1_05/aci04105.htm
4 Ramírez Leyva. Elsa Margarita. La lectura, Alfabetización en
Información y Cultura de la Información.2007.

2.1. National digital inclusion experience for
people with sensory disabilities
According to the National Bureau of Statistics (DANE), in 2005
6.4% of Colombia's population suffers from some form of
permanent disability 5 . This finding, based on the general
population census, shows alarming statistics in this field; as a
result, digital inclusion has become a priority in Colombia. The
Ministry of ICT through its "Communication Technologies for
Disabled People" and their project "New Technologies for
Information Access of the Blind", "Connecting Senses" for deaf
blind people and the "Relay Center" for deaf people, have been
trying to start the process of including people with sensory
limitations by accessing and using information technologies.
Communication Technologies for Population with Disabilities
Program: This program focuses on providing a range of
technology solutions to people with sensory disabilities, to
generate the active participation of these individuals in the
different spheres of social interaction, including the democratic
process. The Ministry of ICT in Colombia, has carried out various
activities for inclusion, such as the Respite Center Project for the
Deaf, which tries to break the communication barriers that this
population suffers. This program has generated a number of
public telephone centers for the deaf, along with the National
Federation of the Deaf of Colombia (FENASCOL) and the
Telephone Company of Bogotá (ETB), which implements text
phones to enable communication between a deaf and a hearing
person. The implementation of closed captioning (subtitles for the
deaf) on television is another initiative that the Ministry has
promoted for the deaf to interpret mass media such as television. 6
New Technologies Project for Information Access for the
Blind: The Ministry of Information Technologies and
Communications, with the help of the National Institute for the
Blind (INCI), has built public libraries for visually impaired
people who can use ICTs and benefit from them, through devices
like: digital book readers and printers to convert braille
documents.
Connecting Senses Program: This program targets people with
deaf blindness conditions, led by the Ministry of Information
Technology and the Colombian Association of the Deaf Blind
(SURCOE). It is responsible for facilitating technology for
classroom use and appropriation of information and
communications technologies in the process of socialization for
this population that has its own characteristics. Connecting Senses
has sought ways to respond to the demands of deaf blind people
holistically, as it has generated an implementation scheme that
takes into account not only the adaptation of ICT for people with
this sensory disability, but also makes special efforts to train
people interested in the topic, as the role of companions for people
with deaf blindness is crucial in the dynamics of socialization.
3. BEST INTERNATIONAL ICT METHODS
TO EMPOWER PEOPLE WITH SENSORY
DISABILITIES
5 http://www.dane.gov.co/index.php?option=com_content&view
=article&id=307&Itemid=124
6 http://201.234.78.217/mincom/faces/index.jsp?id=2334
68
In order to identify the best ICT practices at the international level
aimed at people with sensory disabilities, the following factors
were taken into account: the number of people with sensory
disabilities within each territory, the structure and contribution to
inclusion, the potential for adaptation in the provision of public
services, education, employment, political participation and access
to cultural activities or entertainment.
3.1. Methodology for selecting successful
international practices
The international review of best practices was obtained from the
collection of information from public, private or mixed source
inclusion programs for people with sensory disabilities, which
were selected according to parameters relevant to the digital
inclusion of people with sensory disabilities, this is why there are
three criteria for selection of successful international practices
relating to: 1) the level of practice approach that has the problem
of exclusion of people with sensory, 2) coverage and provide the
inclusion of people with limitations and 3) the potential for
adaptation to cover several dimensions of inclusion (i.e.
education, employment, political participation, etc.).
3.1.1 Criteria approach to the problem of exclusion of
people with sensory disabilities
This criterion is defined as the initiative or practice that is
responsible for solving the problem of exclusion experienced by
people with sensory disabilities. Depending on the conceptual
characteristics of each approach, different alternative solutions
emerge with dramatically different impacts on the lives of people
with visual and auditory disabilities. In this regard there are four
main approaches to address the problem of exclusion.
Exclusion as a personal and individual limitation: This approach
involves recognizing a situation of vulnerability and disadvantage
people with sensory disabilities, which prevents it from interacting
with the rest of society safely and fairly. This approach generates
responses (programs) to direct attention to the individual such as
educational centers or community support.
As a population characteristic: This perspective does not
portray people with sensory disabilities as a vulnerable group, but
as a population group with characteristics that make it different
from the rest of society, as would be the ethnic, religious or
cultural. This approach generates projects including direct and
indirect: direct projects that seek alternative solutions such as
access to specialized education for the visually impaired, to
promote job training and recruitment of this population and
indirect projects which allow them to create partnerships aimed at
achieving a political representation to ensure that this population
is taken into account as a group with characteristics distinct from
the majority society, and therefore must be treated and cared for
differently.
As a matter of physical environment: This approach assumes
that people with disabilities encounter significant difficulties when
interacting with their environment, and therefore, if it is modified
taking into account the sensory abilities of people with sensory
disabilities, to improve their living conditions visibly. This
approach integrates accessibility projects to public buildings,
private buildings regulations to the public and promotes
alternatives to the existing infrastructure which meets the needs of
people with sensory disabilities.

As a matter of human environment: the latter approach to the
problem of exclusion of people with limitations, aims to get
people who have contact with individuals with sensory disabilities
to be able to interact with them, that is, that the responsibility for
social integration lies not only in the individuals with disabilities,
but extends to individuals in regular conditions of perception. this
type of approach promotes alternatives such as indirect inclusion:
raising awareness, training for family members, teachers and
chaperones.
3.1.2. Coverage and contribution to the inclusion
This criterion refers to the ability to serve people with sensory
disabilities, while a positive influence to avoid isolation and
segregation of the population. Similarly, coverage, rather than as a
quantitative index can be understood as the flow direction or
orientation of the actions needed to access or benefit from a
particular program. Here there are: 1) individual care programs, 2)
direct government actions and 3) indirect government actions:
Individual care programs: Tend to only one person or individual
with sensory disabilities, may be of a private or public source.
The objective of such programs is to achieve human development
and social reintegration of the person with limited sensory abilities
Direct government action: Are those actions that are national,
state or local, as appropriate, whose aim is to benefit all people
with sensory disabilities in a particular jurisdiction, such as a law.
These actions differ from individual public actions in the sense
that citizens with sensory disabilities do not have to search for
programs to access them because the initiative includes the
general population with sensory disabilities
Indirect public actions: The indirect actions of public coverage
are those that, like direct public coverage, cover a jurisdiction, but
in this case, do not direct impact on individuals with disabilities,
but rather, their environment
3.1.3. Potential for adaptation to cover several
dimensions of inclusion
Adaptation refers to the possible extension of the use of a program
into other dimensions of impact (employment, education, political
participation, personal autonomy, etc). This approach which seeks
to identify those practices that generate coverage, operation and
ownership by people with sensory disabilities, can be applied
across several dimensions of impact simultaneously or
independently in a potential program or policy of digital inclusion
for people with sensory disabilities
3.2. Programs for digital inclusion of the
visually impaired population
As part of the generation of programs for inclusion in the access,
use and appropriation of ICTs for people with visual, people need
to define what can be described within this group, according to the
World Health Organization, are part of the community with visual
impairment, those who suffer from total blindness in one or both
eyes or those with profound visual impairment (partial blindness
or profound amblyopia amblyopic itself) with respect to visual
acuity at such a level that affects the normal execution of daily
activities, according to the ONCE (National Organization of
69
Spanish Blind) are blind persons whose visual field is reduced to
10 ° or less 7 .
One of the data provided research initiatives around access, use
and appropriation of ICTs, internationally, is related to the
interaction of participants of different natures, since those who run
programs for assisting communities with sensory are not only
public but also private.
There are several initiatives for us to highlight that grant access to
ICTs for people with visual impairments, such as the one
promoted by the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Culture,
which provides the blind with free Mecdaisy software for the
conversion of digital textbooks , this in order to provide tools for
academic and intellectual development of visually impaired
users 8 . In the United States, for example, a legislative initiative
called Americans with Disabilities Act, established the obligation
of both public and private institutions to provide people with
disabilities technologies and devices which are required for access
to information and public services, while in Spain, the scientific
community is most interested in developing specialized
technologies, as it has released a device to see with their
hands, thus facilitating the mobility of blind people through a
technology that converts images into tactile signals.
The adaptation of existing technologies to the needs of the blind,
is the strategy that Mexico is betting on, and that initiatives such
as the Library for the Blind National Autonomous University of
Mexico, show the Mexican government's willingness to attend
and include people with disabilities in education.
3.3. Digital inclusion initiatives for hearing
impaired
The inclusion of deaf people, access to and use of information
technology differs from the dynamics meant for the blind. Even
though both are limitations of a sensory type, the characteristics of
a deaf person call for other programs that cater to different needs
that are unique to this population. According to the World Health
Organization, ninety-three percent of deaf people have no access
to sign language interpretation service 9 , hence it is essential for
communication, use and access to information and
communications technologies.
In Mexico, for example, CONFETER a government sponsored
initiative since 2005 has compelled telecommunication providers
to furnish the necessary technology (such as telephones that
eliminate sound systems interference, vibrating phones, lit alert
indicators and amplified speakers) that facilitates communication
access to the hearing impaired.
Additionally, the Canadian private sector has answered the
hearing impaired communications challenge with organizations
such as The Canadian Society of the Deaf. This is Canada´s main
purveyor of services, products and information that eliminate the
stumbling blocks that limit the communication of the hearing
impaired.
3.3. Best methods for deaf-blind people
This population, which suffers from two limitations (auditory and
visual) depending on each individual case, may or may not benefit
from projects designed for the deaf or blind. However, there are
7
http://www.juntadeandalucia.es/averroes/caidv/interedvisual/
ftp_p_/def_bajavision_ceguera.pdf.
8
http://www.ufpel.edu.br/cic/2009/cd/pdf/CH/CH_00288.pdf
9
http://www.who.int/disabilities/world_report/2011/summary
_es.pdf

advanced initiatives specifically designed to assist this population.
For example, the Department of Rehabilitation Services of
Mississippi, United States, provides the deaf-blind population
with technological, pedagogical and psychological devices (such
as hand magnifiers to read, high-intensity lamps, small telescopes
to read from a distance and small circuit television or computers
that magnify printed material) this with the idea of satisfying the
needs and overcoming the barriers this population faces in relation
to such common activities as learning and communication.
However, the characteristics of the condition of deaf-blindness,
also calls for specialized care programs for access to ICT, a highly
trained companion that can help these people. Nevertheless,
despite the fact that this population possesses less communication
capabilities, it has not been given higher priority within
international programs for the deaf-blind community.
3.3. People with sensory disabilities in the
countries analyzed
Table 3: Number of people with sensory disabilities
Country Census of
the country
(million)
Blind
Population
Deaf
Population
Populatio
n with
deaf
Blindness
Colombia 46,51,645 2.4% 0.98% _
Mexico 112,336,538 1.15% 3.6% _
Spain 45,283,259 0.13% 2.3% 0.013%
UU.EE. 305,000,000 8.2% 3.2% _
Canada 34,030,589 0.52% 0.91% 0.04%
Brazil 203,429,773 0.73% 0.083% _
As evidenced by the table above, the most populous country with
sensory disabilities is United States of America where 11.4% of
the population is visually and hearing impaired , excluding people
with both limitations, followed by Colombia where 3, 4% of the
total population presented some sensory limitation (blind or deaf),
then Spain with 2.43% of people with sensory limitations, fifth
place belongs to Canada with 1.44% of the population with
sensory disabilities and Mexico with 1.15% of visually impaired
people.
4. CONCLUSIONS
To build successful programs in the care of people with sensory
disabilities, we must recognize that this is a population group with
its own characteristics in need of specialized care. International
trends in terms of programs for this population, as presented in
this study, have shown that it is necessary to adapt the physical
space for real digital inclusion of people with sensory disabilities.
It is also of the essence to grant them institutional recognition, as
has been the case with successful programs for people with
limitations in the U.S., Canada, Spain, Mexico and Brazil. These
programs empower groups of people with disabilities by making
policy decisions for the access, use and appropriation of ICTs.
Additionally, international experience shows that spread is also
necessary for the production of digital information in the areas of
education and entertainment, since in most countries and
especially in the United States, this initiative is driven by the State
in their quest to achieve greater competitiveness and human
development of people with sensory impairments, so that there are
two scenarios for people with sensory limitations, a first positive
scenario in which that population can access a variety of digital
content of the same quality as those in normal sensory conditions,
thus reducing the information gap and capacity, and a second
70
scenario less favorable in this population remains excluded from
the flow of ideas and information because they lack the means or
knowledge accessing digital information.Finally, the inclusion of
people with sensory disabilities is the only possibility of
generating a real and effective exercise of the right to information
of every citizen. Thus, governments have an obligation to
implement public policies to help facilitate the use of ICTs
independently to exercise their rights as independent persons with
a real capacity to make their own decisions, thereby affecting
collective decisions that allow them competition and active
participation in democracy. However, the benefits of ICTs for
people with sensory disabilities is not limited to purely civic and
democratic roles, as technologies make everyday tasks easier for
these individuals, which is achieved by a dynamic of inclusion
that goes beyond the merely digital and reaches beyond the
academic, social and family life of each person.
5. REFERENCES
[1] Brian D. Loader and Leigh Keeble, Challenging the digital
divide? : A literature review of community informatics initiatives,
JosephRowntree Foundation, Teesside University, 2004
[2] Bueno Manuel. Definiciones y clasificaciones en torno a la
discapacidad visual. La baja visión y la ceguera,2012.
[3] Canadian Association of the Deaf. Statistics on Deaf
Canadians, 2012.
[5] DANE. Censo General, 2005
[6] Gulati. Archana, Universal Service Obligation Fund´s Pilot
Project Scheme For Access to ICTs And ICT Enabled Services for
Persons with Disabilities in Rural India, 2011
[7] INEGI. Censo de Población y Vivienda, 2010.
[8] MengEe Wong and Libby Cohen. School, Family and other
influences on assistive technology use: Access and challenges for
students with visual impairment in Singapore, 2011.
[9] Microsoft Corporation. Conducted by Forrester Research Inc.
in 2003, The Wide Range of Abilities and Its Impact on Computer
Technology, 2003
[10] Observatorio de Sociedad, Gobierno y Tecnologías de
Información. Revisión y análisis de los avances en alfabetización
digital y apropiación TIC para población con discapacidad
sensorial. 2011
[11] OMS. Resumen Informe Mundial sobre la discapacidad.2011
[12] MINTICS. Tecnologías de Comunicación para la población con
discapacidad, 2009.
[13] Pereira. Selau. Mecdaisy: Um Novo Espaço Virtual Para Os
Deficientes Visuais No Brasil,2009
[14] Silvera. Claudia. La alfabetización digital: una herramienta
para alcanzar el desarrollo y la equidad en los países de América
latina y el Caribe.2005.
[15] Ramírez Leyva. Elsa Margarita. La lectura, Alfabetización en
Información y Cultura de la Información,2007.
[16] World Economic Forum. ISNEAD.The Global Information
Technology Report 2010, 2011.Transformations 2.0. 2011.

E-Government Education at the Public Administration Departments
in Turkey
Cenay BABAOGLU
Hacettepe University
Department of Political Science and
Public Administration
Beytepe, Çankaya, Ankara-TURKEY
+90 312 2978725
cenaybabaoglu@hacettepe.edu.tr
ABSTRACT
This paper presents the main findings of an extensive investigation
of the current status of undergraduate level e-government
education at public administration departments in Turkey. In the
study, online program curriculums were searched to determine the
state of the e-government and ICT courses. Primary data were
collected from lecturers via semi-structured interviews and a
questionnaire which was applied to undergraduate public administration
students who have attended e-government courses during
the fall semester of 2011. Syllabi of the courses were also analyzed
to determine the contents of the courses. In the light of these
data, the current status, risks, future prospects, and diffusion of egovernment
education at public administration departments were
discussed within the limits of the presentation.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.3.2 [Computer and Information Science Education]: Curriculum,
Information Science Education
General Terms
Human Factors.
Keywords
E-Government Education, Curriculum, Turkey, PA Departments,
Public Administration.
1. INTRODUCTION
Governments spend considerable amount of resources in egovernment
projects. The cost of these investments may be justified
if one considers the benefits such as reduction of costs, increasing
transparency, easier communication between the state
and the citizens, improving effectiveness, or faster service delivery
[7]. But, e-government projects entail risks as well as its advantages.
Project failures and low user rates may hinder costly egovernment
initiatives. Heeks’ [7] study which investigates the
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
H. Serkan AKILLI
Nevsehir University
Department of Public Administration
Faculty of Economics and Administrative
Sciences, Nevsehir, Turkey
+90 384 2281000 (1534)
h.serkanakilli@nevsehir.edu.tr
71
Mehmet Akif DEMIRCIOGLU
Indiana University
School of Public & Environmental Affairs
1315 East Tenth Street, Bloomington,
IN USA
+1 812 8552457
mdemirci@indiana.edu
success levels of e-government projects in developing countries
shows that only 15% of projects can be labeled successful while
35% of the projects totally failed and other projects (50%) was
just partially successful. The same failure scenarios and low citizen
usage of e-government services are experienced in developed
countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands or the UK,
as well [8][12][21].
The failures of e-government projects may stem from many intertwined
reasons such as system design, inadequate infrastructure,
social and organizational issues, public/private relationships or
political factors. However, the focus of this study is on egovernment
education, since lack of human capital is one of the
most critical factors, which may bring success or failure in egovernment
projects. Successful implication of e-government
projects requires educational and training activities on a wide
array of levels and dimensions. As a component of e-government
education research agenda, this paper presents the main findings
of an extensive investigation of the current status of undergraduate
level e-government education at public administration departments
in Turkey. In the following sections, an overview of egovernment
in Turkey and e-government education is shortly
discussed, the methodology of the study is explained, and the
main findings are presented.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
Turkey, as a candidate to the European Union (EU), and as a
partner involved in e-government agenda of the union, has been
eager to invest in e-government projects since the 1990s under E-
Turkey, and E-Transformation Turkey programs. A single point
access to e-government services was achieved in 2008 with the
opening of the e-government gate (www.turkiye.gov.tr) and as of
2010, 246 services were provided on-line by different government
agencies. In 2010, the availability of 20 e-government services
determined by the European Council was above the average of EU
member and candidate states. Although the supply side of egovernment
services is enough, there is urgent need to increase
the level of use of these services by the citizens and a general
need to develop e-readiness level of the society as a whole.
Parallel to e-government investments, e-government researches in
Turkey have been initiated by several government agencies with
the support of a number of NGOs since the late 1990s. The first
people working on e-government research were computer scientists
and faculty from public administration departments were

involved later [22]. Several institutions are involved in egovernment
research on organizational and technical level [14].
“E-Government Research and Applications Center (EDMER)” in
Middle East Technical University (METU) was opened in 2007
and “Center on E-Government” (eDEM) in the Public Administration
Institute for Turkey and Middle East (TODAIE), (a governmental
institution to train bureaucrats and scholars in the field of
public administration) was opened in 1999. More recently, several
NGOs have also initiated studies about e-government and information
society [14] [22].
To sum up, although it is clear that e-government is a mature field
of research, there is still need for wide-spread e-government training
and education in Turkey since the efforts of the above mentioned
institutions remain restricted in the face of mounting “demand
side”. While lack of investment on educational and training
activities about e-government may bring about disappointment in
e-government projects, there seems to be a substantial gap in this
field, both abroad and in Turkey. A number of reasons lie behind
this withdrawal from such activities: service providers may see
education and training services as extra costs that should be
avoided, due to the complex and multidimensional nature of egovernment
topics, difficulties arise when designing teaching
programs, training programs for public employees may have
limited time and reach a limited number of staff, or governments
may be unwilling to pay for educational costs of large populations
[6]. However as Janowski argues, especially the political leaders,
government leaders, project managers, management staff, technical
staff, service staff, businesses, citizens should have some
training on e-government [9]. Thus, the role of higher education
institutions as well as offering courses to the public becomes more
important, since they have an opportunity to reach various types
of recipients. Moreover, public administration graduates need to
prepare today’s challenges and uncertainty which globalization
and information technology trigger [18]. Since public administration
systems are largely affected from surrounding technologic
environment and e-government initiatives on both organizational
and political levels, it would be appropriate to suggest that public
administration departments should have a leading role in developing
information technology and e-government curricula or update
existing programs according to the needs and requirements of
public organizations and the societies at large [3] [4] [11] [17].
Thus, even before the emergence of the internet revolution, the
importance of updating public administration programs to follow
technological developments was emphasized by various writers,
and the inadequacies in this field still remain problematic [10]
[13] [15] [17]. Parallel to the diffusion of information technologies
into the societies and the institutions, universities have initiated
technology or e-government education programs on different
levels that target students, public/private sector employees, social
groups and specific topics and specialization areas [1][2].
3. METHODOLOGY
In this study, online program curriculums were searched to determine
the state of the e-government and ICT courses in Turkey.
Primary data were collected from lecturers via semi-structured
interviews and a questionnaire which was applied to undergraduate
public administration students who have attended egovernment
courses during the fall semester of 2011. Syllabi of
the courses were also analyzed to determine the contents of the
courses. In the light of these data, the current status, risks, future
prospects, and diffusion of e-government education at public
72
administration departments were discussed within the limits of the
presentation.
There are 68 public administration department in Turkey in 2012.
Although all departments offer courses which aim to develop
basic computer skills, such as office programs or web page design,
only 14 department offer course which are directly about egovernment.
Faculty members teaching relevant courses in these
departments were determined, and semi-structured in-depth interviews
were conducted with them. In these interviews, introduction
process of relevant courses into the curricula was examined, and
related factors were investigated. In addition, questions about the
content of the courses were addressed. The development of egovernment
studies and e-government courses have been asked to
the faculty and their recommendations and predictions were compiled
with the interviews. Syllabi of the courses were collected as
secondary data. It was not possible to reach enough syllabi to use
for content analysis, so 4 syllabi were used as subsidiary sources.
In order to investigate the opinions of students about egovernment
courses, a survey was conducted among undergraduate
students of four PA departments offered e-government courses
in Fall 2011. 266 students followed these courses during the stated
period and 193 of 266 answered the questions. 59.7% (111) of
these students were female, and 40.3% (75) were male. In total,
186 (70% of the students) student questionnaires were used for
analysis. The questionnaire included ten expressions about the
reasons for choosing the course, course satisfaction, perceived
advantage of taking this course, and opinions about the status of
the course. They were asked to choose from one of five options
about the expressions (From absolutely disagree to totally agree).
The students were also asked to assign an importance rating (one
being least important and seven being most important) to 22 student-familiar
e-government topics, which reflect technical, theoretical,
legal, organizational, and political aspects,
4. FINDINGS
In this section, the main findings of the study are presented with
two sub-headings. The first sub-section gives information about
the current status of e-government courses at PA departments, and
discusses the inclusion of e-government courses into the curricula.
The second sub-section deals with the education methods, course
syllabi and the opinions of undergraduate students about egovernment
courses. The findings of the study are discussed in the
last section.
4.1 E-Government Courses at PA Departments in
Turkey
As mentioned before, the interest in e-government investment and
research does not seem to correspond to a similar interest in egovernment
education at the public administration programs in
Turkey. Since the number of PA departments which offer egovernment
courses is low, understanding the way in which these
courses diffuse into the curricula becomes important for future
tracks. In a recent study Yildiz et al. have found that receiving
graduate education or spending sabbatical studies in abroad are
the most important factor to include public policy courses in the
curriculum. Additionally, student exchange programs (particularly
with the European countries) and second generation lecturers who
have taken these courses in Turkey are also affecting the decision
to add these courses in the curriculum.

A similar pattern can be observed about e-government courses.
First reason of spread of e-government courses is about faculties’
academic interests. Our research shows that e-government courses
were included to the curricula mainly because of at least one
faculty’s demand. If a faculty were interested in e-government or
information and communication technologies, he/she demand to
add these courses to curricula. Faculties, who received their MA
or Ph.D. degrees in European or American universities, become
another transfer agent for the e-government courses. Most of these
received similar courses during their studies, and after the graduation
they transferred the courses to Turkish universities. Faculty,
who took these lessons, would be a new instrument for a secondary
transfer, and it is the third reason for the spread of egovernment
course, which could be seen above in Figure 1.
Figure 1
33%
25%
42%
Academic Interest
Transfer by Abroad
Studied Faculty
Secondary Transfer
Although current lecturers of e-government courses are optimistic
that these courses will be developed and core courses in the near
future, we do not expect it due to existing traditions in PA Departments
and lack of interest of academic staff. In terms of Rogers’
diffusion of innovations, it could be claimed that inclusion of
e-government courses are generally optional and personal choice
[19]. The decision rests mostly on the interested lecturer or department
chair that is responsible for updating the curricula. Some
of the “early adapters” find it difficult to open or sustain the
course which is included in the curriculum because of lack of
academic staff or because this course was not really meant to be
opened at all. In this case, the curriculum looks right, but the
courses, in fact, only nominally exist. Thus, the course becomes a
product of isomorphism rather than innovation.
4.2 Content of the Courses and Students’ Opinions
about E-Government Courses
Looking at the contents of the course, e-government issues can be
categorized, which are derived from interviews and syllabi. According
to this data, Turkish e-government education includes
these titles: Basic e-government literature, e-government theories,
e-government applications, e-government policies, e-governance,
e-participation, e-democracy, e-municipality and problems of egovernment.
These titles are used in almost every university.
Three of ten faculties, named the topics; cyber crimes and esignature
as basic, and two others named as subtopic. An advising
report of UNESCO, which is prepared for the African countries,
includes almost the same topics. [20] E-government courses
generally begin with theoretical backgrounds and basic concepts.
Towards the middle of the term, they turned to e-government
applications.
If we look to the students’ opinions about the courses, some of
would be outshining. The ranking means and the standard deviations
of the ratings are presented in Table 1. Test results show that
there is a significant difference among the departments with respect
to the importance rating of e-signature, theories of egovernment,
properties of the information society, system design,
e-democracy, e-trade/e-business, e-government experiences in
Turkey, success/failure factors and internet penal law.
73
Table 1: Stated Importance Ratings of E-Government Topics
(Students, N: 186)
TOPIC MEAN STD.DEV.
Information Security 6,102 1,4576
Right to Internet Access 6,003 1,2884
Right to Information 5,944 1,3210
E-Government and Public Adm. 5,795 1,5052
E-Signature 5,706 1,6790
Theories of E-Government 5,116 1,5277
Public/Private Partnership 5,050 1,5007
Technological Dependency 4,596 1,8363
Significant difference among the departments could be explained
by the interests of the lecturers and could be considered as natural.
However this may also carry the risk of “speci-centrism” as Yildiz
et al. have defined in their own study [23].
It could be argued that the answers of the students are promising
about the sustainability of the e-government courses. When the
options “Totally Agree” ve “Agree” are combined, it is found that
79,6% of the students asserts positive opinions about interest in
the topics of the course. On the other hand, 61,3% percent of the
students think that the e-government course has provided advantages
for their careers. Perceived advantage of taking egovernment
courses would be another factor in development of egovernment
courses in Turkey. There is a high level of satisfaction
(81,1%) about the courses and 79% of the respondents says
they would recommend this course to other students. When the
responses for the above mentioned expressions are considered
together, it could be argued that e-government courses would
attract enough students if they were included in the curriculums of
the departments which have not opened a course about egovernment.
5. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
The findings present a mixed case. E-government is developing
fast in Turkey, and research on e-government draws significant
attention. But, currently, the number of public administration
departments which offer courses about e-government may not be
considered as adequate. The opinions of lecturers and students are
promising about the e-government courses in the future, yet lack
of interest on academics’ side may hinder the development of
these courses. Proliferation of e-government courses in Turkey is
needed, but this is not without risks. These courses have been
spreading among PA departments in the last five years. Although
the courses which aim to improve basic computer skills could be
traced to 1990s, first e-government courses in Turkey date back to
2006. Currently, 22% of the departments have e-government
courses in their curricula. At this point the problem of institutional
isomorphism becomes critical [5]. As Park and Park acknowledge,
the curricula of leading universities in South Korea were followed
by other institutions and that there is possibility of normative
isomorphism [16]. In a similar vein, latest developments in the
field of higher education in Turkey, especially Bologna process,
have created coercive and imitative institutionalization among PA
departments. This isomorphic trend may end up in curricula which
reflects “the politically right” but which do not correspond to the
real resources of the departments that are required to sustain IT
and e-government related courses. As a conclusion, it is important
to emphasize the need to build necessary resources and skills

among lecturers and students parallel to (better before) diffusion
of e-government courses into core PA curricula in Turkey.
In this study we have focused on on e-government education at
the undergraduate departments of public administration in Turkey.
Our researches, however, have found that other departments and
schools do not offer e-government courses, but similar courses
such as information technology. Future studies may focus on
graduate programs teaching e-government courses at the public
administration department. In addition, since e-government studies
also include practical sides, other scholars may focus on practical
aspects of e-government research and education. As authors,
we consider that it will be very useful if both theoretical and practical
sides of e-government would be examined and compared.
6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Haydar EFE, Veysel EREN, M. Kemal
ÖKTEM, Özgür ÖNDER, Mustafa ÖZTÜRK, Naci SEVKAL,
Nur ŞAT, and Ali ŞAHİN for their valuable helps. And also special
thanks to ICEGOV 2012 organization committee, two anonymous
reviewers and Mete YILDIZ, for their valuable comments
and suggestions.
7. REFERENCES
[1] Augustinaitis, A.and Petrauskas, R. Master Studies on e-
Governance Administration: The First Experience in Lithuania.
In R. Traunmüller, (Ed.), EGOV 2004, Springer
LNCS#3183, Heidelberg, 2004, 438-445.
[2] Biasiotti, M.A. and Nannucci, R. Teaching e-Government in
Italy. In R. Traunmüller, (Ed.), EGOV 2004, Springer
LNCS#3183, Heidelberg, 2004, 460-463.
[3] Chiu, S. Understanding the Adoption and Diffusion of Information
Technology Related Curricula: Multiple Theoretical
Perspectives. Ph.D. Thesis, Indiana University, 2007.
[4] Dawes, S. Training the IT-Savvy Public Manager: Priorities
and Strategies for Public Management Education. Journal of
Public Affairs Education, 10, 1 (Jan., 2004), 5-17.
[5] Di Maggio, P. J., and Powell, W. W. Iron cage revisited:
Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational
fields, American Sociological Review, 48 (1983).
147-160.
[6] Garson, D. Public Information Technology and E-
Governance: Managing the Virtual State. Jones and Bartlett
Pub, NC, 2006.
[7] Heeks, R. Most eGovernment-for-Development Projects
Fail: How Can Risks Be Reduced?. iGovernment Working
Papers , paper no.14. Institute for Development Policy and
Management, University of Manchester, 2003.
[8] Gauld, R., Goldfinch, S., and Horsburgh, S. Do They Want
It? Do They Use It? The “Demand-Side” of e-Government in
Australia and New Zealand. Government Information Quarterly,
27, 2 (March, 2010), 177-186.
[9] Janowski, T. Conceptualizing Electronic Governance Education.
45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences,(2012)
2269-2278
[10] Kiel, D. Information Systems Education in Master Programs
in Public Affairs and Administration. Public Administration
74
Review, 46, Special Issue: Public Management Information
Systems (Nov., 1986), 590-594.
[11] Kim S. and Layne K. Making the Connection: E-Government
and Public Administration Education. Journal of Public Affairs
Education, Vol.4, No.4 (Oct., 2001), 229-240.
[12] Kolsaker, A. and Kelley, L. Citizens’ Attitudes towards e-
Government and e-Governance: a UK Study. International
Journal of Public Sector Management, 21, 7 (2008), 723-
738.
[13] Kraemer, K.L. and Northrop, A. Curriculum Recommendations
for Public Management Education in Computing: An
Update. Public Administration Review, 49, 5 (Sep.-Oct.,
1989), 447-453.
[14] Medeni, T., Mustafa S., Tunc, M., Asim B., and Merih T.
Developing an E-Government Education Programme Curriculum
Based on Knowledge Management Paradigms to Support
Institutional Transformation. International Journal of
eBusiness and e-Government Studies. 2009. 1(2): 35-47
ISSN: 2146-0744 (Online)
[15] Northrop, A. Challenge of Teaching Information Technology
in Public Administration Graduate Programs. In D. Garson
(ed.), Information Technology and Computer Applications in
Public Administration. IGI Publishing, PA, 1999, 7-22.
[16] Park, H. M. and Park. H. Diffusing Information Technology
Education in Korean Undergraduate Public Affairs and Administration
Programs: Driving Forces and Challenging Issues,
Journal of Public Affairs Education, 2006, 12(4): 537-
555.
[17] Pavlichev, A. The E-Government Challenge for Public Administration
Education. In A. Pavlichev, D. Garson (eds.),
Digital Government: Principles and Best Practices, IGI, PA,
2004, 276-289.
[18] Perry, James L. A Symposium on Transformations in Public
Affairs Education: Challenges, Progress, and Strategies.
Journal of Public Affairs Education, 2001, 7(4): 209-211.
[19] Rogers, E. Diffusion of Innovations. Free Press, NY, 2003.
[20] UNESCO, Curriculum Guide on E-governance for African
Government Institution, Available from:
http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/files/25720/11980630809curri
culum_guide.pdf/curriculum%2Bguide.pdf, accessed
16.03.2012
[21] Van Deursen, A., van Dijk, J., and Ebbers, W. Why E-
Government Usage Lags Behind: Explaining the Gap Between
Potential and Actual Usage of Electronic Public Services
in the Netherlands. Lecture Notes in Computer Science,
4084 (2006), 269-280.
[22] Yazici, Ali. Teaching and Research on E-Government. International
Conference on eGovernment and eGovernance. 11-
12 March 2010. Antalya, Turkey.
[23] Yildiz, M., Demircioglu, M.A., and Babaoglu, C. Teaching
Public Policy to Undergraduate Students: Issues, Experiences,
and Lessons in Turkey. Journal of Public Affairs Education,
17, 3, 2011, 343-365

e-Government in Latin American Countries. Are they
Building National Policies with a Regional Perspective?
ABSTRACT
Are the Latin American countries building their national e-
Government policies with a regional perspective? The hypothesis
of this paper is that international organizations are shaping, at
least in some extent, the ideas, priorities, and initiatives
implemented by the governments of this emergent region.
Institutional theory suggests that policy transfer implies a process
of institutionalization in the national public sector and public
policies of specific logics of action, values, routines, rules, etc., in
general, defined by international organizations, through diverse
policy instruments. This paper presents a documentary analysis of
policy reports from this type of organizations (i.e. Inter-American
Development Bank…) devoted to foster e-Government in Latin
America. Also it descriptively analyses statistical data about e-
Government in the region. Thus, this paper studies the most
important ideas, priorities, and values that these international key
drivers use to disseminate e-Government policies in the region.
Finally, this work debates their implications using institutional
theory, and gives ideas for future research.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4.1 [Public Policy Issues]: Transborder Data Flow
General Terms
Management, Measurement, Design, Human Factors, Theory
Keywords
Electronic Government, International Organizations, Policy
Transfer, Latin America, Interoperability
1. INTRODUCTION
The diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies
(ICTs) in public administration represents a relatively recent
phenomenon in Latin American (LatAm) countries. This paper is
determined to shed light on the following question: Are the Latin
American countries building their national e-Government policies
with a regional perspective? This general question is based on the
importance that during the last years have gained the ideas,
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
J. Ignacio Criado
Department of Political Science
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
ignacio.criado@uam.es
75
values, priorities, and projects mostly sponsored by international,
inter-governmental, or transnational organizations acting as key
drivers of e-Government developments within the LatAm region
[1,4]. This paper assumes the existence of a policy transfer
process of these ideas, values, priorities, and projects across the
LatAm governments.
This study is rooted in institutional theory literature. Institutional
theory has tackle with the interplay of ICTs and public
administration, and it has been of growing interest for e-
Government scholars during the last decade [6,7,8]. Institutional
theory suggest that policy transfer within a region of the World
implies a process of institutionalization in the national public
sector and public policies of specific logics of action, values,
routines, rules, etc., in general, defined by international,
intergovernmental, or transnational organizations, through diverse
instruments [5]. However, this is not the same to convergence,
harmonization, or political integration; since there is a difference
between a process and its consequences. The next pages put more
emphasis on mechanisms of policy transfer in the field of e-
Government, and how these mechanisms work (processes), than
on final outputs, or qualitative differences across national public
policies and administrations (results).
Methodologically, this paper presents a documentary analysis of
policy reports from international, intergovernmental, and
transnational organizations (i.e. Organization of American States,
Inter-American Development Bank…) dedicated to foster e-
Government in LatAm during the last ten years. It also analyses
statistical data about e-Government developments in the region.
Thus, this paper assembles qualitative and quantitative methods to
focus on the study of the most salient ideas, priorities, and values
of key drivers in the enhancement of e-Government policies.
The following section presents the development of e-Government
readiness from a comparative perspective. This overview needs to
be brought forward by giving an approximation to the drivers of
the e-Government agenda in the LatAm region, notably intergovernmental,
international, and transnational organizations
devoted to formulate, design, fund, and implement projects,
initiatives, or regulations within this field. Finally, the conclusion
section debates the contents of the paper, research implications
and limitations. At the same time, it discusses the institutional
implications of the policy transfer process related to e-
Government that it is supposed to be occurring within this
emergent and vibrant region.

2. COMPARATIVE E-GOVERNMENT IN
LATIN AMERICA
Comparative data about the evolution of e-Government in LatAm
is available from different sources. This section pinpoints some
dimensions of the deployment of ICTs and the Internet within the
countries of the region (e-Government demand-side). Also, it
offers data about the United Nations e-Government readiness
report (e-Government supply-side). Overall, the picture of the e-
Government (potential) demand-side in LatAm resembles
disparities if one look at in a country-by-country basis (see Table
1). For example, there exist important differences among the
societies of the region regarding to the access to the Internet. On
the one hand, a group of experienced countries lead the Internet
access in the region with more than 50% of users each. This group
concentrates almost 30% of the Internet demand of the region. In
second place, a group of six countries has not yet reached the
barrier of 50% of the population connected (with 30% at least).
Here, Mexico and Brazil are the most populated countries in the
region, and they accumulate more than 50% of the Internet users.
Finally, a group of less experienced societies shows the lowest
rates of Internet access in the region (less than 30% of Internet
users). This last group still exhibits a significant lack in terms of
basic accessibility to the Internet, exemplifying the most negative
side of the digital divide.
Table 1. e-Government (potential) demand-side in Latin
American countries
Internet users
(latest data,
2011) (*)
Penetration
(%
population)
Broadband
subscribers
(2010) (**)
Household
use of
computers
(%) (***)
Mobile
phone
subscriptions
(per 100
inhabitants)
(2010)
Argentina 27.568.000 66.0 9.56 21.9 141.79
Bolivia 1.225.000 12.1 0.97 17.1 72.30
Brazil 75.982.000 37.4 7.23 30.9 104.10
Chile 9.254.423 54.8 10.45 33.1 116.00
Colombia 22.538.000 50.4 5.66 22.8 93.76
Costa Rica 2.000.000 43.7 6.19 33.9 65.14
Cuba 1.605.000 14.5 0.03 2.1 8.91
Dominican 4.116.870 41.3 3.64 13.0 89.58
Republic
Ecuador 3.352.000 22.3 1.36 22.8 102.18
El Salvador 1.035.940 17.1 2.83 10.9 124.34
Guatemala 2.280.000 16.5 1.80 10.7 125.57
Honduras 958.500 11.8 1.00 10.1 125.06
Mexico 34.900.000 30.7 9.98 25.7 80.55
Nicaragua 600.000 10.6 0.82 6.3 65.14
Panama 959.900 27.7 7.84 16.9 184.72
Paraguay 1.104.700 17.1 0.61 14.9 91.64
Peru 9.157.800 31.3 3.14 16.2 100.13
Uruguay 1.855.000 56.1 11.37 38.8 131.71
Venezuela 10.421.557 37.7 5.37 14.6 96.20
Total/Mean 212.401.030 36.7
Sources: (*) Internet World Stats (2011). Available:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm. Access data: September 1st 2011. (**)
ITU. Available: http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/icteye/Indicators/Indicators.aspx#. Access
data: September 1st 2011. (***) CEPAL. Estimations are based on household surveys
for each country between 2006 and 2008 (Argentine is an estimation of 2001, last year
with household survey information). Available: http://www.eclac.cl/cgibin/getprod.asp?xml=/socinfo/noticias/paginas/6/34246/P34246.xml&xsl=/socinfo/tpl/p
18f.xsl&base=/socinfo/tpl/top-bottom.xsl. Access data: September 1st 2011.
This picture of the e-Government (potential) demand-side requires
attention to other data (see Table 1). The use of personal
computing is an indicator of the extension of the traditional device
to measure technological literacy, and to access the Internet. In
general, data offer low rates in all the countries studied, ranging
from almost 40% in Uruguay to 6.3% and 2.1% in Nicaragua and
76
Cuba. These data contrast with the access to mobile telephones in
the region, which is remarkably higher in most of the cases. Here,
governments may see an opportunity to facilitate the access to the
e-Government services through mobile devices, regarding to their
growing level of acceptance, including those cases with more
limited Internet social penetration. Besides, broadband
connections facilitate the access to the most sophisticated services
available in the Internet, including electronic commerce, live
video and music streaming, or transactional interactions with
governmental agencies. Nonetheless the diffusion is very limited
in all the countries of the region, with only two cases (Uruguay
and Chile) with more than 10% of broadband subscribers.
On the other hand, it is also important the study of the e-
Government supply-side in the region (see Table 2). The most
interesting conclusion of this comparative analysis of the UN e-
Government readiness index is that in LatAm countries the online
service delivery index is more developed than the general e-
Government readiness index. In other words, the supply-side of e-
Government (on-line service delivery) has been more expanded
than the demand-side (equipment and digital education) in the
countries of the region. This seems to be clearly the case of
Colombia or Chile, and it is the same situation in other less
developed including El Salvador or Dominican Republic.
Table 2. United Nations e-Government readiness index and
on-line service delivery in Latin America
On-line service delivery e-Government readiness
Ranking Index Ranking Index
position 2012 2012 position 2012 2012
Argentina 61 0.5294 56 0.6228
Bolivia 97 0.4118 106 0.4678
Brazil 32 0.6732 59 0.6167
Chile 24 0.7516 39 0.6769
Colombia 16 0.8341 43 0.6572
Costa Rica 69 0.4967 77 0.5397
Cuba 129 0.3072 110 0.4488
Dominican Republic 57 0.5359 89 0.5130
Ecuador 84 0.4575 102 0.4869
El Salvador 32 0.6732 74 0.5513
Guatemala 81 0.4641 112 0.4390
Honduras 100 0.3791 117 0.4341
Mexico 28 0.7320 55 0.6240
Nicaragua 125 0.3137 130 0.3621
Panama 82 0.4641 66 0.5733
Paraguay 85 0.4575 104 0.4802
Peru 63 0.5163 82 0.5230
Uruguay 53 0.5490 50 0.6315
Venezuela 76 0.4837 71 0.5585
Source: United Nations. Available:
http://www.unpan.org/egovkb/global_reports/08report.htm. Access data: Sep. 5th 2011.
The analysis offers conclusions from a comparative point of view.
One of them is that the region experiences the digital divide
phenomenon, due to the marginal access to the technologies
across important groups of citizens, still out of the demand side.
At the same time, it seems to be that governments of the region
have invested their resources in the supply-side of e-Government,
while less efforts have been devoted to improve the citizens
access and literacy (demand-side). In order to understand why this
policy frame has been so successful, one may suggest that this is a
consequence of political decisions at national level. Conversely,
one may support that some type of policy transfer process has
been activated within this region. This second assumption is
studied in the next section.

3. REGIONAL DRIVERS OF THE E-
GOVERNMENT AGENDA
This section pinpoints the common efforts to develop e-
Government from a regional perspective, notably coming from
international, intergovernmental, or transnational organizations
devoted to formulate, design, fund, and implement projects,
initiatives, or regulations in this field. In doing so, we look at the
priorities, areas, and the type of projects enhanced by these
regional actors and organizations during the last years. This
analysis facilitates the understanding of how the e-Government
development within a region with very different administrative
realities has tended to share some common policy frames. In this
endeavor, some institutions like the CEPAL (United Nations
Economic Commission for Latin America), CLAD (Latin
American Center for Developing Administration), IDB (Inter-
American Development Bank), OAS (Organization of American
States), among others, have played a prominent role in fulfilling
regional approaches to build up e-Government.
One of the first regional definitions of e-Government derived
from the Ibero-American Chart for Electronic Government (Carta
Iberoamericana de Gobierno Electrónico) (ICEG) [3]. The
definition of e-Government refers to the ‘use of ICTs in public
administration to enhance the information and services offered to
the citizens, to support public management efficacy and efficiency,
and to improve the transparency of public sector and the
participation of the citizens’ [3:7]. This is important while
different country definitions and approaches to e-Government
have been rooted in similar principles. Other recent efforts have
emerged from the CLAD group of countries, i.e., the Ibero-
American Interoperability Framework, the Ibero-American Model
of Pubic Software for e-Government, or the Ibero-American
Framework for Social Electronic Identification. Undoubtedly,
these official documents have been cited and used in national
strategies and blueprints, and they still provide shared guidelines
fostering e-Government in the region.
Other sources of regional influence and vision for the
development of e-Government in LatAm have derived from the
eLAC strategies. eLAC is a regional strategy for the development
of Information Society (IS) from a harmonized perspective, with
the support of CEPAL, using ICTs as instruments for economic
development and social inclusion. Initially, it was endorsed in
2005 in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) as a long-term vision (until 2015)
with short terms milestones (eLac 2007 and eLac 2010), in line
with the Millenimum Development goals and those of the IS
World Summit, which adopted concrete qualitative and
quantitative goals to be achieved, also in the field of e-
Government [1]. In general, the e-Government section of eLAC
2015 fosters the diffusion of governmental agencies on the web
and the sophistication of electronic services on-line [2]. This set
of goals gives a sense of common ideas, values, and priorities
within the diversity of the region. Another key aspect is the eLAC
2015 focus on integration, interoperability, common standards,
and collaborative work in the region.
An archetype instrument derived from eLAC 2015 is the creation
of the Network of e-Government Leaders of Latin America and
the Caribbean (REDGEALC). REDGEALC has promoted the
collaboration of LatAm governments from a technical point of
view. This network of national experts acts as a forum to boost e-
Government in the region, but also as an institutional mechanism
to enforce, even informally, the policy transfer process in the
77
field. REDGEALC actions, meetings, and projects are funded by
international organizations like the IDB or OAS, and it is intended
to deepen the technical collaboration among the units devoted to
manage national e-Government policies and strategies within the
countries of the region. At the same, REDGEALC has expanded a
network of key players, less political and more administrative,
putting together a pool of middle-level managers involved in
fostering e-Government in the region. One of the most remarkable
projects of REDGEALC is eGobex, a common tool for sharing e-
Government knowledge and applications at national, regional, and
local layers (see: http://www.egobex.net/home/en/). This platform
of solutions is based on different topics, among others, electronic
citizen services, document management, e-justice, m-government,
human resources management, e-procurement, or e-health.
eGobex also facilitates other tools by facilitating the exchange of
experiences among the public administrations of the region,
providing a pool of experts in different aspects of e-Government,
or offering virtual training for practitioners. Also, news and
comments about developments of e-Government in the LatAm
region are also provided by this shared digital platform.
In sum, eLAC 2015 guidelines, REDGEALC network, as well as
CEPAL, and other abovementioned international and
intergovernmental institutions (CLAD, OAS, etc.), and the
instruments behind them, play the role of framing this policy field,
targeting the type of e-Government actions that need to be
enhanced, adopted, funded, and implemented by national public
administrations of the region. This group of instruments operates
as policy carriers, or policy transfer instruments. In some cases
they proceed as coercive mechanisms, while they can impose
views about what type of projects will be funded. In other cases,
they frame with ideas and rationales behind the strategies to foster
e-Government nationally. Whatever the case, it is clear that this
process has been, and it is, promoted within the LatAm region.
4. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
This paper has explored the most salient aspects of the e-
Government policy transfer process within the countries of
LatAm. The question motivating this study is whether or not Latin
American countries are building their national e-Government
policies with a regional perspective. The preliminary assumption
of this paper is that some international, intergovernmental, and
transnational organizations are shaping, at least in some extent,
the ideas, priorities, and initiatives implemented by the
governments of this region of the World. The analysis of previous
sections suggests the verification of this hypothesis.
Consequently, one may support the idea that e-Government in
LatAm may exemplify a policy transfer process.
Overall, one may say that e-Government policy ideas and frames
in LatAm countries derive from the abovementioned international,
inter-governmental, and transnational organizations. These actors
have played a growing role within an emergent policy field (e-
Government), in which a number of developing countries have put
their expectations to modernize their public sectors. What is more,
in developing countries e-Government projects are funded by
these organizations. This facilitates defining priorities, objectives,
and even in some cases, applications, platforms, and vendors
involved in the design, and implementation processes at national
level. Nonetheless, further investigation will be needed in the
future to identify in detail how the regional diffusion of ideas is
implemented in specific countries, and to what extent

governments can innovate or be disconnected from the general
ideas and priorities coming from this group of regional key
drivers.
In the LatAm region, different mechanisms have been oriented to
enhance the supply-side of e-Government. This process has
resulted in policy-makers focused on developing sophisticated
Internet portals and e-services, more than the provision of training
and digital literacy among the citizens. This conclusion is derived
from the importance of supply-side elements within national e-
Government policies, as well as from the analysis of data
provided in previous sections. Besides, it is worth noting the most
important areas of e-Government enhanced, i.e. e-procurement
portals, tax and social security agencies on-line, and more recently
electronic mechanisms for identification, interoperability
schemes, or social media tools for public sector organizations [4].
All of them are inextricably linked with these common beliefs,
mostly a consequence of a techno-centric, e-commerce oriented,
and new public management style of e-Government development.
This study is rooted on institutional theory and policy transfer
literature. Regarding to the previous analysis, this study shows
that international, intergovernmental, and transnational
organizations do not exert adaptive pressure in national states
(‘hard’ mechanisms); and that therefore framing or ‘soft’
mechanisms of policy transfer have characterized e-Government
[5]. In other words, they have promoted e-Government in the
nations of the region through non-coercive processes based on the
will of the participants (i.e. eLAC 2015 goals, CLAD conferences,
REDGEALC groups, etc.) to agree, by way of collective
deliberation, on procedural norms, modes of regulation and
common political objectives and, at the same time, to preserve the
diversity of national and even local experiences.
This type of policy transfer process has created convergence
around paradigms, or a policy frame. This occurs when national
jurisdictions accept new practices, actions and routines inspired
by the international, intergovernmental, and transnational
organizations involved, within an incremental adjustment
process of current domestic institutions. In other words, the
cognitive dimension within this type of intergovernmental
coordination process operates through knowledge-sharing [7,8],
mutual learning or exchange of best practices. In the case of e-
Government policy, the main purpose of the instruments
described throughout the previous section has been to encourage
a comparison of situations across all countries, seeking to share
some mutual representations, opening the road to common
perceptions of political priorities and goals, and enlarging the
variety of candidate alternatives, as a result of the exchange of
good practice (i.e. REDGEALC).
On the other hand, the organizations involved in the policy
transfer process also delivered legitimacy and, less commonly,
solutions to national authorities responsible for e-Government
policies. By the mid of the previous decade, the majority of
LatAm governments perceived this area as a new policy field,
and recognized the extreme importance of the Internet, web sites
and interaction with citizens using digital means. In this context,
eLAC strategy, the CLAD policy formulations, or OAS
initiatives emerged as a source of legitimacy for national
78
governments, as a consequence of the uncertainty about the
future of e-Government. In some cases, they provided solutions
for emergent challenges, altering the cognitive perceptions of
problems in national policy arenas. The logic behind this is
based on the conclusion that national administrations that do so
increase their legitimacy, and their acceptance in society,
independently of the immediate efficacy of practices and
procedures.
Further research will be required to conclude that a process of
policy transfer has operated successfully during the following
years promoting e-Government implementation in LatAm
countries. The next steps of this study will be oriented (a) to
deepen the extent of this process of policy transfer within the
different countries of the region; (b) to understand the
motivations behind the different levels of acceptance of this
process of policy transferability; and (c) to identify the nations
more prone to develop successfully their own e-Government
agendas within the region. This paper aims at providing the
basis for the future consolidation of this ambitious research
agenda.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This study has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy
and Competitiveness (project CSO2009-09169).
6. REFERENCES
[1] CEPAL. (2010a). Monitoring of the Plan of Action eLAC
2010: Advances and Challenges of the Information Society in
Latin America and the Caribbean. Lima, November 21-23th.
[2] CEPAL. (2010b). Plan of Action for the Information and
Knowledge Society in Latin American and the Caribbean
(eLAC 2015). Lima, November 21-23th.
[3] CLAD. (2007). Carta Iberoamericana de Gobierno
Electrónico. Caracas: Centro Latinoamericano de
Administración para el Desarrollo.
[4] Criado, J. I., et al. (2011). ‘Interoperabilidad de Gobierno
electrónico en Iberoamérica’. Reforma y Democracia 50:75-
114.
[5] Criado, J. I. (2009). ‘Europeanization of e-Government
Policy. Institutional Mechanisms and Implications for Public
Sector Innovation’. Information Polity 14: 299-314.
[6] Gil-García, J. R. (2012). Enacting Electronic Government
Success. New York: Springer.
[7] March J. G. & J. P. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: the
Organizational Basis of Politics, New York: Free Press,
1989.
[8] Scott W. R. & J. W. Meyer, The Organization of Societal
Sectors, in The New Institutionalism in Organizational
Analysis, W. W. Powell & P. J. DiMaggio (eds.), Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 108-140.

Lyudmila Bershadskaya
e-Gov Center, Analytic
V.O., Birzhevaya line, 14, office 270
199034, St.Petersburg, Russia
+7812-457-1796
analytics@egov-center.ru
e-Government in Russia: Is or Seems?
ABSTRACT
Electronic governance has received much interest worldwide and
a significant amount of attention and money is being put into
making e-governance a reality. Proper assessment of egovernance
projects gives us crucial information on the kinds of
changes needed in order to make them successful.
International ratings are extremely important in relation to
comparing the achievements of different countries, analysing their
experiences and making decisions about further development. On
the other hand, a country’s ranking position forms or adjusts the
world’s attitude toward this country.
This article discusses the possible problem when a high position
in such ranking becomes an aim in itself and determines the
misdirection of e-Governance development – in this, the case we
have chosen to study is Russia.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY; K.4.1 Public Policy Issues;
K.4.3 Organizational Impacts; K.5.2 Governmental Issues; K.6.1
Project and People Management - Strategic information systems
planning
General Terms
Management, Measurement
Keywords
E-Government, Public Policy, Goals, Ranking
1. INTRODUCTION
The assessment of e-government development held by the
Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations
in 2012 [1] showed that the Russian Federation (hereinafter RF or
Russia) has achieved outstanding success and raised its rating
from 59th position in 2010 to 27th place in 2011.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Andrei Chugunov
e-Gov Center, Director, PhD
V.O., Birzhevaya line, 14, office 270
199034, St.Petersburg, Russia
+7812-457-1796
chugunov@egov-center.ru
79
Dmitrii Trutnev
e-Gov Center, Deputy Director, CISA
V.O., Birzhevaya line, 14, office 270
199034, St.Petersburg, Russia
+7812-457-1796
trutnev@egov-center.ru
At the same time, other ratings do not show the same success in
other areas of Russia’s economic and political life. This
discrepancy can be clearly seen in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Russian Federation Rankings
For comparison, the status and trends of other indicators of the RF
were used as follows: GCI Global Competitiveness Index
rankings [2], IMD Global Competitiveness Index rankings [3],
World Bank Government Effectiveness Index [4], World Bank
Knowledge Index & Knowledge Economy Index [5], Legatum
Prosperity Index [6], Human Development Index [7], Doing
Business 2011 [8] and Corruption Perceptions Index [9]. The
question that the authors raise is as follows: is the formation of e-
Government development plans influenced by world rankings?
Research methods proposed:
- Analysis of the motives of decision-makers in government
and their reflections on the adopted legislative acts that define
e-Government development plans in Russia.
- Analysis of e-Government objectives stated in the adopted
legislative acts and their relationship with the common e-
Government goals and the indicators used in some rankings.

2. E-GOVERNMENT AS IS
2.1. E-Government Globally
E-government and e-governance are intrinsically related,
however, practice shows that successful e-government and egovernance
are not synonymous, but complementary [10]. This
article will use both terms as they are used in the referenced
documents.
E-government has many definitions:
o A new form of organizing public services based on extensive
use of ICT that offers citizens and businesses the new and
higher levels of efficiency and comfort in the delivery of
public services, and in obtaining information on the
performance of governmental agencies [11]
o “E-government” refers to the use by government agencies of
information technologies (such as Wide Area Networks, the
Internet and mobile computing) that have the ability to
transform relations with citizens, businesses and other arms of
government. These technologies can serve a variety of
different ends: better delivery of government services to
citizens, improved interactions with business and industry,
citizen empowerment through access to information, or more
efficient government management. The resulting benefits can
be less corruption, increased transparency, greater
convenience, revenue growth and/or cost reductions. [12]
o E-government is the use of information technology to support
government operations, engage citizens and provide
government services. [13]
o The term “e-government” focuses on the use of new
information and communication technologies (ICTs) by
governments as applied to the full range of government
functions. In particular, the networking potential offered by
the Internet and related technologies has the potential to
transform the structures and operation of government. [14]
Summing up all these definitions and the world’s best practice, we
can say that e-government and information technology serve as a
tool to achieve such national goals as better governance (and
common prosperity as a consequence) due to better (more
effective and efficient) governmental functions, services and
communications as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. E-government as a Tool
2.2. E-Government in the Russian Federation
The development of e-government in Russia began with the
adoption of the Federal target programme “Electronic Russia
(2002-2010)” in 2002. The main objectives of that programme
80
have been announced as “the creation of conditions for the
development of democracy, improving the functioning of the
economy, public administration and local self-government
through the introduction of ICT and mass distribution, and the
rights to freely seek, receive, transfer, production and
dissemination of information” [15]. Along with “Electronic
Russia”, other Federal target programmes “Budget Reform” and
“Administrative Reform” where carried out. After 2010 the
Programme “Information Society 2011-2020” became the
successor to “Electronic Russia”. The stated goals of all these
Federal target programmes were consistent with the global trend –
improving the quality of life through the use of ICT.
Over 2002-2011 there was much public investment in nationwide
projects aimed at e-government development in Russia. The
intensity of the legislative activity in the area of e-government
reflects the intensity of the government’s efforts and is illustrated
in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Quantity of E-Government Legislation Acts Adopted
It is logical to expect rapid positive changes in economy and
society in response to such vigorous state activity and investment
growth in the use of ICT in government, but this has not happened
as we have already seen in Figure 1.
3. THE ANALYSIS
3.1. Analysis of the motives of decision-makers
To understand the reasons for this weak link between the growing
use of ICT in government and any positive changes in other areas
of national development, we must understand the motivation of all
stakeholders, including the legislature, supreme executive power
(Ministry), the regional authorities and municipal government
agencies, companies and citizens.
Established in the last decade, the administrative system of the
Russian Federation is characterized by rigid top-down control
(“vertical power”). In such a system all orders comes from the top
down with, as a rule, lack of feedback, horizontal coordination
and local initiatives. In this system, until recently, the opinion of
citizens and businesses (except for the giant and state-owned
corporations) did not play any significant role, for example, no
large-scale studies of the requirements of citizens and businesses
on the quality of public services have been carried out. These
(citizen and business) stakeholders have no significant channels
by which to influence the authorities.
For the main implementers of e-government (regional authorities
and municipal government agencies), Federal Law and
Government Decrees are the only motive for the creation and
implementation of e-government (“system motivation –
administrative control and compulsion” [16]).

Observations over recent years show that the vast majority of
major legislation in the field of e-government was developed and
submitted for approval to the legislature by the executive
authorities – responsible ministries (Ministries of Economic
Development and of Telecommunications). These ministries are
under the direct authority of the Prime Minister (and, indirectly,
under the President) whose orders define the vector of the state in
general and e-government development in particular.
In 2000 at the G8 Summit the President of the Russian Federation
together with the other G8 leaders signed Okinawa’s Charter on
“Global Information Society” in which e-government was listed
as one of the components of the information society. Since that
time the implementation of commitments made under the
Okinawa Charter and improving Russia’s position in international
rankings have become among the highest priorities of the
President and Prime Minister of Russia (especially in the practical
absence of pressure from citizens and businesses as was
mentioned above). This desire to improve Russia’s position in
international rankings is frequently mentioned in the policy
speeches of the leaders of the state and has even been used as the
Key Performance Indicator in the text of the Concept of
Administrative Reform in the Russian Federation in 2006 – 2008
[17]. In particular, this document only elucidated upon the need to
improve Russia’s position in the United Nations E-Government
Survey’s ranking, GRICS, Doing Business and other rankings.
Tracing this chain of motivations, we can conclude that one of the
important factors determining the direction and results of egovernment
development in Russia is the international rankings
and the United Nations E-Government Survey among them.
Logically we can assume that if one of the important goals is the
position in a rating and the other motivators are not very strong,
then there is a natural desire to improve precisely those
characteristics that are evaluated during the surveys.
3.2. Analysis of E-Gov Objectives and
Indicators
The authors have carefully examined the key normative
documents that regulate the direction of e-government
development in Russia ([18], [19], [20], [21]).
These documents contain the requirements for naming and dating
the transfer of governmental service into electronic form, and
establishing the mandatory presence of governmental web-portals
and electronic interagency interaction. At the same time, they do
not contain any requirements for quality characteristics or the
expected results and impact of these innovations on the main and
common e-government goals. The same remark applies to all laws
and regulations adopted in this period.
E-government systems and applications created under these
conditions cannot contribute to goals of e-government such as
effectiveness, cost reduction, quality, anticorruption, etc. and
cannot be useful to citizens and businesses. The absence of these
effects of e-government projects in Russia has been shown here
above in Figure 1.
Indeed, in Russia in full accordance with those legislative acts, the
main efforts were aimed at creating a national central web-portal,
e-services portals, websites of all ministries and administrations,
and establishing a system of interagency interaction.
The United Nations E-Government Survey methodology says: “to
arrive at a set of online service index values, the researchers
assessed each country’s national website, including the national
81
central portal, e-services portal and e-participation portal, as well
as the websites of the related ministries of education, labour,
social services, health, finance and environment as applicable. In
addition to being assessed for content and features, the national
sites were tested for a minimal level of web content accessibility
as described in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines of the
World Wide Web Consortium” [22].
The generalized relationship between the main objectives of egovernment
(taken from its several definitions), United Nations E-
Government Survey indicators and the targets established by the
laws of the Russian Federation are shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Relationship between E-Gov Objectives, UN E-Gov
Survey Indicators and Targets Established by the RF’s Laws
E-Government Objectives
UN E-Gov Survey
Indicators
Targets Established
by the RF’s Laws
Gov. processes improvement X X
Effectiveness of government X X
Cost reduction X X
Quality of service delivery X X
Availability of Information � �
G2G relations improvement X �
G2B relations improvement � �
G2C relations improvement � �
Less corruption X X
Transparency improvement � �
From Table 1 we can see that in the Russian Federation has been
successfully (according to the UN rating) created that kind of egovernment,
which does not lead to the achievement of such goals
as prosperity due to good governance, better functions, services
and communications, simply because the government did not state
such objectives initially. Instead of e-government as a tool to
achieve these vital goals, Russia saw e-government as a goal in
itself, which takes resources away from other vital goals which
were almost forgotten and not supported (Figure 4).
Figure 3. E-Government as the Goal
Such logic can explain why in recent years Russia actively created
a web interface (front office) that assessors see well (“the national
government portal … looks very solid and representative” [1])
while the processes of public and municipal service delivery (back
office) still continue to run in the manual and paper-based mode,
under the old rules with the same low rate and high (if not higher)
cost. This inner being of the “electronic government” was
concealed from the assessors and cannot be evaluated from abroad
with the methodology used.
4. CONCLUSION
If seen in the light of the Russian case, a negative effect of

ankings on the formation of national e-government development
plans exists, therefore, it may also exist in other countries.
Other authors have found that the raised problem is very complex
and includes a spectrum of related problems:
o The success of the e-governance survey and ranking has been
limited so far [23]. Such a respected ranking as the United
Nations E-Government Survey in some cases could give
results which do not reflect the essence of the phenomena
occurring.
o It is possible to expect an immediate and strong impact of egovernment
evaluation studies on countries’ e-government
policies [24].
o Lack of attention to stakeholders’ interests can make the
results of the ranking meaningless [25].
These problems can and should be solved by joint efforts of
ranking organisations and appraised countries. In any case, all
participants of ranking processes should be aware of the existence
of such problems, understand their causes and take them into
consideration in order to prevent negative impacts.
The authors understand that the problem raised in this publication
has not been adequately studied yet and requires further research.
5. REFERENCES
[1] United Nations e-Government Surveys. [E-source]:
http://www.unpan.org/Home/tabid/1243/language/Library/Maj
orPublications/UNEGovernmentSurvey/tabid/646/language/en
-US/Default.aspx
[2] The World Economic Forum, GCI Global competitiveness
index rankings. [E-source]: http://www.weforum.org/
[3] IMD Global competitiveness index rankings.
[E-source]: http://www.imd.ch/
[4] World Bank Government Effectiveness Index. [E-source]:
http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/sc_chart.asp
[5] World Bank Knowledge Index & Knowledge Economy Index.
[E-source]:
http://info.worldbank.org/etools/kam2/KAM_page5.asp
[6] Legatum Institute, Legatum Prosperity Index.
[E-source]: http://www.prosperity.com/rankings.aspx
[7] UNDP’s Human development index. [E-source]:
http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2007-2008/
[8] International Finance Foundation & The World Bank’s
Measuring Business Regulation Report “Doing Business
2012”. [E-source]: http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings
[9] Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index
(CPI). [E-source]: http://www.transparency.org/
policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi
[10] Haiyan Qian, Citizen-Centric E-Strategies Toward More
Successful E-Governance, Journal of E-Governance, Volume
34 Issue 3, August 2011, Pages 119-129, IOS Press
Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
[11] Russian Federation, Concept of E-Government Formation till
the Year 2010. [E-source]: http://www.transparency.org/
policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi
[12] The World Bank, [E-source]: http://web.worldbank.org/
wbsite/external/topics/extinformationandcommunicationandte
chnologies/extegovernment/0,,contentMDK:20507153~menu
PK:702592~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:70258
6,00.html
82
[13] University at Albany, Center for Technology in Government
[E-source]: http://www.ctg.albany.edu/publications/reports/
future_of_egov?chapter=2
[14] OECD, Glossary of Statistical Terms
[E-source]: http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=4752
[15] RF Government Order of 28.01.2002 N 65. On the Federal
Target Program "Electronic RUSSIA (2002 – 2010)”
[E-source]: http://www.internet-law.ru/intlaw/laws/e-rus.htm
[16] Rustem Nureev, Political Economy of Russian “Vertical-of
Power”, Proceedings of the Second World Congress of the
Public Choice Societies, 8-11 March 2012, [E-source]:
http://www.pubchoicesoc.org/papers_2012/Nureev_Shulgin.p
df.
[17] RF Government Order dated October 25, 2005 N 1789-R On
the approval of the Concept of Administrative Reform in the
Russian Federation in 2006 - 2008 and action plan for
administrative reform in Russia in 2006 - 2010 (as amended)
[E-source]: http://base.garant.ru/188767/
[18] RF Government Order of 17.10.2009 N 1555-R "Transition
plan for federal executive bodies public services and execution
of public functions conversion into electronic form".
[E-source]:
http://government.consultant.ru/page.aspx?8411;1030853
[19] RF Government Order of 17.12.2009 N 1993-R
"Consolidated list of priority of state and municipal services
provided by executive bodies of subjects of the Russian
Federation and local authorities in electronic form".
[E-source]:
http://government.consultant.ru/page.aspx?1041050
[20] RF Federal Law of 27.07.2010 N 210 “On the organisation
of public and municipal services”
[E-source]: http://www.rg.ru/ 2010/07/30/gosusl-dok.html.
[21] RF Government Decree of 2.09.2010 N 1433 “Plan of action
needed to implement the Federal Law “On the organisation of
public and municipal services”
[E-source]: http://www.rg.ru/ 2010/12/21/plan-site-dok.html
[22] United Nations Global E-government survey 2012
[E-source]: http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/
documents/un/unpan048065.pdf
[23] Ojo, A., Janowski, T,. Estevez, E., Building theoretical
foundations for electronic governance benchmarking,
Proceedings of the 10th IFIP WG 8.5 international conference
on Electronic government, Springer-Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg
©2011
[24] Janssen, D., Rotthier, S., Snijkers, K., If you measure it they
will score: An assessment of international eGovernment
benchmarking. Information Polity Journal (Volume 9 Issue
3,4, December 2004)
[25] Rahul De', E-Government systems in developing countries:
stakeholders and conflict. EGOV'05 .Proceedings of the 4th
international conference on Electronic Government. Springer-
Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg ©2005

Session 4
Egov Adoption & Usage

Framework for Useful Transparency Websites for Citizens
ABSTRACT
In this paper, I describe the need to elaborate a theoretical
framework that could help governments to improve their
transparency and access to information websites beyond standard
transparency obligations. If developed properly, these websites
could offer information that is actually useful for ordinary
citizens. In addition, I review literature of e-transparency web site
evaluations in Mexico, as well as some examples of initiatives that
have aimed to provide the ordinary citizen with useful
information. Finally, this paper proposes a research agenda that
could help to develop this framework. This is a work in progress.
Josune Arcelus
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J.1.4 [Computer Applications]: Administrative Data Processing -
Government
General Terms
Management, Human Factors
Keywords
Transparency Websites, Access to Information, e-Transparency,
e-Government, Open Government
1. INTRODUCTION
During the last decade, the topic of transparency has taken a great
deal of importance in Mexico. In 2000 Vicente Fox, the
presidential candidate of National Action Party (PAN), defeated
the long lasting ruling party, the Institutionalized Revolutionary
Party (PRI) under the political banner that government
transparency will empower citizens to demand a more democratic
government. Twelve years after this promise, one of the few
tangible achievements of the new democratic government has
been the growing importance of transparency and access to public
information. In 2002, the Federal Transparency and Access to
Public Information Law (Ley Federal de Transparencia y Acceso
a la Información Pública -- LFTAIP) was approved by Congress.
In addition, a special institute (Instituto Federal para Acceso a la
Informacion-- IFAI) was created to supervise compliance of this
law. Gradually, each state and the Federal District (Mexico City)
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Blvd Jose Maria Morelos 1506
Leon, Guanajuato, CP 24263
+52(477)781 0347
josune.arcelus@gmail.com
83
published their own laws to guide their obligations at the local
level.
The LFTAIP describes in its 7 th article the mandatory information
that must be published electronically, and states in its 9 th article
[1] that information must be available via electronic media.
Over the last ten years state and local governments and their
agencies have created their own transparency websites to comply
with their respective laws.
Different academic and civil society organizations like CIDE
(Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica) and Article XIX
have been evaluating federal and state governments to assess their
websites as well as their overall transparency initiatives. These
evaluations are widely publicized in the media. Therefore,
governments are trying continually to improve in order to obtain
better evaluations.
Based on the assumption that better informed citizens make better
citizens, this law and transparency websites would contribute to a
more democratic society. Transparency websites would open
mechanisms to supervise the government, and harness a new
desired relationship between citizens and governments. However,
there is the perception that the information requested through
websites is not being used directly by citizens, but by media,
political opposition, and other enemies of the groups in power.
This assumption is hard to evaluate with government produced
data because the petition online system (Sistema de Solicitud de
Información -- SISI) allows for anonymity. Therefore, making it
hard to elaborate a precise analysis of who is requesting
information. However, there is evidence that suggests that citizens
are not making transparency and access to information part of
their lives. According to a survey conducted by Parametría in
2011 [2], only 19% of the persons interviewed were able to
identify the IFAI, 14% knew how to make a petition to the
government, and about 60% thought that information about
government expenses and public servants salaries is “obscure” or
difficult to reach.
Interestingly, the transparency websites users and the petition
system (SISI) users do not consider that transparency and access
to information has been achieved after they interacted with them.
In a survey/focus group published in the Mexican Journal
Derecho Comparado de la Información [3], it is pointed out that
while the test subjects find that the websites comply with what is
required by law to be published, the website does not promote
transparency in itself or the right to know. All interviewed
subjects had access to the federal transparency web site, or used
the SISI.

Several governments are aware of these deficiencies, yet because
they are mostly evaluated and rewarded for complying with the
law, they focus mostly on the latter.
Additionally, evaluators have not found an impartial set of criteria
regarding contents, from where to measure usefulness of
information. There is agreement that evaluations currently lack a
framework to measure content, apart from the mandatory list
provided by the law
In 2011 the Mexican Federal Government launched an initiative [4]
of Focused Transparency (Transparencia Focalizada), intended to
push information that may not be required by law but that is
considered useful to the government. In addition, Mexico City´s
government has published several transparency websites that
evolve around topics of interest to the ordinary citizen, for
instance, transportation, environment and procedures (tramites y
servicios).
However, there is not yet a neutral standard list of elements that
could be considered when designing a website, and performing
evaluation studies.
The purpose of this article is to set the stage for a theoretical
framework and guidelines that would allow for a more
comprehensive evaluation of transparency and access to
information web portals, and that would include compliance of a
minimum set of useful content, apart from what is currently
required by law.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW AND MAJOR
ISSUES
2.1 Transparency and Access to Information
as Part of Accountability
Elaboration of a framework for transparency and access to
information web portals requires defining both transparency and
access to information in the right context.
Literature does not equate transparency to access to information
[5], although both concepts can be included within the concept of
accountability. Lopez-Ayllon and Arellano explain that
accountability has a dimension of answerability, which
comprehends two components: information and justification. The
information component implies an authority that is obliged to
provide information and a citizen that has the right to access that
information. The justification component of answerability is more
complex and harder to achieve, since it implies the justification of
actions by governments to citizens and a dialogue between them.
The authors mention that these two components, information and
justification, imply the possibility of the citizens to sanction, and
that having all these components of information, justification and
sanction allow for a complete accountability.
In addition, Lopez-Ayllon and Arellano develop a diagram that
depicts an incremental relationship among access to information,
transparency, accountability, and democratic governance. Access
to information is the most basic component, as shown below:
Access to Information < Transparency < Accountability <
Democratic Governance
The implications of this concept have a relevant application for
government websites, since it draws possible evolutionary stages
for a complete transparency and access to information website.
84
This is actually explained in a recent study of transparency and
access to information websites of Mexico [6]. In this work, the
author Sepulveda cites the stages of an e-Transparency web
portal, as defined by the University of Manchester [7]:
publication, transaction, reporting, openness and accountability.
The framework proposed in this paper should aim to the more
advanced stages, since it aims to provide guidelines for websites
that harness interaction between the government and the citizens.
2.2 Access to Information as a Human Right
Access to information can be understood under the notion of a
liberal state, where a state is constrained by a set of fundamental
rights of citizens [8].
In addition, access to information is seen as the key that enables
other rights. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, declares freedom of speech for which the right to know is
explicitly required. Within this context, the access to information
is seen as a component of other rights (e.g., free expression). In
other words, access of information protects other rights, helps in
the compliance of other rights, and prevents possible violations of
other human rights [9]. According to this perspective, the more
information citizens have, the more citizens’ rights will be
fulfilled [10].
Consideration of access to information as an enabler and protector
of other human rights should be incorporated as part of the
framework, since it complements the other visions that have been
applied to transparency websites.
The cited contextualization of transparency and accountability
take into account that the government must implement a policy
that actively engages the citizens in the evaluation of all policies
[5]. This paper by López-Ayllón and Arellano sets the extent and
reach of the website regarding the achievement of democracyoriented
goals; however, it does not help to define the basic
contents of a website that enables transparency and access to
information.
A website framework that considers human rights germane
provides the advantage of universality and simplicity as to what
information must be included in any attempt to promote
transparency and access to information.
2.3 Websites Evaluations and Compliance of
the Law
Several efforts have been made to measure the compliance of the
LFTAIP and the different state laws. The metrics developed by
CIDE are the ones that are more widely recognized by the media
and the government. CIDE’s metrics indicators provide a final
grade. The four main aspects evaluated by CIDE include
evaluation of web sites, normative quality, mystery shopper based
on information requests, and institutional quality [5][11].
The evaluation of the website mostly consists of checking the
existence of all mandatory information (used as variables) as
required by law, for example budget, outcomes of investigations,
salaries, public servant directories, goals, programs, expenses,
procurement, procedures, and services. Out of the 15 variables
used as information proxies, only one is assigned to everything
that has to do with the usability and design of the website.
The limit of this evaluation approach is that governments that get
a good grade in the evaluation of the website might think that they

are doing a good job overall in regards to their websites, while
they are mostly doing a good job only in including the legally
required information. As noted above users might acknowledge
that the website provides the information required by law, and yet
not feel their transparency and right-to-know needs are being
fulfilled.
The study conducted by Sepúlveda [6] suggests that quality of the
law (i.e., how advanced the law is in terms of access to
information and democratization) is not related to her
transparency website index, in which she includes more
technology related aspects. In other words, she shows that there is
no relationship between how good the transparency law is and the
quality of its transparency website.
Lastly, the minimal information demanded by the LFTAIP, falls
short within what a government is expected by its citizens to
publish in order to be regarded as transparent. The emphasis
placed in content targeted to fight corruption resulted in a tight
and unattractive set of information for ordinary citizens as can be
observed both in Parametría [2] and the Comparative Law Journal
[3] surveys.
The framework that shall be developed when this work is
completed will emphatically seek to raise the bar of what is
considered the minimum mandatory information that a
government should share with the citizens.
2.4 Usability and Other Types of Friendliness
It is important for any website that the users remain in their
websites for more than 10 seconds before they click-away. This
concept of usability, as defined by Nielsen [12], parts from the
assumption that the Internet user has thousands of options to
choose from when browsing.
Governments allocate a lot of money and other resources to
organize, sort and publish information on their websites just to
discover that they are not used because the information is not
displayed in an attractive way.
The topic of usability is noted in Sepulveda´s [6] study and in the
yearly ranking [13] published by the magazine Política Digital
issued in Mexico. Both studies develop an index to evaluate
exclusively Transparency websites, and suggest specifications of a
good web site, which include usability and accessibility.
The issue of an easy-to-understand language is mentioned in
Sepulveda´s study, but it is specified that it cannot be evaluated.
The study refers to the Mexican Federal Government initiative of
citizen´s language (lenguaje ciudadano), which calls all the
agencies for action to provide information in a simpler and lessbureaucratic
manner.
The trustworthiness of the information provided in the website is
mentioned in both studies, yet no repeatable and neutral
measurement is provided to evaluate it. According to the studies,
trustworthiness always depends on the evaluator´s perception.
The framework will incorporate the usability and accessibility
aspects of previous studies.
2.5 Current Examples of Focused
Transparency
In 2011, the Mexican Federal Government launched an initiative
called Focus on Socially Useful Information [4][14], through
85
which it encourages its agencies to publish more information than
that required by law. The information provided should include
information that citizens might find useful in their every-day lives.
This initiative defines Focused or Socially Useful Transparency as
“providing valuable information to the citizen so that she can
make better informed decisions about procedures and services, or
in aspects that affect her every day life, to prevent public risks or
solve problems from the social sphere.”
The Secretary of Public Administration (Secretaría de la Función
Pública) has already elaborated guidelines with criteria that all
agencies must incorporate when updating information in their
respective websites and transparency sections. A special call is
made to include information beyond what is required by law, as
well as to rephrase, summarize and reorganize the information
that is produced within a bureaucratic environment to
communicate it in a simpler way.
Another attempt to provide more valuable information to citizen´s
has been that of Mexico City´s government of Focused
Transparency [15]. The approach in this case has been to define a
set of thematic websites that publish all the information related to
that topic, arranged and displayed in a question-and-answer
fashion. For example, what is environmental policy…? What is
the impact of CO2 emissions in my life…? How can I become
part of the solution to environmental problems…? [16]
Another initiative was presented by Mexico City´s Governement
where the strategy was described as groups of information
packages:
Table 1. Information Packages
Procurement Environment
Transportation
traffic
and Health
Procedures and Employment and
Services
Education
Social Programs Tourism
Budget Citizen´s requests and
legal petitions
Civil Protection Culture
Public Works Business
So far, the environment, transportation and procedures and
services focused transparency websites have been created.
3. METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCH
The framework suggested in this paper will be a compilation of
findings from the different issues analyzed throughout the
literature, mainly:
o The need to have an accountability approach that goes
beyond the mere provision of mandatory information and
incorporates the justification component;
o The need to provide a content skeleton that can be widely
accepted, because it adjusts to the essence and raison-de-etre
of government, as well as to the nature of human beings as
human beings and not just citizen; and
o The need to incorporate usability and other websites
friendliness criteria as an important element.

Qualitative analysis of websites and surveys will provide a
guideline-like framework that governments may be able to use to
organize their transparency and access to information web sites.
Hopefully, this suggested framework would help supervise the
government and provide evaluators with more tools to measure
transparency beyond the compliance of law.
3.1 Accountability Approach
The ten best ranked access to information and transparency (or
similar) websites in the world as presented in the literature
previously reviewed will be analyzed to gather best practices that
show high evolution in terms of e-Transparency. Already existing
practices of accountability will be identified and incorporated into
a framework.
3.2 Universal Content Skeleton
One of the main gaps observed in the literature reviewed is the
lack of a content skeleton for those websites that goes beyond the
standard list set up by the law. In order to be able to convince
government and academia to accept the contents proposed by such
a skeleton, there needs to be some sort of philosophical theory that
is universal (within a democratic context) and that cannot be
contested. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights offers a
perfect platform for this purpose, because of its universality, its
world-wide acceptance, and its depth.
The list of the human rights contained in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights will be compared to the mandatory
contents that the LFTAIP demands, and possible gaps will be
identified. Additionally, human-rights oriented information
architecture will be proposed.
In order to incorporate the citizen´s point of view in regards to
what a government should be mainly accountable for, a survey
will be conducted, where citizens will be required to list top-ofmind
information that they would expect the government to
publish. They will also be asked to rank from a list of information
that governments publish which ones do they think are more
important, and explain, how many times in that year they have had
to use that information; finally, citizens will be proposed to list the
names of three activities that they perform weekly in which they
think the government is involved. The outcomes of this survey
will also be considered in the elaboration of a content skeleton.
3.3 Usability and Website Friendliness
A detailed compilation of usability, accessibility and friendliness
criteria will be listed, based on the studies cited. Also, a list of
information pushed by the agencies as useful will be analyzed,
and interviews will be held with the people responsible of both
initiatives in order to assess their success and challenges.
The resultant framework will constitute a list of elements to be
incorporated within future evaluations, but will not provide
specific or new metrics for those evaluations.
86
4. REFERENCES
[1] Cámara de Diputados, Ley Federal de Transparencia y
Acceso a la Información Pública, Diario Oficial de la
Federación, 11 de junio del 2002, 3-5
[2] Parametría, Los mexicanos y su interés por la transparencia.
http://www.parametria.com.mx/DetalleEstudio.php?E=4320,
2011.
[3] Contreras Padilla, S, E-Government y acceso a la
información en México, Derecho Comparado de la
Información, núm. 11, Enero-Junio 2008
[4] Secretaria de la Funcion Publica, Procedimiento 6.4:
Información Socialmente Util o Focalizada, MAAGT,
agosto 2011
[5] Lopez-Ayllon, S. and Arrellano-Gault, D., Estudio en
material de transparencia de otros sujetos obligados por la
Ley Federal de Transparencia y Acceso a la Información
Pública Gubernamental, CIDE-IFAI-UNAM, 2008
[6] Sepúlveda K., P., Transparencia Electrónica en México: Un
Analisis de las Estrategias de los Gobiernos Estatales en
Internet, Tesis ITAM, 2008
[7] Institute for Development Policy and Management (IDPM),
University of Manchester, United Kingdom, 2004:
www.egov4dev.org/transpdefn.htm
[8] Rodríguez Zepeda, Jesús. Estado y transparencia: un paseo
por la filosofía política, Cuadernillos del IFAI, 2006
[9] Jagwanth, S. “The Right to Information as a Leverage Right”
in The Right to Know, The Right to Live: Access to
Information and Socio-Economic Justice, Calland, Richard
and Allison Tilley, ed. Open Democracy Advice Centre,
2002, p.7.
[10] Ramirez Salazar, Los Derechos Humanos desde la
Perspectiva del Derecho de Acceso a la Información, Article
XIX-InfoDF, CDHDF, 2009, p. 53-59
[11] COMAIP and CIDE presentations about Metrica de la
Transparencia www.metricadetransparencia.cide.edu
[12] Nielsen, J., Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design,
www.usability.org
[13] Sandoval, R., Ranking de Portales de Transparencia, Política
Digital, http://www.politicadigital.com.mx
[14] Secretaria de la Funcion Publica, Guia para la Identificacion
y Difusion de la Informacion Socialmente Util o Focalizada,
2010
[15] CGMA, Paquetes de Información, Portal de Transparencia
Focalizada del Gobierno del Distrito Federal, 2009
[16] http://www.transparenciamedioambiente.df.gob.mx

The Circular Continuum of Agencies, Libraries, and Users:
A Model of E-Government in Practice
Natalie Greene Taylor
Information Policy & Access Center,
University of Maryland-College Park
ngreenetaylor@gmail.com
Paul T. Jaeger
Information Policy & Access Center,
University of Maryland-College Park
pjaeger@umd.edu
ABSTRACT
When e-government first became a viable solution to the
dissemination of government information, experts believed that
the rise of direct government-to-citizen (G2C) services would
improve government transparency and foster civic engagement. It
soon became clear, however, that not all users were not getting the
type of information or instruction that they needed from this
arrangement, and that there was a need for an intermediary in this
continuum of services. Increasingly, libraries fulfill this role.
Instead of direct government-to-user interaction, information
channels flow from agency to librarian to user, from user back up
to agency, and from agency to user to librarian. This paper
expands on the idea of these multiple pathways of information
through research conducted in collaboration with libraries,
government agencies, state library agencies, and a national library
association in the United States with aims to create an egovernment
web resource to assist librarians engaging in egovernment
services. The different pathways of information both
informed the creation of the web resource and offered a practical
model of e-government, important for other projects dealing with
similar information.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
A.1 INTRODUCTORY AND SURVEY
General Terms
Documentation, Human Factors, Theory
Keywords
Digital Government, Electronic Government, Models
1. INTRODUCTION
In the early stages of e-government, expectations ranged from
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Ursula Gorham
Information Policy & Access Center,
University of Maryland-College Park
ugorhos@yahoo.com
John Carlo Bertot
Information Policy & Access Center,
University of Maryland-College Park
jbertot@umd.edu
87
Ruth Lincoln
Information Policy & Access Center,
University of Maryland-College Park
rlincoln21@gmail.com
Elizabeth Larson
Information Policy & Access Center,
University of Maryland-College Park
elclarson@gmail.com
cautious optimism to the belief that e-government would promote
unprecedented waves of citizen interaction with the government.
These government-to-citizen (G2C) services were expected to cut
out information middle-men and let users interact directly with
their government. 1 It soon became clear, however, that users were
not getting the type of instruction or information they needed from
this arrangement. Government agencies were not soliciting user
input in developing services, feedback was not a priority,
evaluation data was almost non-existent, and users identified a
variety of access issues that kept them from fully engaging with
the services [9]. Increasingly, public librarians found that they
were serving as the intermediary for the government in this
continuum of services. In addition, users were communicating
their frustrations, concerns, and suggestions about government
information to these librarians, instead of the government directly.
Rather than the government speaking directly to users, it became
the librarian’s job to disseminate information, assist patrons with
form completion, or engage in other aspects of e-government,
often without the guidance of the government agencies from
which it originated . Because of the existence of multiple
participants in the flow of government information, a
straightforward pathway of e-government does not exist. This
paper focuses on two main research questions: 1) what are the
pathways of e-government information and 2) what implications
do these pathways have on e-government services and systems?
Based on a multi-method approach using informal interviews, site
visits, and survey data, the researchers propose a model
representing a circular flow of information with e-government
information traveling from agency to librarian to user, from user
back up to agency, and from agency to user to librarian. This
model has implications for the design of e-government services
and the dissemination of information. Findings made in
connection with the development of this model also serve to
inform the development of a Web resource to assist librarians
1 It is important to note that the term “Government-to-Citizen” is
one historically used in e-government research. In this paper,
outside of direct references to prior research, we have used the
term “user” instead, acknowledging the individuals in need of egovernment
information who may not have citizen status. The
term “user” thus refers to individuals who are either actively
accessing e-government information or are attempting to do so.

serving as intermediaries for e-government services and resources.
The Web resource, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library
Services, is being developed by the authors in conjunction with
the American Library Association, as well as various library and
government agency partners, and aims to create an e-government
web resource for librarians dealing with tax and immigration
issues.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 E-Government: A history
Since the advent of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, there
has been a surge in the use of e-government by federal, state, and
local governments to deliver information, communication, and
services to users, with much of this content and services now
available only online. As e-government has matured into a
dynamic socio-technical system encompassing issues of
governance, societal trends, technological change, information
management, interaction, and human factors [15], G2C, or
government-to-citizen service, has become one of the central uses
of e-government. Democratic governance relies on access to the
government by citizens [34], resulting in G2C information,
communication, and services holding significant potential not
only for facilitating interactions, but also for promoting
democracy.
For the average user, e-government access now stands as the
primary means of getting government information and interacting
with the government [11]. G2C e-government services are used as
a means to address a wide range of user needs – unemployment
benefits, voter registration, license application and renewal, tax
payments, enrollment of children in school, immigration and
citizenship, and many similarly important functions [13], [18],
[20]. Just from this broad overview of e-government topics, it is
clear that this information intersects with almost every facet of
everyday life. As such, e-government information does not always
flow directly from the source to the user. As shown in Figure 1
(below), other stakeholders have key roles and responsibilities in
the e-government process.
Figure 1. Stakeholders in E-Government Dissemination –
Roles and Responsibilities
Government
Entities
Non-
Governmental
Organizations
Libraries
Businesses
- Create content
- Mandate use (e.g. Electronic Data
Procurement processes)
- Disseminate information via electronic
media (e.g. websites, social media, etc)
- Disseminate information
- Analyze information and re-release for
community needs
- Fund programs that tailor e-government
content to needs of users
- Provide information for community
- Offer personalized help to patrons
- Provide access to technology
- Possess knowledge of patrons that can be
used to provide feedback to content creators
- Provide knowledge of user base (based on
consumer information)
- Provide funding and other resources for
projects that can benefit the community
- Provide feedback to content creators about
88
Users effectiveness of dissemination
- Possess the needs that determine strategies
of content developers and providers
This paper largely focuses on three of these stakeholders – the
government agencies that produce e-government information,
libraries that act as intermediaries, and users. That said, NGOs
and businesses often directly impact the type of services libraries
can offer, the way the information gets disseminated to users, and
the opportunities users have for resources to help them decipher
the government information. The extent of these impacts is an
issue worth exploring through future research.
The growing involvement of intermediaries in G2C government
coincides with users’ increased need for e-government access. In
2003, a CRS report identified G2C government as “initiatives
[that] are designed to facilitate citizen interaction with
government,” [34, pp. 8]. Many agencies now view e-government
as their primary method for interacting with members of the
public [4], [5], [16], [37]. The recent explosion of usage of social
media platforms – such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr - has
led many government agencies to view social media as a core
aspect of G2C services [6], [10], [29]. Not surprisingly, G2C
services are central to both of the primary reasons typically
presented in favor of continuing to expand e-government: 1)
engaging citizenry in government in a user-centered manner, and
2) developing quality government services and delivery systems
that are efficient and effective [4].
G2C services, however, are not always designed to make life
simple for the users. In fact, from the agency perspective, the
focus has often been on making the interactions easier for the
agency, not the user [26]. A clear example of this situation was
demonstrated by the Medicare Part D enrollment program in
2006, which required senior citizens – a group with large gaps in
usage of the Internet – to examine the different plans and sign up
for one online [24].
One marker of early G2C literature was that accessing
government information online was deemed voluntary: “citizen
use of a Web-based state government service is an individual
choice and is not likely to be mandated” [14, pp. 3]. This soon
became an outdated assumption, as more government forms and
services became available exclusively online. The need to use egovernment
presents challenges for many members of the public
because they lack the technical skills to use the online functions,
lack sufficient Internet access, or are uncomfortable engaging in
online interactions without guidance [7], [8]. Many of these users
must find an outlet to engage e-government to accomplish
necessary educational, economic, social, and political functions.
The focus on agency savings over access is illuminated by the
emphasis on e-government when so many users still lack Internet
access or sufficient Internet access to interact with e-government.
In many locations in the United States, a lack of available
computers, low levels of Internet access, and low levels of basic
telecommunications infrastructure, are barriers to access. Many
households lack Internet access and many with Internet access
lack broadband speed access, which is necessary for most online
activities, including certain types of social media. Nearly 40% of
homes lack Internet access and many of those families have no
interest in or ability to get Internet access [21]. Among homes
with Internet access, 45% lack broadband access, while 10%

continue to rely on dial-up Internet service [22]. In rural areas,
only 38% of homes have broadband access [22].
Lack of access to technology is not the only barrier to G2C egovernment.
Even if the technological infrastructure is in place, egovernment
services are often limited by difficulties in searching
for and locating the desired information, a general lack of
familiarity with the structure of government, lack of education
about the value of e-government, language barriers, and attitudes
toward technology and government among many users [32], [33].
While many members of the public still struggle with G2C
information and services, government agencies have come to
focus on it as a means of cost savings rather than increasing
access for members of the public [26], [28]. Government agencies
have shifted responsibility to the users for innumerable functions
that the agencies had to handle before e-government– registering
students in school, paying fees and taxes, scheduling
appointments, taking driver’s education programs, applying for
permits, finding court proceedings, submitting local zoning board
information, requesting planning permits, searching property and
assessor databases, and completing numerous other federal, state,
and local government functions online.
2.2 The Role of Libraries in E-Government
Paralleling the rise of the Web and e-government, public libraries
quickly became providers of free public access to the Internet,
with virtually every public library already offering public access
by the year 2002 [2], [28].Throughout the intervening years, the
public library has served as the primary – or only available –
access point for G2C access, training, and assistance in
communities across the country [1]. In some sense, serving as
guarantor of G2C access and training is a natural extension of the
established social roles of the public library. “The public library is
one place that is culturally ingrained as a trusted source of free
and open information access and exchange” [30, pp. 487]. Given
the complexities of many G2C services, “even if Americans had
all the hardware they needed to access every bit of government
information they required, many would still need the help of
skilled librarians whose job it is to be familiar with multiple
systems of access to government systems” [19, pp. 124].
Several years ago, it became commonplace for government
agencies to direct users with questions about their websites to the
local public library [8], [7], [13]. Now, many federal, state, and
local government agencies continue to rely upon public libraries
to provide residents with access to and guidance in using G2C egovernment,
including the completion of applications and forms
[8], [7], [25], [27]. For example, the Florida Department of
Children and Families reduced the number of case workers and
assistance providers by over 3,000 positions due to its
implementation of the AccessFlorida online application system,
resulting in near complete lack of available agency staff from
which users can seek assistance [18].
Another example of this shift in information responsibility from
the agency to intermediaries is information provision during the
2005 Atlantic hurricane season. According to Jaeger et al,
librarians reported unprecedented numbers of patrons during the
emergencies. One librarian said, “We have a large number of
displaced people who are coming to rely upon the library in ways
many of them never expected. I’ve had so many people tell me
that they had never been to a library before they had to find
89
someplace to file a FEMA application or insurance claim. Many
of these people knew nothing about computers and would have
been totally lost without the staff’s help.…” [31, pp. 205]. What
would ordinarily have been the job of government-sponsored
disaster relief agencies became the province of the intermediary.
These examples show that librarians operate as an important
stakeholder in the delivery of e-government services. According
to the 2011-2012, Public Libraries Funding & Technology Access
Study (PLFTAS), 96.6 percent of public library outlets reported
that library staff members assist library patrons in applying for egovernment
services. Moreover, 91.8 percent reported that staff
members assist patrons in understanding how to access and use egovernment
websites. The following figure illustrates additional
roles that public libraries serve in connecting patrons with egovernment
services [3]. 2
Figure 2: E-Government Roles & Services of Public Libraries
E-Government Role or Service Percentage
Staff provide assistance to patrons applying for
or accessing e-government services
Staff provide as needed assistance to patrons for
understanding how to access and use egovernment
Websites
Staff provide assistance to patrons for
understanding government programs and services
Staff provide assistance to patrons for completing
government forms
The library developed guides, tip sheets, or other
tools to help patrons use e-government Websites
and services
The library offers training classes regarding the
use of government Websites, understanding
government programs, and completing electronic
forms
The library offered translation services for forms
and services in other languages
The library partnered with government agencies,
non-profit organizations, and others to provide egovernment
services
The library worked with government agencies
(local, state, or federal) to help agencies improve
their Websites and/or e-government services
The library has at least one staff member with
significant knowledge and skills in provision of
e- government services
96.6%
(n=12,607)
91.8%
(n=11,976)
50.0%
(n=6,528)
70.7%
(n=9,230)
20.6%
(n=2,686)
11.2%
(n=1,457)
7.8%
(n=1,020)
30.9%
(n=4,017)
11.0%
(n=1,438)
23.6%
2 Throughout this paper, the term “patron” is used when users are
either in the library, using library resources, or are the target of
library programs.

(n=3,078)
In summary, the various criticisms of G2C services, centered
mainly on the access issues described above have prompted
librarians to function as intermediaries in the G2C information
space.
Notwithstanding public librarians’ acceptance of greater
responsibility along this information continuum, there are obvious
problems with this developing intermediary role. While
government agencies indicate that relying on libraries for G2C egovernment
access and assistance allows the agencies to focus on
other issues [7],[8], [17], the provision of G2C access assistance
by public libraries creates a range of service, funding, technology,
and political challenges for the libraries [12], [28].
One problem is the fact that librarians are largely unrecognized in
any official capacity by the government agencies that encourage
their participation. Underlying this lack of recognition is the way
in which public libraries in the United States are funded.
Historically, 90% of public libraries are independent departments
within their local governments [36]. Accordingly, although
libraries receive state funding, as well as federal money through
the Library Services and Technology Act and the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, the majority of their funding
comes from local government agencies. This trend has become
more pronounced in recent years due to the ongoing economic
downturn, as local governments have struggled to fill the gap
between shrinking state budgets and increased demand for library
services [3] The end result is that funding for public libraries
comes principally from sources other than those federal and/or
state agencies that are shifting much of their service role to
libraries, raising the question of whether libraries have been
burdened with an unfunded mandate [7]
In addition, the expectation that librarians will understand the egovernment
systems and services is often unfounded. While
librarians are certainly capable of figuring out complicated
information, time restraints, concerns over legal liability, and the
constantly changing nature of government information makes the
intermediary role difficult. The lack of advance notice for many
new government information initiatives is one of several reasons
why librarians often feel as though they are left out of the
information loop. For example, a historical instance of this is the
closure of a Virginia unemployment office. In this particular
instance, a mere sign was placed on the door overnight informing
users of the office’s closure. Employees were notified at the same
time, leaving users with no information about the closure. Local
librarians, who were equally surprised by this sudden
development, had no choice but to manage an influx of
unemployed individuals, confused about this loss in services.
Librarians were forced into an unenviable position, in which they
had to provide assistance, despite having no prior knowledge of
the event that precipitated this influx. This is but one example of
an agency decision having unintended consequences on other
stakeholders in the information continuum.
These problems have only grown in importance with the increase
in the number of services being shifted from agency to librarian.
While the E-government Act of 2002 included language on the
need for federal government assessment of the impacts of the law
on public libraries and other social institutions, such studies were
never funded or conducted. Thus, the need for a reassessment of
90
the pathways of e-government information is particularly
important as further policy and funding decisions are made.
3. METHODOLOGY
The findings presented in this paper are based upon three
interrelated data collection efforts that informed the creation of an
e-government Web resource (LibEGov), initially focused on the
areas of immigration and taxation. The 2011-2012 Public Library
Funding & Technology Access Survey, funded by the American
Library Association and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is
the 14 th in a series of public library Internet access surveys
conducted since 1994. The Web-based survey was conducted
between September 2011 and November 2011, yielding 7,260
responses, a response rate of 83.1%. The survey drew a
proportionate-to-size stratified random sample that considered the
metropolitan status of the library (i.e., urban, suburban, and rural).
More specific methodology issues regarding the survey are
available at http://www.plinternetusrvey.org.
Data were also collected through site visits to seven public
libraries in five states (Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Maryland,
and Texas). The site visits included informal interviews with state
library staff, government officials, and community organization
leaders, all of which occurred between April 2011 and October
2011. For this component of the study, the authors sought to
include geographically dispersed public libraries that serve a
diverse set of communities (e.g., rural, suburban, and urban; high
immigrant concentrations; underserved populations; high
poverty). Library characteristics, such as size, number of staff,
and known e-government partnerships, also factored into the
selection process. In advance of the site visits, research was
undertaken to identify existing e-government collaborative
approaches, leading to a preliminary assessment of “best
practices” that guided the development of LibEGov.
The aggregate and generalizable data regarding public library egovernment
service provision and challenges generated from the
survey, together with the on-the-ground assessments of library
and government collaborative efforts offered by the site visits and
interviews, provide rich insight into the context in which libraries
are currently providing e-government services. Through this
multi-method data collection strategy, the authors were able to
explore the pathways of e-government information. By
determining what e-government service roles public libraries
provide to their communities, what partnerships libraries have
formed with government agencies in the provision of egovernment
services, what the success factors and/or barriers are
to forming these partnerships, and what challenges libraries face
by serving as e-government providers, we explore the
implications these information pathways have on e-government
services and systems.
In addressing each of these questions, the authors identified key
elements to be included in LibEGov, including: 1) detailed
guidance on how to conduct a community needs assessment; 2) a
tool to help librarians better understand complex immigration
processes; 3) strategies for identifying and reaching out to
potential partners; and 4) a community forum that encourages
users to share their e-government experiences with one another.
After conclusion of the data collection efforts in October 2011,
attention shifted to the development of the Web resource’s site
design and content. Usability testing began in April 2012 and, at

this time the authors continue to work on refining both the design
and content of LibEGov. In anticipation of a wide release of the
resource during the summer of 2013, the next phase of the project
will include field testing of LibEGov through workshops at which
additional feedback regarding content and design will be solicited.
4. FINDINGS
Through the survey data, interviews, and site visits that informed
the development of LibEGov, researchers found multiple
pathways of information. This flow could be understood as a
circular continuum of information, with knowledge flowing from
all stakeholders in the stream. Rather than e-government delivery
operating from one central source (the government) and traveling
directly to the user, it became clear that government agencies,
intermediaries (in this case, libraries), and users all source
information and thus are all responsible for the diffusion of
information to each point in the continuum. Below, we outline
each of the six directionalities in which information is
disseminated, including examples from the surveys, interviews,
and site visits to provide more concrete evidence of this
multiplicity of information pathways. Though this discussion
largely focuses on the source of the e-government information, it
should be inferred that the needs of the information targets
directly influence the sources, emphasizing the reciprocal nature
of the information flow.
4.1 Government to Intermediary to User
Several government-library partnerships were discovered through
site visits and interviews. Many of these partnerships are building
on the idea that agencies have begun to recognize the intermediary
as a powerful ally in e-government information dissemination. For
example, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
has partnered with The American Place at Hartford Public Library
in Connecticut to provide citizenship services directly at the
library, including a swearing in ceremony for new citizens. The
library provides links to government resources on its website as a
companion to its services on English language learning,
citizenship facts, and information for immigrants new to the area.
USCIS’s effective use of the library’s extensive in-house
resources and capabilities aptly demonstrates how information can
flow from government to intermediary to user.
4.2 User to Intermediary to Government
Often the user needs an intermediary for practical reasons;
without the computers and broadband access provided by a
library, for example, the user would have no means to get to the
information provided on government websites. Given that the
public library is often the only access point for free and reliable
Internet access, an intermediary is necessary to find the
information needed. According to the 2011-2012 PLFTAS data,
62.1 percent of public library outlets were the only provider of
free public Internet and free public computer access in their
communities. More dramatically, 70.3 percent of rural libraries
outlets reported to be the only free provider in their communities
[3].
Even for users who do have Internet access available at home,
government information is often confusing and/or intimidating.
Thus users come to the library for assistance; studies have found
that the library "is a trusted community-based entity to which
individuals turn for help in their online activities—even if they
91
have computers and Internet access at home or elsewhere” [8].
Librarians cite helping patrons with e-government issues as one of
their most oft requested tasks, with 96.6 percent of public library
outlets reporting assisting patrons with applying for or accessing
e-government services. This represents an increase of 11.5 percent
from 2010-2011 [3].
4.3 Intermediary to Government to User
Often the intermediary wishes to inform the government of
missing information or with access problems a user is having with
a government site. For example, in interviews, librarians often
remarked that they anticipated problems based on a lack of
information provided by the government, such as in the case of
the change from paper tax forms to online forms. Librarians
expected an influx of patrons confused about this switch and
sought to inform the government of the potential ramifications of
this decision. This particular information pathway is often
interrupted by the lack of available communication with the
government agency directly, a problem that disrupts the
effectiveness of this communication continuum.
4.4 User to Government to Intermediary
Effective August 1, 2011, Florida law now requires
unemployment claims to be filed over the Internet. During an
interview that took place shortly after this change occurred,
officials from the Florida Department of State, Division of Library
and Information Services indicated that the state workforce
agency was specifically instructing individuals with no access to a
computer or the Internet to go to the public library to complete
their applications. In this situation, users seeking, receiving, or
applying for continued unemployment benefits needed to: 1) take
an aptitude test to determine skills and appropriate employment
skills; 2) reapply for unemployment benefits; and 3) demonstrate
employment seeking efforts. As such, the user had to report to the
state workforce agency a variety of information, which then
flowed to libraries to support a range of employment-related
information.
4.5 Intermediary to User to Government
In this information flow, the intermediary packages information in
way that makes it more accessible to users, therefore enabling
them to engage in more effective interactions with the
government. E-government websites that are developed and
maintained by libraries are one way to facilitate this flow. The
Cobb County Public Library, for example, has recently launched
an e-government website that presents a wide range of resources,
organized by topics focused on common e-government
information needs (e.g., employment, legal information and vital
records). Although much of the information presented through
this site originates from government agencies, the library is the
entity disseminating this information so that users can use it in
their direct interactions with the government.
4.6 Government to User to Intermediary
This particular information flow was seen during the site visits in
connection with a presentation given by a USCIS officer at a
public library branch. As part of a semi-structured presentation
directed to patrons of the library, the representative offered
multiple opportunities for questions from the attendees. Queries
ranged from the mundane (can I apply for citizenship) to

complicated (stories of relatives with criminal backgrounds who
wanted to become citizens), but all were particularly well-suited
for the USCIS representative to answer. A public librarian
attended the Q&A, gathering materials from the representative in
order to have additional resources on hand for patrons who could
not come to the session. The intermediary (i.e., the librarian) was
able to gather information from not only the government
representative, but also the patrons, in order to improve services.
5. DISCUSSION
These findings have important implications on the design of egovernment
policies and systems. Departing from the traditional
view of e-government as a direct government-to-citizen
communication model and incorporating the multiple means of
knowledge transfer between users, the government, and
information intermediaries, such as librarians, necessitates a shift
in the way that government agencies produce and disseminate
information. There are five main areas in which government
agencies need to reexamine their services:
1) Involvement of intermediaries in conversations regarding
the roll-out and implementation of new e-government
services;
2) Government notification of releases and changes in
service through relevant information channels with time
for the intermediaries to prepare proper assistance;
3) Provision of funding for public libraries and other
intermediaries to assist in the proper flow of egovernment
information;
4) Response to feedback from users in terms of egovernment
services; and
5) Clarity for intermediaries of their roles and
responsibilities, whether they are liable for mistakes, and
when professionals should be recommended
The first two points are relatively straightforward. In the
interviews and site visits, a concept that kept coming up was the
fact that librarians often felt blind-sided by agency decisions on
information dissemination and changes in policy. One example of
note that came to light during the interviews was the delayed
dissemination of IRS forms during the 2011 tax season. Although
the IRS did not create the delay, it contributed to a difficult
situation by failing to communicate this development to the
libraries. The end result was that librarians resorted to using
handwritten signs and notes to inform patrons. Another example
raised during the site visits regards affordable housing. Each year,
there is a window for applying for housing vouchers (known as
Section 8 vouchers provided by the Housing and Urban
Development). These windows are administered by the local
public housing agencies, which often do not communicate with
libraries about the upcoming window. Section 8 housing requires
the completion of a range of forms, as well as a process for
determining eligibility. Those seeking housing vouchers often end
up in the library seeking assistance locating and completing the
forms, as well as determining eligibility and information
regarding application submission.
The third point is also fairly intuitive. Libraries have begun to
fulfill the role of customer service operators for government
agencies. With this increased responsibility should come
increased funding. According to the 2011-2012 PLFTAS data,
92
adequate staffing was the most common challenge cited in helping
patrons meet their e-government needs with 44.9 percent of public
library outlets reporting this challenge to be important or most
important [3].
Government agencies also need to provide opportunities for users
to give feedback on e-government services. As early as 2002,
researchers were recognizing that agencies were not adequately
providing opportunities for user input; according to one 2004
study, 90% of local government agencies answered no to the
question “Has your local government conducted a citizen survey
to determine what online services residents and businesses want?”
[23]. Nearly ten years later, the evaluation standards are not much
improved. Agencies would be well served to offer not only direct
online communication opportunities for user feedback (and the
accompanying staff to answer such communication), but also
formal methods of evaluation to ensure that user needs are being
met. The distinction between information as an entity and the
service of information provision is not as clear cut as one might
think. The way the information is developed matters to the way
the public can use it.
The fifth improvement, clarity for intermediaries on their role, is a
task both agencies and library supervisors must address. Though
librarians are taking on the intermediary role in high percentages,
they also remark that they are often unsure of where their roles
should begin and end. In terms of tax services, for example, most
are uncomfortable with any level of service beyond providing
access to forms, for fear of legal liability or intrusion on patrons’
privacies. Agencies should support library supervisors by
determining guidelines for librarians, as well as by assisting
librarians with information queries directly.
The findings from this study have also informed the LibeGov web
resource, a project that hopes to address many of the
improvements listed above. Through the identification of the
multiplicity of information channels in the flow of e-government
information, researchers and developers on the project have
observed the necessity of gaining input from all participants in
providing a source for government resources. There are several
ways that the developers have taken stakeholders and these
possible improvements of service into account. These include:
1) Adding a forum to the site that encourages participation
from both librarians (intermediaries) and government
agency representatives;
2) Soliciting stakeholder input at all levels of web resource
development, achieved by researcher-led meetings with
agencies and public libraries at the beginning of the
project and continued meetings with stakeholders as the
project continues;
3) Conducting usability testing with public library partners
that will shape the second and future iterations of the
web resource; and
4) Providing ample opportunities for feedback in all stages
of development through a contact form provided through
the web resource as well as ongoing communications
among a network of interested parties through a listserv
developed by members of the project team.
By acknowledging the pathways of e-government information
transfer, the model of a circular continuum of service has been
applied to a practical e-government system. In a similar vein,

government agencies should consider all potential information
points when designing websites and other e-government
resources.
6. CONCLUSION
The findings from this study offer an overview of the continuum
of information between users, libraries (intermediaries), and the
government. The major outcomes of the study show that there are
improvements that agencies can make to their current strategies of
information dissemination, as well as ways that libraries and their
patrons can better navigate the often confusing waters of egovernment
information.
Finally, the model provides a conceptual framework to guide the
web resource currently under development by the authors and
their partners, the primary purpose of which is to help libraries
and agencies better support one another in this continuum. The
model also provides direction for other stakeholders interested in
building better information systems.
There are several directions in which this research could go in
continuing to clarify the e-government landscape. While it is
obvious that there are multiple ways that information flows from
stakeholder to stakeholder, the optimum way that this information
should travel is an interesting problem that has still not been
conclusively studied. Does the fact that the information flow is
top-down, bottom-up, and circular in nature have consequences
for the current method of e-government technical information
transmission?
In addition, although government agencies have begun to consider
issues of access, these multiple pathways of information make the
need to keep in mind the access points for users all the more
important. For example, public libraries provide a bevy of
technology training classes, and the PLFTAS data shows that the
more general technology classes are the most prevalent.
According to the latest data, 87.0 percent of public library outlets
offer general computer skills training classes (e.g., how to use a
mouse, keyboard, printer), and 86.5 percent offer general Internet
use classes (e.g. set up e-mail, Web browsing) [3]. How the
different pathways of information flow affects and is affected by
these prerequisites for e-government information retrieval is
necessary for building an information flow that gets to all users.
Future research should ensure that all stakeholders are addressed
and that the multiple ways that information is directed from user
to intermediary to agency are considered.
7. REFERENCES
[1] Bertot, J. C. Public access technologies in public libraries:
Impacts and implications. Information Technology &
Libraries, 28, 2 (2009), 84-95.
[2] Bertot, J. C. Public libraries and the Internet: A retrospective,
challenges, and issues moving forward. In J. C. Bertot, P. T.
Jaeger, & C. R. McClure (Eds.), Public libraries and the
Internet: Roles, perspectives, and implications. Libraries
Unlimited, Westport, CT, 2011, 15-35.
[3] Bertot, et al. Public Libraries and the Internet 2012: Study
Results and Findings. Information Policy & Access Center,
University of Maryland, College of Information Studies,
2012, forthcoming.
93
[4] Bertot, J. C., & Jaeger, P. T. The e-government paradox:
Better customer service doesn’t necessarily cost less.
Government Information Quarterly, 25 (2008), 149-154.
[5] Bertot, J. C., & Jaeger, P. T. User-centered e-government:
Challenges and benefits for government Web sites.
Government Information Quarterly, 23 (2006), 163-168.
[6] Bertot, J. C., Jaeger, P. T., & Hansen, D. The impact of
polices on government social media usage: Issues,
challenges, and recommendations. Government Information
Quarterly, 29 (2012), 30-40.
[7] Bertot, J. C., Jaeger, P. T., Langa, L. A., & McClure, C. R.
Drafted: I want you to deliver e-government. Library
Journal, 131, 13 (2006), 34-39.
[8] Bertot, J. C., Jaeger, P. T., Langa, L. A., & McClure, C. R.
Public access computing and Internet access in public
libraries: The role of public libraries in e-government and
emergency situations. First Monday, 11, 9 (2006).
[9] Bertot, J.C., Jaeger, P.T., & McClure, C.R. Citizen-centered
e-government services: Benefits, costs, and research needs.
In The Proceedings of the 9th Annual International Digital
Government Research Conference (Montreal, Canada, May
18-21, 2008). ACM Press, New York, NY, 2008, 137-142.
[10] Bertot, J. C., Jaeger, P. T., Munson, S., & Glaisyer, T.
Engaging the public in open government: The policy and
government application of social media technology for
government transparency. IEEE Computer, 43, 11 (2010),
53-59.
[11] Bertot, J. C., Jaeger, P. T., Shuler, J. A., Simmons, S. N., &
Grimes, J. M. Reconciling government documents and egovernment:
Government information in policy,
librarianship, and education. Government Information
Quarterly, 26 (2009), 433-436.
[12] Bertot, J. C., & McClure, C. R. Assessing sufficiency and
quality of bandwidth for public libraries. Information
Technology and Libraries, 26, 1 (2007), 14-22.
[13] Bertot, J. C., McClure, C. R., & Jaeger, P. T. The impacts of
free public Internet access on public library patrons and
communities. Library Quarterly, 78 (2008), 285-301.
[14] Carter, L. & Belanger, F. Citizen adoption of electronic
government initiatives. Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii
International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS ’04)
(Big Island, Hawaii, January 5-8, 2004). IEEE Computer
Society, Washington, DC, 2004.
[15] Dawes, S. S. Governance in the digital age: A research and
action framework for an uncertain future. Government
Information Quarterly, 26 (2009), 257-264.
[16] Ebbers, W. E., Pieterson, W. J., & Noordman, H. N.
Electronic government: Rethinking channel management
strategies. Government Information Quarterly, 25 (2008),
181-201.
[17] Fisher, K. E., Becker, S., & Crandall, M. E-government
service use and impact through public libraries: Preliminary
findings from a national study of public access computing in
public libraries. Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii
International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS ’10)

(Poipu, Kauai, Hawaii , January 5-8, 2010). IEEE Computer
Society, Washington, DC, 2010, 1-10.
[18] Gibson, A. N., Bertot, J. C., & McClure, C. R. (2009).
Emerging roles of public libraries as e-government providers.
Proceedings of the 42 nd Hawaii International Conference on
Systems Sciences (HICSS ’09) (Waikoloa, Big Island,
Hawaii, January 5-8, 2009). IEEE Computer Society,
Washington, DC, 2009.
[19] Heanue, A. (2001). In support of democracy: The library role
in public access to government information. In Kranich, N.
(Ed.), Libraries & Democracy: The Cornerstones of Liberty.
American Library Association, Chicago, IL, 2001, 121-128.
[20] Holt, L. E., & Holt, G. E. Public library services for the
poor: Doing all we can. ALA Editions, Chicago, IL, 2010.
[21] Horrigan, J. B. Obama’s online opportunities II: If you build
it, will they log on? Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Washington, D.C., 2009.
[22] Horrigan, J. B. Home broadband adoption 2008: Adoption
stalls for low-income Americans even as many broadband
users opt for premium services that give them more speed.
Pew Internet and American Life Project, Washington, D.C.,
2008.
[23] International City/County Management Association.
Electronic government 2004: Survey methodology. 2004.
Available:
http://icma.org/en/results/surveying/survey_research/survey_
results
[24] Jaeger, P. T. Building e-government into the Library &
Information Science curriculum: The future of government
information and services. Journal of Education for Library
and Information Science, 49 (2008), 167-179.
[25] Jaeger, P. T. Public libraries and local e-government. In C.
G. Reddick (Ed.), Handbook on research on strategies for
local e-government adoption and implementation:
Comparative studies. IGI Global, Hershey, PA, 2009, 647-
660.
[26] Jaeger, P. T., & Bertot, J. C. Designing, implementing, and
evaluating user-centered and citizen-centered e-government.
International Journal of Electronic Government Research, 6,
2 (2010) 1-17.
[27] Jaeger, P. T., & Bertot, J. C. E-government education in
public libraries: New service roles and expanding social
94
responsibilities. Journal of Education for Library and
Information Science, 50 (2009), 40-50.
[28] Jaeger, P. T., & Bertot, J. C. Responsibility rolls down:
Public libraries and the social and policy obligations of
ensuring access to e-government and government
information. Public Library Quarterly, 30 (2011), 1-25.
[29] Jaeger, P. T., Bertot, J. C., & Shilton, K. Information policy
and social media: Framing government-citizen Web 2.0
interactions. In C. G. Reddick & S. K. Aikins (Eds.), Web 2.0
Technologies and Democratic Governance: Political, Policy
and Management Implications. Springer, London, England,
in press.
[30] Jaeger, P. T., & Burnett, G. Information access and exchange
among small worlds in a democratic society: The role of
policy in redefining information behavior in the post-9/11
United States. Library Quarterly, 75, 4 (2005), 464-495.
[31] Jaeger, P.T., Langa, L.A., McClure, C.R., & Bertot, J.C. The
2004 and 2005 gulf coast hurricanes: Evolving roles and
lessons learned for public libraries in disaster preparedness
and community services. Public Library Quarterly, 25, 3/4
(2006), 199-214.
[32] Jaeger, P. T., & Thompson, K. M. E-government around the
world: Lessons, challenges, and new directions. Government
Information Quarterly, 20, 4) (2003), 389-394.
[33] Jaeger, P. T., & Thompson, K. M. Social information
behavior and the democratic process: Information poverty,
normative behavior, and electronic government in the United
States. Library & Information Science Research, 26, 1
(2004), 94-107.
[34] Schudson, M. Why conversation is not the soul of
democracy. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 14
(1997), 297-309.
[35] Seifert, J.W. A primer on e-government: Sectors, stages,
opportunities, and challenges of online governance. CRS
Report for Congress, 2003. Available:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/RL31057.pdf
[36] Shavit, D. (1986). The politics of public librarianship. New
York : Greenwood
[37] Streib, G., & Navarro, I. Citizen demand for interactive egovernment:
The case of Georgia consumer services.
American Review of Public Administration, 36 (2006), 288-
300.

The critical success factors for websites for Chinese
migrant farmer workers: a multi-case study
Fang Wang
Business School of Nankai University
No. 94 Weijin Road, Nankai District
Tianjin, China, 300071
(86)22-23502800
wangfangnk@nankai.edu.cn
ABSTRACT
This paper is to explore the critical success factors for the
websites for Chinese migrant farmer workers. A theoretical
framework was put forward according to the theories of
usability, information architecture, webometrics and business
model. A multi-case study on 10 websites was conducted for
testifying 7 hypotheses. Business model and a few technical
properties were found to be the critical factors that influence
the effect and sustainable development of these websites. The
originality of this paper is that it adopted a managerialtechnical
perspective to explore the critical success factors of
the MFW websites.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.3.5 [Online Information Services]: Web-based services
General Terms
Management, Measurement, Performance, Economics, Theory
Keywords
Special website, Website effect, Vulnerable groups, Chinese
farmer workers, Multi-case study, Managerial-technical
Perspective
1. INTRODUCTION
From the late 1980s, along with China’s industrialization and
urbanization process, migrant farmer workers (MFWs, farmers
who leave their home in rural areas and come to cities to hunt for
jobs in various industries without hukou, a registered permanent
residence, in cities where they work, and some of them have to
migrate to different cities frequently as their jobs change) have
become a new workforce who are playing critical roles in Chinese
economic and social development [1]. According to the National
Statistics Bureau, the number of Chinese farmer workers was
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
95
Lihong Gu
Business School of Nankai University
No. 94 Weijin Road, Nankai District
Tianjin, China, 300071
(86)22-23502800
gulihong1217@163.com
229.78 million in 2009, and 145.33 million of them were away
from their hometown villages, occupying 83% of the total Chinese
floating population. Among the farmer workers who migrated
from hometown villages to cities, 128 million had no Hukous in
cities where they worked [2]. However, the 28th Statistics Report
on China Internet Network Development shows that by June 2011
the number of Chinese netizens had reached 485 million which
occupied 34.3% of the total population, 390 million of them
connected to Internet by family broad-band and 318 million by
mobile phone, 33.6% (131 million) of the total netizens were rural
residents [3], while the proportion of MFWs was only 3.5% by
December 2010 [4]. Abovementioned data indicate that there
exists a big digital divide between MFWs and other social groups
although the total number of netizens in China continued to
increase every year. Because of their fluidity and the restriction of
Hukou, MFWs could neither equally share urban information
infrastructure and resources with native citizens nor enjoy policies
and projects of the "new socialist countryside" for rural residents.
This plight makes them fall into a state of information welfare
“loss” or “deprivation”, and in some way become a marginal
group in information society.
“Information welfare is an important part of social welfares” [5].
The inferior positions in which MFWs have to stay concerning
labor price, social security, public good enjoyment, cultural and
recreation consumption are related with their weak information
capabilities [ 6 ]. Their awkward positions in the process of
informatization will lead them to a greater poverty in economic,
political, social and cultural rights and interests according to
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs [7]. Under the impacts of present
social structure, economic development and other factors, it's
difficult for them to get necessary information [8]. In order to
diminish the digital divide between MFWs and other social
groups, “it is necessary to integrate and make full use of the
information resources owned by the departments of police,
statistics, population and family planning, to promote the
construction of information networks among MFWs, and to
realize information sharing between relevant departments in order
to provide accurate and timely information for MFW management
and services” [9].
Informatization is essential to the realization of the orderly flow of
MFWs [ 10 ]. Information service is especially promising in
improving MFWs’ employment [11]; [12]. On the one hand,
information services for MFWs can strengthen the communication
between the government and the public [13]. On the other hand,
solutions to MFWs’ information marginalization will help to build

an exit mechanism for them and promote labor transfer by
improving their information capabilities and employability, and
thus to diminish the gap between urban citizens and them and
promote their social integration [ 14 ]. As a seminal work,
Construct an Integrated Information Service System for Migrant
Farmer Workers [15], the report of the National Informatization
Expert Committee in 2005 put forward that China should establish
an integrated information service system for MFWs.
Websites are indispensable parts of an integrated information
service system for MFWs. With the implication of “Village
Connection” policy, the number of agriculture-related websites
had reached nearly 20,000 by the end of 2010 in China [16].
Current studies on these websites mainly include website
construction [17]; [18], webmetrics [19], roles of websites played
in rural informatization [20], existing problems e.g. duplicated
and outdated information [21], limited functions and unguaranteed
information authenticity [22], and low browse rate and inadequate
brand building [23]. However, only several websites special for
MFWs have emerged in recent few years. Among 20,000
agriculture-related websites, they occupy only a minimal
proportion but have great significance for MFWs. Moreover, we
had not found any researches on the websites for Chinese MFWs
by June 2011. How do these websites operate? What factors
influence their survival and development? What difficulties are
they faced with? In order to answer these questions, a holistic
exploration is necessary and a multi-case study will be adopted to
realize it.
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
There are a quantity of theories and methods for website study,
such as usability [24], information architecture (IA), technology
acceptance model (TAM) [25 ], webometrics, social network
analysis (SNA), etc. Studies on usability in LIS and IS fields have
increased dramatically in recent years and a variety of measure
scales have been developed. Shackel advanced four dimensions of
usability, effectiveness, learnability, flexibility and attitude [26].
IA is thought as both a kind of art and a kind of technology on
website building [27] and provides a set of technical aids to make
a website more usable. Webometrics studies the quantitative
aspects of the construction and use of information resources,
structures and technologies on the Web drawing on bibliometric
and informetric approaches [ 28 ]. Abovementioned theories
examine websites from technical, managerial or social
perspectives. Our study will focus on disclosing the effects of the
MFW websites and the influences of some internal and external
factors. This is a comprehensive problem related to managerial,
technical and social issues. It is not enough to employ any single
theory to guide a holistic exploration. Therefore, we select
relevant constructs from present theories and combine them into a
new theoretical framework under a managerial-technical
perspective.
Literatures show that some successful studies focus on complex
aspects of a website rather than a single one. Welch and Pandey
[29] compared different measures for the effect of government
websites and found that except technology, political pressure,
centralization, formalization, goal ambiguity, organizational
culture, communication effect, red tape, complexity and size are
all possible determinants of website effects. To avoid the
shortcomings of a single perspective, Eschenfelder and Miller [30]
established a socio-technical toolkit to measure the openness and
accessibility of government information. Lee and Kozer [31]
96
constructed a model consisting of four major website quality
factors, information quality, service quality, systems quality, and
vendor-specific quality, to measure the effect of e-business
website quality. These studies combined online characteristics of
websites with offline factors and obtained satisfying results. In
terms of this study, research problems could be given a more
detailed examination under a holistic theoretical framework than
under a single theoretical perspective. Out of this consideration, 5
qualitative and quantitative constructs and 7 theoretical
hypotheses are put forward as follows:
2.1 Website Effect
The main goal of the studied websites is to deliver information to
MFWs. An effective website will attract more potential users to
click and satisfy actual users’ information needs better. In this
paper, website effect is taken as the dependent variable. Many
constructs could be extracted to describe or measure website
effect in usability researches. Nilsen [32] used ten usability
heuristics related with user’s satisfaction for user interface design.
Preece [33] adopted the user’s attitude as one of the factors in
defining website usability. Success of information delivery to
intended users or not determines a website’s final effect. Thus
website effect could be defined with two variables, awareness and
users’ satisfaction. High awareness means that a large number of
people have known or experienced the website. In search engine
optimization (SEO) average daily IP clicks and page view (PV)
within a month are used to estimate website awareness. Many
methods are used to evaluate overall user’s satisfaction towards a
website in literatures. In this study, we choose both qualitative and
quantitative indicators to evaluate user’s satisfaction. The former
is used to indicate users’ satisfaction degree by qualitative content
analyses on users’ feedback messages and media comments. The
latter include two quantitative indicators, Google Page Rank
Value (a numeric value that represents how important a page is on
the web) and an overall assessment scored with 5-point Likert
scale by researchers after in-depth investigations of each website
and interviews with its webmaster. These indicators for the
concept of website effect are shown in table 1.
Table 1: Indicators for the concept of website effect
Conceptual
indicator
website
awareness
User
satisfaction
Operational indicator Data Source
Average daily IP clicks,
Page view estimates
within one month
Degree of MFWs’
satisfaction
Websites of ALEXA,
SEO and GOOGLE
Users’ feedback
messages on websites
and comments from
other mass media
Overall assessment Google Page Rank
Value, overall website
analyses and interviews
with webmasters
2.2 Business Model of the Websites
Business model is a concept frequently used in e-business, IS,
computer science, strategy or management [34]. “At its heart, a
business model performs two important functions: value creation
and value capture” [35]. A conceptual business model should

include customers and competitors, the offering, activities and
organization, resources and factor market interactions [36]. “We
must consider which concepts and relationships allow a simplified
description and representation of what value is provided to
customers, how this is done and with which financial
consequences” [37]. As for websites, business model is mainly
determined by their capital sources and profit models, which is
more often used in businesses than government agencies or nonprofit
organizations. Our pilot interviews show that current MFW
websites have four types of investment entities, governments,
non-profit organizations, individuals and enterprises, and their
profit models can be categorized as government websites, nonprofit
websites and enterprise websites. In general, non-profit and
individual invested websites try to represent or pursuit benefits of
MFWs, government invested ones intend to help to improve social
management of MFWs while enterprise invested ones are used to
make money as a e-business platform. Accordingly, their business
models can be classified as “pure public operation”, “supported by
government procurement” and “market operation”. Relationships
between investment entities, profit models and business models of
MFW websites are shown in figure 1.
Government
investment
Non-profit
organization
investment
Individual
investment
Enterprise
investment
Government
websites
Public
welfare
websites
Enterprise
website
Pure public
operation
Supported
by
government
procurement
Market
operation
Figure 1:Relationships between investment entities,
profit models and business models of MFW websites
Different business models mean different incentive mechanisms
and may result in different website effects. Therefore, we propose
hypothesis 1:
H1: Business model affects the effect of MFW websites.
2.3 Website Construction
Website construction refers to technical features or perceived
technical features of a website in this study. Usability and IA
provide valuable explanations for website construction from
different angles. Usability theory examines perceived interface
attributes such as availability, accessibility, readability,
understandability, etc.. Wang and Senecal [38] developed a scale
for website usability including three dimensions: ease of
navigation, speed and interactivity. Al-badi & Mayhew [39]
demonstrated the value of target culture, navigation, layout,
interaction, graphics and color in designing localized business
websites. Karlsson [40] found that graphic design, content and
perceived usability contribute to the perceived expression and
emotional responses of the websites. In these studies, content,
97
accessibility, interactivity navigation, open speed, graphic and
color design are important factors that affect website effect.
IA theory provides some objective guidelines to improve website
usability. Its core idea is “user-centered and to make information
more understandable”. Davenport defined Information
architecture simply a set of aids that match user needs with
information resources [41]. Gullikson [42] examined the impact
of information architecture on the usability of an academic
website and recommended key ingredients: information design,
access tools, and navigational aids. Comparing IA with website
usability theory, we define website construction with two
dimensions, information architecture and technical performance.
Technical performance affects website usability and comprises
complex components. In order to get data more easily, we adopt
open speed to measure it. Content, information organization,
navigation and page presentation are selected to indicate website
information architecture. In the process of investigation, we found
that there are no obvious differences in page presentation between
websites, so it is abandoned for lack of good discrimination.
According to usability and IA theory, website construction
influences its website effect. Four research hypotheses are put
forward as follows:
H2: Information content affects the effect of MFW websites.
H3: Information organization affects the effect of MFW websites.
H4: Website navigation affects the effect of MFW websites.
H5: Open speed affects the effect of MFW websites.
2.4 Social Networking Service
As one of the sociological characteristics of a website, social
networking services help to expand MFWs' social network and
interpersonal communication. Our previous research shows that
interpersonal influence is one of the most important factors for
MFWs to access to the Internet for the first time and interpersonal
network is an important source for them to acquire information
[43]. Previous literatures show that interactivity is an important
indicator of website usability [44]. Therefore, interaction and
community functions of a website could be used to indicate social
networking service. The communication function can help website
users to share information or views and includes BBS, blog,
online groups, etc., while the interaction function helps users to
communicate with the webmaster or manager and mainly involves
the feedback channels on websites. To explore the influence of
social networking services on website effect, hypothesis 6 is put
forward as follows:
H6: Functions for Social Networking service affect the service
effect of MFW websites.
2.5 Website Promotion
From the perspective of network marketing, only when a website
is known by most of the targeted users, could it make full impacts.
In past ten years, e-commerce webmasters have developed various
indicators to measure and adopted many strategies to improve the
awareness of their websites. Our pilot investigation shows that
except that local government websites can be easily found on first
page of Baidu’s search results after 2010, websites of small
government departments and non-profit organizations without
promotions can’t be found easily because Baidu ranks its search
results by bid. The practice of e-business has proved that website

promotion involves a variety of tactics and has obvious impacts
on website effect. Some webometric indicators, such as web links,
search engine optimization, are used to disclose website
marketing [45]. Present webometrics studies involve four areas:
(1) Page content analysis; (2) Link analysis; (3) Site usage
analysis; (4) Web technology analysis (including search engine
performance) [46].To testify the influence of website promotion
on its effect, we adopt SEO (Search Engine Optimization) value,
the number of back-links and the number of times reported by
other media to evaluate website promotion. Hypothesis 7 is put
followed as follows:
H7: Website promotion is positively correlated with the effect of
MFW websites.
All the hypotheses form a theoretical framework of this study, as
shown in figure 3.
3. RESEARCH METHODS
Case study is adopted in some website researches, such as
Weischedel & Huizingh [47], Fang [48], etc.. Yin [49] states that
case studies could be used to describe, explore or explain
phenomena. Bonoma [50] (1985) suggests that multiple cases
could play a role in both hypothesis generation and hypothesis
testing. “Multiple-case designs allow for cross-case analysis and
the extension of theory, and yield more general research results
than single-case study.”[51]. Multi-case studies are often used to
explore influential factors in many management fields. Akhavan
et al [ 52 ] derived critical success factors for design and
implementing knowledge management (KM) system in a multicase
study research with an integrated approach. Our study is to
explore success factors for MFW websites beyond a single
perspective of technology. Multi-case approach is thought suitable
for this holistic exploration.
According to the analytical framework, independent variables are
business model, website construction, social networking services,
website promotion, and the dependent variable is website effect.
Their indicators are concluded in table 2.
Table 2: Indicators for Key Variables
Variables Dimensions Indicators
Website effect
Business
model
Website
construction
Website
awareness
Users’ satisfaction
Overall website
effect
(1)Daily average IP traffic
within a month;
(2) Daily average page
view estimates
Qualitative analysis of
feedback messages and
content of website forums
(1) Google Page Rank
Value;(2)qualitative
assessment of overall
effect;(3) Analysis of
problems and difficulties
Fund sources Amount and persistence
of funds or investment
Website property See in figure 1
Information
architecture
(1) Information contents
(quality, richness,
relevance, renewal and
98
Social
networking
services
Website
promotion
Technical support Open speed
Interaction
function
community
function
SEO (Search
Engine
Optimization)
Number of backlinks
Number of times
reported by
traditional media
accuracy)
(2) Information
organization
(classification, structure)
(3)Navigation (sign
design, number of internal
and external links, search)
Interaction channels (
feedback columns, Online
chat, etc.)
Virtual community (blog,
BBS, QQ group etc)
Number of pages included
in search engines on
ALEXA (google, baidu,
yahoo, netease, soso and
sogou)
Number of back-links
recorded in search engines
on ALEXA (google,
baidu, yahoo, netease,
soso and sogou)
Qualitative analysis of
relevant reports on
important traditional
media
4. CASES AND DATA
4.1 Case Description
Existing MFW websites mainly provide information related to
MFWS’ employment, legal right protection, children’s education,
medical treatment and e-business. Using search engines like
google, baidu, soso, et.al and any possible link tracks, we
searched case websites from November 2010 to 14 June 2011 and
finally found 11 relevant objects in total, including 9 websites (not
involving their sub-websites) and 2 special pages. These MFW
websites occupied a minimal percentage of more than 20,000
agriculture-related websites and could nearly be neglected
compared with more than 70,000 government websites in China at
the end of 2010. The earliest MFW website opened on 10 May
2003, a personal forum established by Changsheng Guo who
hoped to protect MFWs’ legal rights by displaying their living and
working situation. In 2004, “Minggong Net” (Websites for
MFWS), a website supported by the Office of Migrant Workers
and Poverty Alleviation Office of State Council, was opened
online. It mainly provides employment information services, and
often holds public activities for MFWs. After 2007, a few
websites for MFWs emerge, such as “Chinese Young Migrant
Workers”, “Zhong Lao Wang” (Websites of Chinese Labor) and
“Legal Rights Protection of MFWs”, ect.. Besides, some large
portal websites (e.g. Phoenix and Sohu) and large government
websites (e.g. China.net and Labor Union of China) own special
columns for MFWs. These websites, columns and pages play
different roles and gradually form an Internet information service
system for MFWs with specialization and diversity, which can be
shown as figure 2.

Websites or columns for MFWs
In this study, we didn’t involve the special columns for MFWs of
large business portals such as Phoenix.com and Sohu.com,
because contents of these columns only occupy a very small
proportion of the whole portals. All the 11 special websites and
columns related to MFWs are introduced in table 3. Taking into
account that each case should be effective, we abandoned the No.
9 case because it is only a static page of China.com and hasn’t
been updated since 2005.
1. Website name,
setup date and
address
Website for
Chinese Young
Migrant Workers
July,2010,www.y
oungmigrants.org
2.Legal Right
Protection for
China Migrant
Workers Jan.
2006,
www.zgnmg.org/
Non-profit
Websites
For-profit
websites
Government
websites or
columns
Special columns
of large business
portals
Individual
forums
Table 3 Case Description
Sponsor
Agencies or
main investor
Institute of
Population
and Labor
Economics of
Chinese
Academy of
Social
Sciences, ILO
UN
Population
Fund
Beijing
Zhicheng Law
Firm, Beijing
Youth Legal
Aid and
Research
Center
Legal right
protection
Academic
research
Employment
Employment
Sub-websites
Special columns
Small local
websites
Phoenix,
Sohu, etc.
Entertainmen
t
Figure 2 Online information service systems for Chinese
MFWs
Websi
te
proper
ty
Nonprofit,
UN
Millen
nium
Devel
opmen
t
Goals
Fund
Nonprofit
Intended
users
Academic
and policy
researcher
s, migrant
workers
Migrant
workers,
layers, &
governme
nt legal
agencies
99
3.Jobs for
Technical and
Skilled Workers,
2007,
www.nmgjggz.co
m/
4.Website for
Migrant workers,
2007
www.mingong123
.com/
5.China Labor,
Aug. 2008
www.chinalao.co
m/
6. Migrant
Workers Help,
2009
www.zhich.com/
7.Chinese Migrant
Workers(subsite
of Zhongnong
Xingye), April,
2009,
www.nmgw.org.c
n
8.Column for
Migrant Workers
of Chinese Trade
Unions website,
2009
nmg.workercn.cn/
9.Special page for
migrant workers
of China.com,
2005
www.china.com.c
n/chinese/zhuanti/
nmg/507760.htm
10.China Migrant
Workers (Party
Building)Jan,
2011,
www.zgnmgw.co
m/
11.Chinese
Migrant workers,
May, 2003,
http://mg.arkoo.co
m/
Individual
Partners
Beijing
Qingda
Yanyuan
Network
Technology
Co., LTD.
Entrepreneur
Wenghua
Zhou and VC
Individual
partners
Information
Center of
Industrial
projects in
rural China
ACFTU
China Foreign
Languages
Publishing
and
Distribution
Agency
Voluntary
investment by
MFWs in
Beijing from
Gushi county
of Henan
Province.
A migrant
farmer worker
Changping
Guo
Nonprofit
Enterp
rise
Enterp
rise
Enterp
rise
Enterp
rise
Invest
ed by
gover
nment
Gover
nment
websit
e
Gover
nment
News
websit
e
Nonprofit
Person
al
forum
Workers,
employers
recruitme
nt and
training
agencies
Same with
No.3
Same with
NO.3
Same with
NO.3
Same with
NO.3
Migrant
workers
and other
people
People
from all
walks
Migrant
workers
Migrant
workers
4.2 Data Collection
The approaches for data collection include website content
investigation, half-structured interview with webmasters, analysis
of related reports on mass media and some webometrics tools.
Data were collected in three steps:

(1)Firstly, all the existing MFW websites were investigated
comprehensively. The content, structure and information
presentation of each website were repeatedly browsed, tried and
analyzed, and the navigation signs, search engine and links were
tested. A deep content analysis was specially conducted on the
site aim, webmaster`s statements, users’ messages and BBS posts.
And then we collected and qualitatively analyzed relevant online
reports on other media. To ensure the reliability of the data, 2
researchers collected all the data respectively at first, and then
compared the results with each other, discussed the difference,
and unify them by repeat investigation. At last, qualitative data for
IA, social networking services, open speed of part websites,
business model and website promotion of each website were
sorted out. After in-depth analyses of these data, an assessment on
the overall effect of each website is given with Likert 5-point
scale.
(2) Secondly, we conducted half-structured interviews with
webmasters by means of telephone, email and QQ (a timely
online communication tool). Interview questions include: “How is
your website going?”, “Who invested on your website?”, “What is
the main purpose of your website?”, “How does your website
make money?”, “What difficulties does your website face at
present?”, “What do you plan to do for next step?”, etc. Interview
contents were recorded for qualitative analysis. Meantime,
supplements and corrections were made for the data got in last
stage.
(3) Thirdly, we collected quantitative data with webometrics tools
such as ALEXA, SEO and Google (site command), including
average daily IP and PV value, number of the pages included by
search engines, number of back-links, Google PR value, number
of website pages, number of internal and external links, open
speed of some websites, etc. All the quantitative data covered
recent 1 month and were collected from 8 a.m. to 12 a.m. o 'clock
on June 14, 2011. The time for data collection is selected
randomly so as to keep the validity of the data.
For the word limit of this paper, the data table is omitted here.
5. FINDINGS AND IMPLICATIONS
5.1 Hypothesis Test
As a compound variable, website effect is measured by both
quantitative indicators such as GOOGLE PR value, daily average
IP traffic within 1 month and daily average page view estimates,
and qualitative indicators such as overall effect, problems and
difficulties faced by the websites and users’ satisfaction. After a
comprehensive qualitative analysis and repeated quantitative
comparisons, results of hypothesis testing are shown in Figure 3.
H1: is supported. Business model has significant influence on the
effect of MFW websites.
The values of PR, IP and PV of commercial websites far exceed
that of other kinds of websites. Among all the websites,
commercial ones occupy the biggest proportion and operate better
than others. They focus on providing jobs for MFWs and bluecollar
workers, including Website for Migrant Workers
(www.mingong123.com/), China Labor (www.chinalao.com/) and
Migrant Workers Help (www.zhich.com/). These websites charge
the employers and training agencies who issue information and
promise to keep the authenticity and reliability of issued
information, but don't charge farmer workers who issue messages
100
for job looking or charge them little. Some of the commercial
websites try to get supports from governments and positive
comments from media by advertising themselves as “platforms
providing public free information for MFWs”. The Website of
Chinese Migrant Workers(a sub-site of the government website
Zhongnong Xingye, www.nmgw.org.cn) is trying to transform
itself into a commercial one and thus to get more vitality.
Business model of websites
Website construction
Website IA
Technology support
Capability of SNS
Website promotion
Content
construction
Info. organization
Navigation system
H6-
H1+
H2+
H3-
H4+p
H5+
H7+
Figure 3:Theoretical framework of this study
Effects of MFW websites
Clear profit model, persistent investment, rich information sources
and strict information checking system are four main
characteristics of commercial websites. China Xin NongMen (new
gate of the villages) Website was set up in august 2005 and got 2
million dollars of venture capital in 2006, but went to bankrupt in
2008 because of bad business model [53]. It made great efforts to
build close relatiohships with governments, which was proved to
be a wrong strategy. The website of Jobs for Technical and
Skilled Workers (www.nmgjggz.com/) seeks a public welfare
model. It doesn't charge on information issue but also don’t
promise to assure information quality. For lack of a clear profit
model and enough investment, it performs mediocre.
Among non-profit websites, the website of Legal Right Protection
for China Migrant Workers has highest IP and PV value. It was
established by Beijing Zhicheng Law Firm and Beijing Youth
Legal Aid and Research Center as a non-profit platform for
providing free legal advice and practical aid services for MFWs.
Supported by government procurement, it operates well. This
kind of business model solves the problems of inefficiency and
unsustainability when judiciary bodies provide free legal aids for
vulnerable groups directly.
Another kind of non-profit websites are academic ones which are
hosted by research institutes or subsidized by NPO. The Website
for Chinese Young Migrant Workers (www.youngmigrants.org),
funded by the project of UN Millennium Development Goals,
perform quite well. Its targeted users are scholars who are
interested in problems of MFWs instead of farmer workers
themselves. It releases information on policies, laws, regulations,
and new research fruits for academic purpose, which is also
helpful to MFWs. The problem is that if the grant project
terminates, its sustainability will face a great challenge.

According to our investigation, there have been no pure
government websites special for MFWs except columns for
MFWs on two large government websites with outdated
information by June 2011. In some way, they are more news
media than service platforms.
Small-sized personal BBSs or forums attract few clicks. The
earliest BBS is very simple with little information, few visitors
and slow speed, and has to change its domain name frequently for
lack of money to rent a permanent server.
Generally speaking, five kinds of websites for or on MFWs adopt
different business models. Commercial websites and non-profit
ones with sufficient funds and clear mission perform better than
others. All kinds of websites hope to set up good relationships
with governments and manage to get their supports in investment,
procurement, or policies. But in terms of commercial websites, a
good profit model is critical for their survival.
H2: is supported. Information contents have significant influence
on website effect.
Websites with higher specialty, richer and more accurate
information and faster updating have better effect than others,
because they are more competitive in meeting the information
needs of farmer workers. Content don’t only influence website
effect directly but also indirectly by the mediation of business
model. For various missions of their host institutions, websites
adopt different business models to provide information with
different utilities. Information on employment is mainly provided
by commercial websites maybe because of its market scarcity,
high cost, time-sensitivity and value-added capability. Legal
information is more likely provided on non-profit websites and
supported by government procurement completely or partly,
maybe because most of their target users are social vulnerable
groups with low incomes and purchasing power. By the mediation
of business model, information contents correlate with website
effect.
H3: is not supported. We can’t get enough evidences to prove or
deny hypothesis 3.
Information classification of a website determines its accessibility
and understandability. Data show that the information
classification of commercial and academic websites is slightly
better than that of other websites. However, this kind of difference
is not significant. Color style and flash design may have impacts
on customers’ preference and loyalty in some way. But most of
the websites have not developed impressive distinctive styles
except the website for China Migrant Workers (Party Building
), which has a symbolic red style. In general, differences in
information classification and page layout are not significant
among MFW websites. The possible reason is that present website
building technology is mature and cheap enough so that all kinds
of websites can afford and adopt it. This doesn’t prove that
information organization has no influences on the effect of MFW
websites, but means that we have not enough evidences to support
or deny this hypothesis.
H4: is partly supported. Navigation systems correlate with website
effect.
According to data analysis, websites with more powerful search
engine and more external links have better effect. Number of links
correlates with website effect, but not as significant as that
101
between information content and website effect. The possible
reason is that there are not enough alternative websites for MFWs
to choose at present so that they have to choose websites by
content at first to satisfy their basic information needs. Besides,
commercial and academic websites do better in information
navigation and external links than others.
H5: is supported. Technical supports are significantly related with
website effect.
Open speed is adopted to indicate technical supports and has
significant correlation with website effect. Data analysis shows
that except personal BBSs or forums, other websites which are
supported by formal organizations and have independent domain
names can be opened quickly, because they are hosted by bigger
sized and more formal institutions that can provide better
information services.
H6: is not supported. The function of social networking services
of the websites have no significant correlation with their effect,
but have significant correlation with their business models.
The function of social networking service is mainly indicated with
interaction and community functions of websites. Data show that
commercial websites have very strong interaction functions and
offer various channels to communicate timely with users, but they
have few communities to allow users to communicate with each
other. The possible reason is that interaction is attractive for
commercial webmasters because they could know more about the
information needs of customers through it and thus to sell their
services more successfully, while community function is often
welcomed by website users because it can help them to expand
social network and get more useful information. On the contrary,
academic websites provide better community construction but pay
less attention to interaction functions. The possible reason is that
free information sharing among users will damage the interests of
commercial websites, which are mostly deprived from
information asymmetry between information suppliers and users.
Whereas, academic websites have a mission to disseminate public
knowledge but can’t burden additional labor cost for limited
funds, are inclined to provide weaker feedback but strong
community functions. As for government websites, the case in
this study is in a “dormancy” state and prepares to transform into
a commercial website. Government websites pay little attention to
both the feedback and community functions for lack of
motivations to seek profits and incentives to disseminate
knowledge.
H7: is supported. Website promotion is significantly correlated
with both website effect and business model.
Three indicators, search engine’s collection, number of back-links
and number of times reported by other media are selected to
evaluate website promotion. Data show that commercial websites
do far better than others in promotion because they have stronger
motivations and take more measures to increase their awareness.
Non-profit websites funded by NPOs or supported by government
procurement also have incentives to promote themselves. Pure
government websites and small personal websites hardly take any
promoting measures. In general, government websites keep
conservative attitude at commercial promotion strategies while
personal websites own low capabilities to promote themselves. By
the mediation of business model, website promotion influences its
effect.

5.2 Other Findings
Business model is a strong predictor for not only website effect,
but also other variables, such as website construction, social
networking services, website promotion, etc. Two commercial
websites, the Website for Migrant workers and the Website for
China Labor, are better than other websites in all aspects,
especially in information updating and examination of
information accuracy. Websites with worst performances are
those commercial websites which are short of funds, those
government websites which are in transformation to commercial
ones and those personal BBSs.
Lack of funds is reported by several small webmasters as the key
factor that influences website effect. The master of the Website of
Jobs for Migrant and Technical Workers, a commercial website
that was set up by a few individual MFW partners with their
meager wages, said: “limitation of funding is the bottleneck of
development and makes the website very difficult.” Another
website, China Migrant Worker (Party Building), was also
established by individual MFW partners and can’t operate well for
lack of money. Lack of talents is another problem related with
shortage of funds. Workers from a few websites which perform
better said that it is difficult for MFW websites to attract better
professionals because they can’t offer higher salaries.
5.3 Practical implications
Previous studies didn’t pay much attention to MFW websites for
many reasons. This study finds that MFW websites are neither
parts of government websites, nor just a group of agriculture
related websites, but are important information platforms
concerning legal right protection, employment and development
of Chinese MFWs with independent business models. The results
of this study have some practical implications for both
webmasters and governments.
5.3.1 Proper business model is critical for the
survival and development of Chinese MFW
websites
Previous researches advocate that government should make
efforts to provide free information services for MFWs because
some of them live in worse information environment and have
lower information capabilities than others, but few empirical
examinations have been conducted to explore specific service
patterns. This study shows that pure government website is not an
effective and efficient model for the delivery of information with
commercial characters. It also finds that information services
related with legal right protection of MFWs could be supported by
governments by means of service procurement, tax cuts, project
leading, etc.. Therefore, MFW websites need to manage to seek
appropriate business models, broaden funding channels, and strive
for supports from governments.
5.3.2 Construction of website features other than
contents will become more important in the
future
This study shows that some website features such as information
organization, number of links and SNS functions have not
significant influences on website effect. But as more and more
MFW websites emerge and the competition among them
intensifies, strengthening the construction of website features
other than contents will become more necessary and urgent.
102
5.3.3 Governments should provide more supports for
commercial and non-profit MFW websites
rather than establish new ones by themselves
This study shows that commercial websites and non-profit
websites supported by government procurement are more
successful than government websites and personal BBSs. This
means that although public information services are very
important for the survival and development of MFWs, it is not a
smart choice for government agencies to establish and manage
websites for MFWs by themselves. Instead, government should
support non-profit or commercial websites by means of
government procurement, tax cutting and policy concessions.
6. CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION
6.1 Conclusions
This study explored the factors that influence service effect MFW
websites. An analytical framework comprising four independent
variables, including business model, website construction, social
networking services, website promotion, and one dependent
variable, website effect, was advanced under a managerialtechnical
perspective. These variables were borrowed from
theories of usability, information architecture and webometrics.
Both quantitative and qualitative indicators were used for the
measurement of these variables, and a multi-case study was
conducted for a holistic exploration. It was found that factors that
significantly influence the effect and sustainable development of
MFW websites are business model, information content and
website promotion. Among them, business model also make
impacts as a mediating variable. Different kinds of information
intend to be provided by websites with different business models.
Government procurement and NPO funding are efficient
arrangements for websites on the legal right protection of MFWs.
The “commerce plus non-profit” mode by charging employers and
training agencies who issue information on websites but don’t
charge MFWs who issue or acquire information is common for
employment websites. Lack of money was reported as a prevalent
problem that faces with all kinds of MFW websites.
6.2 Limitations
Firstly, trying to combine both managerial and technical, and even
social perspectives into a holistic study is risky in being accepted
by readers who are accustomed to one discipline paradigm. We
employed and unified theories from LIS, IS, webmetrics and
management science and formulated an analytical framework for
this qualitative study. We hope that this attempt will be proved a
cross-discipline innovation instead of a blunder. Secondly, a
multi-case study may have to lose some detailed information in
order to improve the generality of the research findings, although
we had collected a large amount of first and second-hand data by
means of interview, website examinations and literature reviews.
Thirdly, the validity of four independent variables and 1
dependent variable were not testified powerfully in this qualitative
study because we failed to find similar studies and appropriate
methods. Fourthly, we focused on websites and neglected
information needs and information seeking behaviors of migrant
farmer workers, which will be studied in further step.
7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Our thanks to 3 projects that support this study, the project
“Information Access of Chinese Migrant Farmer Workers and the

Construction of Inter-regional Public Information Service System
for Them” (Grant No. 71173121) supported by the National
Natural Science Foundation of China , the project “Holistic
Evaluation Research on E-government Based on Multistakeholder
Value-focused Approach” (Grant No. 10YJA870021)
supported by the Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences
Program of Ministry of Education , and the project “Theory
Construction and Evaluation on Social Information Welfare”
supported by the Special Funds for fundamental Research of
Central Universities.
8. REFERENCES
[1] The State Council. The Opinion about Solving the Problems
of Rural Migrant Farmer Workers. The central government
website of the People 's Republic of China,2006. [view:
2011-05-18] http://www.gov.cn/jrzg/2006-
03/27/content_237644.htm.
[2] The National Statistical Bureau. Migrant Farmer Workers
Monitoring Report, 2009. [View: 2011-11-19]
http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjfx/fxbg/t20100319 402628281.htm.
[3] CNNIC. The 28th China Internet network development
statistics report, 2011. [view: 2011-12-
14].http://www.piaoshi.org/2011-cnnic-28th-china-internetdevelopment-statistics-report-download/.
[4] CNNIC. The 27th China Internet Network Development
Statistics Report, 2011. [view:2011-03-11],
http://www.cnnic.net.cn/dtygg/dtgg/201101/t20110118
20250.html.
[5] Wang, F. Social information welfare and its realization.
Library and Information Service, No.18 (2009), 30-34.
[6] Zheng, Y. Exploring the weak information capability of
China’s labor force from rural area. Economist, No.5 (2005),
52-59.
[7] Wen, J. & Yu, G. Information division and the poverty of
right of information underprivileged group. Journal of
Dehong Teachers College, No. 1 (2008), 21-24.
[8] Xie, Q., Shi, D. & Zhu, L. On information behavior and
assistance for information underprivileged group in
information society. The Library Journal of Henan, No.5
(2008), 54-56.
[9] The State Council. The Opinion about Solving the Problems
of Rural Migrant Farmer Workers. The central government
website of the People 's Republic of China,2006. [view:
2011-05-18] http://www.gov.cn/jrzg/2006-
03/27/content_237644.htm.
[10] Zhou, Y. Informatization promotes orderly flow of migrant
farmer workers. Leadership Science, No. 4, (2007), 40-41.
[11] Li, G. Informatization is promising to promote the
employment of peasant worker. Economic Daily No. 4
(2009).
[12] Yang, F. & Li, J. Information Asymmetry and Employment
of Peasant-workers. Market Modernization, No.34 (2007),
523.
103
[13] Jin, J. Building the information service system for migrant
workers. Economic Vision, No. 4 (2007), 49-50.
[14] Huang, L. & Wang, C. Exploring information
marginalization of migrant workers. Consume Guide, No.19
(2009), 18-19.
[15] Zhou, H. Constructing the integrated information service
system for migrant farmer workers. Information System
Engineering, No.9 (2005), 20-21.
[16] Xing, T. The electric business of agricultural products is
promising with 20000 national agriculture websites. [View:
2011-05-26], Communication and Information Report
(Fuzhou), (2011),
http://tech.163.com/11/0526/01/74UNDOLH000915BF.html.
[17] Wu, D. & Wu, Y. Research on the construction of
agricultural science-learning website based on Internet
independent study. Mechanical & Electrical Engineering
Technology, No.7 (2008), 47-48.
[18] Li, K & Sun Y. Research on application of personalized
recommendation system in agriculture websites: Sichuan
agricultural economy Website as an example. Market Forum
,No.2 (2009), 70-72.
[19] Zhao, L. & Zhu, X. Research on the construction of
agricultural websites in China based on web link Analysis.
Sci-Tech Information Development & Economy, No.11
(2011), 110-112.
[20] Yang, X. &Jia, D. Agriculture websites in the application of
rural informatization-take the case of Jiangsu Jurong City as
an example. Journal of Beijing University of Posts and
Telecommunications (Social Sciences Edition), No.5 (2009),
28-32.
[21] Guo, X. & He, M. Exploring the problems of agriculture
website construction. Press Outpost, No.12 (2009), 81-82.
[22] Yang, Y. & Jia, B. Research on the construction of
agricultural websites in China. Rural Economy and Science-
Technology, No.6 (2007), 20-21.
[23] Zhang, T. & Wu, H. The problems and solutions in the
development of agricultural information websites. Journal of
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (Social
Sciences Edition), No.3 (2010), 9-14.
[24] Benbunan-Fich, R.. Using protocol analysis to evaluate the
usability of a commercial website. Information and
Management, Vol. 39, No.2 (2001), 151-163.
[25] Davis, F. D., Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use,
and user acceptance of information technology. MIS
Quarterly, 13(3) (1989): 319–340.
[26] Shackel, B. (1991). Usability--context, framework,
definition, design and evaluation. Shackel, B. and
Richardson, S., Ed. Human Factors for Informatics
Usability. pp. 21-37. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University
Press.
[27] Morville, P. Information architecture on the World Wide
Web,1998. [View: 2011-10-19], http://repo.zenk-

security.com/Others/Information%20Architecture%20For%2
0The%20World%20Wide%20Web.pdf.
[28] Björneborn, L. & Ingwersen, P. Toward a basic framework
for webometrics. Journal of the American Society for
Information Society for Information Science and Technology,
Vol. 55 No. 14 (2004),1216–1227.
[29] Welch, E.W. & Sanjay, P. S. Multiple measures of website
effect and their association with service quality in health and
human service agencies. Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii
International Conference on System Sciences, 2007.
[30] Eschenfelder, K.R., and Miller, C. The openness of
government websites: toward a socio-technical government
website evaluation toolkit. MacArthur Foundation Internet
Credibility and the User Symposium, Seattle Washington,
2005.
[31] Lee Y. & Kozar, K. A. Investigating the effect of website
quality on e-business success: An analytic hierarchy process
(AHP) approach. Decision Support Systems, No. 42 (2006),
1383–1401.
[32] Nilsen, J. Usability Engineering. Academic Press, 1994.
[33] Peerce, J., Rogers, Y., Sharp, H., Benyon, D., Holland, S &
Carey, T. Human-computer interaction. Workingham,
England, Addison-Wesley, 1994.
[34] Pateli, A. & Giaglis, G.. A Framework For Understanding
and Analysing e-Business Models. Proceedings of the Bled
Electronic Commerce Conference, 2003.
[35] Chesbrough, H. Business model innovation: it’s not just
about technology anymore. Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 35
No. 6 (2007), 12-17.
[36] Hedman, J. & Kalling, T.The business model concept:
theoretical underpinnings and empirical illustrations.
European Journal of Information Systems, No. 12 (2003),
49–59.
[37] Ostenwalder, A.; Pigneur, Y. and Tucci C.L. Clarifying
Business Models: Origins, Present, and Future of the
Concept. Communications of AIS, Volume 15 (2005) .
[38] Wang, J. & Senecal, S. Measuring perceived website
usability. Journal of Internet Commerce, Vol. 6, No.4
(2007), 97-112.
[39] Al-Badi A. H. & Mayhew, P. J. A Framework for Designing
Usable Localized Business Websites. Communications of the
IBIMA, Vol. 2010, 1-24.
[40] Karlsson, M. Expressions, emotions and website design. Co
Design, Vol3, supplement 1 (2007), 75-89.
[41] Davenport, T.H. Information ecology: mastering the
Information and Knowledge Environment. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997.
[42] Gullikson, S., Blades, R., Bragdon, M., McKibbon, S.,
Sparling, M. & Toms, E. G. The impact of information
architecture on academic website usability. The Electronic
Library, Vol. 17, No. 5 (1999), 293-304.
104
[43] Wang, F. & Chen, Y. Wang, F & Chen, Y. From potential
users to actual users: Use of E-Government Service by
Chinese Migrant Farmer Workers. Government Information
quarterly, Vol. 29 (January 2012), pp. S98-S111.
[44] Al-Badi A. H. & Mayhew, P. J. A Framework for Designing
Usable Localized Business Websites. Communications of the
IBIMA, Vol. 2010, 1-24.
[45] Chen, B. The application of the external Web links in the
promotion of large enterprise's Website. Sci-Tech
Information Development & Economy, Vol. 17 No. 29
(2007), 246.
[46] Björneborn, L. & Ingwersen, P. Toward a basic framework
for webometrics. Journal of the American Society for
Information Society for Information Science and Technology,
Vol. 55 No. 14 (2004), 1216–1227.
[47] Weischedel, B. & Huizingh, E. K. R. E.. Website
optimization with web metrics: a case study. Proceedings of
the 8th international conference on Electronic commercet,
2006, Fredericton New Brunswick, Canada, August 13-16.
[48] Fang, W. Using Google Analytics for Improving Library
Website Content and Design: A Case Study. Library
Philosophy and Practice, Special Issue on Libraries and
Google (June, 2007),.
[49] Yin, R.K.). Case Study Research, Design and Methods.
California: Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, 1984.
[50] Bonoma, T. V. Case research in marketing: Opportunities
problems, and a process. Journal of Marketing Research,
Vol. 22 No. 2 (1986), 199-208.
[51] Benbasat, I., Goldstein, D. K. & Mead, M. The Case
Research Strategy in Studies of Information Systems. MIS
Quarterly, September, Vol.11, No.3, (1987), 369-386.
[52] Akhavan, P.; Jafari,M. & M Fathian, M. Critical success
factors of knowledge management systems: a multi-case
analysis. European Business Review, 18(2), (2006), 97-113.
[53] China Xin NongMen Website, “Comments”, 2008. [View:
2011-05-18]
http://wopingit.com/company.aspx?companyid=c569211eaae3-48ae-a6e3-e92af310217f.

The Development of Public Smart Phone Apps in Korea:
Empirical Approach
Eom, Seok-Jin
Seoul National University
1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu,
Seoul, Korea, 151-742
(82) 010-8147-5352
sjum21@snu.ac.kr
ABSTRACT
With widespread proliferation of smart phones, public apps, the
smart phone applications provided by government organizations
and public agencies, have been emerging as a new channel of
public information services in the era of mobile government (mgovernment).
Despite the increasing necessity of research on the
public apps, however, few studies have dealt with the public apps.
Under these circumstances, this study has been in progress with
following purposes: (1) to build a ‘public apps development
model’ for describing the level of services of public apps; (2) to
measure the overall level of public apps in Korea adopting the
development model; and (3) to analyze the factors which
determine the difference in the level of public apps services. Until
now, a 6-stage public apps development model whose criteria are
citizen-centricity and technological complexity of the public apps
was built. In addition, the levels of 148 public apps provided by
Korean central government were measured. As results, it is found
that all kinds of public organizations including central government
are actively providing various public apps and the overall level of
public apps provided by central government is in a midpoint of
the second and third stage. The authors plan to complement the
public apps development model in order to enhance validity, and
to measure a level of the public apps not only of central
government but also of local governments and public agencies
accordingly.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J.1 [Computer Applications]: Administrative Data Processing –
government.
General Terms
Measurement, Theory
Keywords
m-government, application (app), smart phone, e-government,
public apps development model
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Lee, Mi Yeon
Seoul National University
1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu,
Seoul, Korea, 151-742
(82) 010-7490-3777
dldus33@snu.ac.kr
105
Kim, Jun Houng
Seoul National University
1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu,
Seoul, Korea, 151-742
(82) 010-9602-5007
jh5451@snu.ac.kr
1. INTRODUCTION
With widespread proliferation of smart phones, public apps have
been produced and provided by government organizations and
public agencies in order to deliver public information services in
recent years. In addition to the wired Internet in the era of egovernment,
these public apps are emerging as a new service
channel in the era of m-government [3][4]. Despite widespread
proliferation of smart phones and the importance of public apps as
a new service channel, however, few studies in the field of egovernment
and information policy have dealt with the public
apps that function in smart phones. Under these circumstances,
this research is in progress for the following purposes: (1) to build
the ‘public apps development model’ for describing the level of
services of public apps; (2) to measure the overall level of public
apps in Korea adopting the development model; and (3) to analyze
the factors which determine the difference in the level of public
apps services.
In this paper, the authors review the literature on e-government
stage models in order to capture the criteria for dividing each
stage of the public apps development model. As a result, the 6stage
public apps development model, which is based on citizencentricity
and technological complexity, is illustrated. Adopting
this model, the authors measure the level of each public app
provided by Korean central government and demonstrate the
result of measurement according to each stage. In the future, the
authors not only plan to measure the level of each public app
provided by local governments and public agencies in Korea, but
also plan to analyze the factors that determine the difference in the
level of each public app through regression analysis.
This study is expected to make a theoretical contribution to
widening understandings on the current status of public apps and
the characteristics of m-government. From the perspective of
practice, this study is expected to provide the guidelines and
toolkits for making better public apps to public agencies and
public officials.
The organization of the paper is as follows. In section 2, the
authors provide theoretical background regarding m-government,
public apps, and development models. In section 3, the public
apps development model is illustrated. Finally, the findings from
the empirical analysis of the public apps adopting the
development model are presented with tentative conclusion and
future research plans.

2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
2.1 Mobile Government
With rapid advance in wireless technologies, there have been
several studies on the next generation of e-government adopting
wireless technologies in the public sector, which is called mgovernment.
More specifically, m-government is defined as “the
strategy and its implementation involving the utilization of all
kinds of wireless and mobile technology, services, applications,
and devices for improving benefits to the parties involved in egovernment
including citizens, businesses, and all government
units” [6]. With regard to the emergence of m-government, the
early literatures tend to regard m-government as the subset or
complement of e-government [5][6]. That is, m-government
cannot function apart from the existing e-government in that most
of the public services equipped with wireless technologies are
nothing more than replications of e-government services on the
mobile platforms. On the other hand, the recent literatures
emphasize the uniqueness of m-government [2]. More
specifically, m-government upgrades the level of public services
by providing the infrastructure and contents, which could not be
realized in the era of the wired e-government, by means of
mobility and hand-held devices.
Regardless of a perspective on m-government, however, there is a
tendency that most of the m-government literatures not only put
too much emphasis on conceptual discussion, but also regard mgovernment
as the phenomenon taking place in the distant future.
In order to deviate from such a tendency and approach mgovernment
empirically, the authors analyze the public apps, the
mobile applications provided by public organizations for
improving benefits to the public and private sector, in this study
[3][6]. With rapid increase in sales of mobile devices and huge
success of mobile application markets, such as Apple’s App Store,
citizens’ demand to receive public services via public apps has
been increasing sharply in Korea [4]. It implies that the study of
the relationship between m-government and public apps is
significant in order to understand the substance of m-government
and contribute to enlarging the research field of m-government.
2.2 Development Models of IT/IS
Since Nolan paved the way for the study of the use of IS
(Information Systems) in business organizations through the
growth stage model of computer use, there have been various
discussions to understand and analyze the development process of
e-commerce and e-business through a development or stage model
[7]. Likewise, the stage models that deal with the development
process of e-government, such as Gartner’s 4-stage model, UN’s
5-stage model, and Layne and Lee’s 5-stage model, have been
illustrated in order to analyze the use of IT (Information
Technology) in government organizations [1]. In their metasynthesis
approach, Siau and Long integrate five stage models
into a synthesized one on the basis of a systematic comparison of
stages between different models. They illustrate a comprehensive
e-government model whose stages are web presence, interaction,
transaction, transformation, and e-democracy [9].
However, some scholars criticize validity and usefulness of the
stage models. While these stage models are predicated on the
premise that the development process of technology and its
adoption in organizations are an evolutionary phenomenon,
Andersen and Henriksen argue that “not all researchers agree on
106
the suitability of “evolutionistic” development models as a means
for measuring IT capabilities in organizations” and “the individual
phases occur simultaneously and part of different elements of egovernment.”
[1] That is, a development model could regard
development process as discrete and individual stages even
though it is a complex and continuous process in reality.
Despite the weakness of these development models, the authors
claim that the development models have contributed to identifying
the current status of the recent IT or IS phenomenon, enlarging
conceptual discussion about the development process which is
seemingly chaotic, monitoring whether an organization’s use of
IT is on the right track in practice, and planning for future
applications. In particular, a development model helps provide a
systematic approach with regard to characteristics of newly
emerging fields of IT and IS. Given that few studies have dealt
with public apps and to a larger extent the substance of mgovernment,
it is expected that building the public apps
development model helps understand and analyze the result of
empirical approach on public apps systematically.
3. PUBLIC APPS DEVELOPMENT MODEL
The crucial principles applied to building the public apps
development model are citizen-centricity and technological
complexity. First, the more the functions of each public app are
interactive with citizens, the higher its stage is. Jaeger states that
not only do leading e-government strategies emphasize a citizen
centered version of public administration, but e-government
technologies that allow government to determine the identity of
users in order to provide more personalized and responsive
service become every more important [2]. In a broader sense, the
concept of Web 2.0 is also in accord with citizen-centricity. Web
2.0, inspired by Tim O’reilly, refers to the user-centric Internet
environment that is underpinned by the spirit of participation,
sharing, and openness, which emphasizes the utility of Internet
users, rather than that of Internet contents suppliers [8]. Second,
the more the technology of each public app is complex, the higher
the stage of the development model is. According to Siau and
Long, e-government system complexity and integration increase
with the advancement of the e-government stages, which also
implies that the technological advance in the functions of public
apps deserves to be regarded as the higher level of services [9].
More importantly, the authors put more significance on citizencentricity
than technological complexity because the studies
dealing with e-government stage models also suggest that it is
crucial to emphasize the function that facilitates interaction
between public organizations and citizens [2]. Therefore, the
public apps which provide a high level of citizen-centric service
with high level of mobile technology reaches the higher stage than
those which provide a high level of mobile technology with a low
level of citizen-centric service.
In summary, the public app which provides a high level of citizencentric
services with a high level of mobile technology reaches the
highest stage, while the public app which provides unilateral
services with a low level of mobile technology stays at the lowest
stage. Combining these criteria, the authors demonstrate a 6-stage
development model for public apps. More specific description
about each stage of this model is illustrated in Table 1.
Table 1. The public apps development model

Stage Description
1 st stage
(Simple
Demonstration)
2 nd stage
(Complex
Demonstration)
3 rd stage
(Simple
Interaction)
4 th stage
(Complex
Interaction)
5 th stage
(Transaction)
6 th stage
(Transformation)
Public information services, which were provided
through the wired Internet previously, are provided
through a public app. Since it is the beginning
phase of public apps production, service producers
mainly focus on delivery of simple services and
information, such as text, pictures, and video clips.
The functions that increase citizens’ convenience
are not provided at this stage.
The functions that increase citizens’ convenience
by means of mobile technology, such as QR
(Quick Response) code, are provided. For
example, citizens can search for the nearest
facilities from the place where they are located via
LBS (Location Based Service), such as augmented
reality and Google Maps. Government agencies
provide such services in unilateral way.
Government agencies provide the function that
interacts with citizens. For example, public apps
provide Q & A, counseling, and chatting billboard
in order to provide citizens with the opportunity to
ask a question or express an opinion about public
affairs. Also, citizens can report the emergency
situation with short descriptions about situation or
pictures on the spot.
The function that enhances interaction is provided.
That is, interaction between government agencies
and citizens transcends the simple level and
researches the extent that not only citizens but
government agencies are also proactive in citizencentric
services. For example, mutual
communication occurs through SNS (Social
Network Services), such as Facebook and Twitter.
At this stage, public apps provide the two-way
communication service which is possible only
when technological security and trust between
citizens and government agencies are assured. For
instance, citizens can make payment of taxes,
fines, and public merchandise. Also, they can
request package delivery with regard to civil affair
documents via public apps.
Citizens enjoy one-stop service via one public app.
Because public apps are interconnected in terms of
service delivery, any service or information that
citizens want to receive are provided even though
they get access to other public apps. For example,
a public app which is a platform for all of the
mobile public information services plays a role as a
portal for providing one-stop services.
4. EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS
4.1 Methods
In order to identify current status of Korean public apps which can
be downloaded through Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android
Market, the authors examined the entire population of public apps
as of January 31, 2012. Based on the data collected from the
survey, the list of public apps according to the title, app producers,
and mobile platforms were made. Then, not only were the public
apps provided by central government downloaded, but the
characteristics and functions were closely examined in order to
measure the level of each public app.
More specific procedure is as follows. First, two of the authors,
the one who had an Apple iPhone and the other who had an
Android phone, individually observed the contents of mobile
107
services of the public apps that were produced by central
government agencies and that were provided through both App
Store and Android Market. Second, they cross-checked each
other’s findings in terms of the functions and characteristics each
public app was equipped with. Third, the author who had an
iPhone examined the level of central government’s public apps in
the Apple’s App Store and the one who had an Android phone
examined the level of central government’s public apps in the
Android Market.
4.2 Descriptive Survey Results
Some major findings on the public apps from the survey are
illustrated in Table 2 and Table 3. According to Table 2, a total of
701 public apps are provided by central government, local
governments, and public agencies in Korea. The public apps
provided by local governments account for 40.4%, which means
that local governments are the most active providers of public
apps among the three types of public organizations. In addition,
the public apps provided by public agencies including public
enterprises and quasi-governmental organizations (QUAGOs)
account for 36.7%. On the other hand, the public apps provided by
central government agencies account for 22.9%, which suggests
that central government agencies fall behind the rest of public
organizations in terms of provision of public apps.
Table 2. The number of public apps
Central
Government
Local
Governments
Public
Agencies
Total
Frequency 161 283 257 701
Portion (%) 22.9 40.4 36.7 100.0
By contrast, Table 3 illustrates that central government agencies
are the most active providers of public apps in terms of the ratio
of the number of the agencies that produce public apps to the total
number of agencies. That is, 67.3% of the entire central
government agencies provide public apps, while only 43.8% and
39.1% of the entire local governments and public agencies
provide public apps, respectively. Also, Table 3 suggests that
local governments provide more public apps than central
government agencies and public agencies because the number of
local governments is more than that of central government
agencies and public agencies, not because every local government
is active in provision of public apps.
Table 3. Public apps providers
Central
Government
Local
Governments
Public
Agencies
Total
Total 49 224 284 557
Providers 33 98 111 242
Portion (%) 67.3 43.8 39.1 43.4

4.3 Measurement of a Level of Public Apps
In order to measure the level of public apps of Korean central
government, the authors made a check-list on whether each of 161
public apps was satisfied with the specific criteria of each stage of
the model. And then, the level of each public app was determined
as the highest stage where each public app reached. Of 161 public
apps, 13 public apps were excluded because of the unexpected
problems. For example, the authors could not get access to the
public app named “National Tax Service for Businessmen”,
because it was necessary to have a registered business number in
order to log in to this public app. Then, based on 148 public apps,
the authors measured a level of each public app.
Table 4. Measurement of a level of public apps
1 st
stage
2 nd
stage
3 rd
stage
4 th
stage
5 th
stage
6 th
stage
Total
Frequency 24 80 13 24 7 0 148
Portion
(%)
16.2 54.1 8.8 16.2 4.7 0.0 100.0
As shown in Table 4, 54.1% of the public apps provided by
central government agencies satisfy the criteria of the second
stage of the model. That is, more than half of the public apps
provided by central government agencies provide the functions
that increase citizens’ convenience by means of mobile
technology, such as LBS and QR code. In term of interaction
pattern, 70.3% of public apps provide one-way communication
services, while 29.7% of public apps provide two-way
communication service. Also, it is notable that 25% of the entire
public apps provide the functions that satisfy the third and fourth
stage, while only 4.7% of the entire public apps reach the fifth
stage. When it comes to the portion of the public apps that provide
two-way communication service, the authors interpret in the
following ways. First, given that the public apps that satisfy the
third and fourth stage account for 25% of the entire public apps, it
seems that central government agencies try to provide the
functions for promoting interactions with their citizens by
accommodating their questions or opinions through public apps.
Second, it can be said that public apps which provide two-way
communications are at the initial stage. Only 4.7% of the entire
public apps of Korean central government provide the functions
that satisfy the fifth stage, such as mobile payment and mobile
order of package delivery. Diverse possible causes for this
phenomenon can be considered. On the supply side, the weak
leadership for developing higher level of public apps or the low
level of technology which government agencies have could be
major obstacles against providing the fifth and sixth level of
public apps. On the demand side, it is possible to argue that the
demand from citizens on such kinds of public apps is still weak.
5. TENTATIVE CONCLUSION
In this paper, the authors reviewed the literature on m-government
and claimed the necessity to approach m-government empirically.
Regarding public apps as the significant substance of mgovernment,
the authors built the public apps development model
in order to analyze the public apps systematically, and examined
the entire population of public apps. Until now, it is found that the
total number of the public apps provided by central government,
local governments, and public agencies in Korea was 701. Also,
108
local governments were the most active providers of public apps
among the three types of public organizations. In addition, overall
level of public apps of central government is approximately in a
midpoint of the second and third stage.
These tentative results can be interpreted that government
organizations and public agencies in Korea are actively adopting
mobile technologies for delivering public information services in
the era of m-government. On the other hand, Korean public
organizations still have long way to go because the overall level
of public apps are not so high that it cannot be enough to fully
satisfy the citizens’ expectations and future demands for the
transaction and integrative services through public apps.
The authors plan to do as follows in the future. First, the public
apps development model should be complemented reflecting
results of the public app survey. Second, the current status of
public apps should be analyzed more deeply applying various
criteria. Third, the measurement of levels of public apps of local
governments and public agencies will be conducted and the
overall level of the entire public apps in Korea will be examined.
Finally, causal factors for determining the levels of public apps
will be analyzed through statistical inferential analysis.
6. REFERENCES
[1] Andersen, K. and Henriksen, H. E-government maturity
models: extension of the Layne and Lee model. Government
Information Quarterly, 23 (2006), 236-248.
[2] Campbell, J. and Im, T. Beyond ubiquity: mobile
government, theory and practice. In Proceedings of the
KAPA international conference (Seoul, Korea, 2012).
[3] Kim, H., Hong, S., and Joo, S. Performance analysis of
mobile application, in Proceedings of the Korean computer
synthesis conference (Seoul, Korea, 2011).
[4] Kim, H., Lee, H., and Choi, S. An exploratory study on the
determinants of mobile application purchase. Journal of
Society for E-business Studies, 16, 4 (2011), 173-195.
[5] Kumar, M. and Sinha, O. M-government: mobile technology
for e-government. In Proceedings of the fifth international
conference on e-governance (Hyderabad, India, 2007).
[6] Kushchu, I. and Kuscu, M. From e-government to mgovernment:
facing the inevitable. In Proceedings of the
third European conference on e-government (Dublin, Ireland,
2003).
[7] Nolan, R. Managing the computer resource: a stage
hypothesis. Communications of the ACM, 16, 7 (1973), 399-
405.
[8] Ra, J. et al. A study on the strategies of electronic
government services based on Web 2.0. Korea IT Service
Society, 7, 1 (2008), 237-254.
[9] Siau, K. and Long, Y. Synthesizing e-government stage
models: a meta-synthesis based on meta-ethnography
approach. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 105, 4
(2005), 443-458

Understanding Citizens’ Perceptions of E-Government
Services in Mexico
Juan M. Gomez Reynoso
Universidad Autonoma de
Aguascalientes, Mexico
jmgr@correo.uaa.mx
ABASTRACT
Mexico has made significant progress in expanding the
capabilities of e-government services available for citizens.
According to the 2012 UN e-government report, Mexico ranks
28 th among the 179 UN member states, and 3 rd in Latin America
in terms of overall development of online services. However, to
date, little is known about the demand side of online services.
This paper investigates the factors that influence the adoption of
online services in Mexico. Kumar et al. model is used to support
the hypotheses proposed in this paper. An online survey was used
to collect data on citizens’ perceptions about e-government. The
results will be analyzed using multiple regression analysis.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.5.2 [Computers and Society]: Governmental Issues –
Regulation, Taxation
General Terms
Measurement, Documentation, Performance, Reliability, Human
Factors, Standardization, Theory, Verification
Keywords
E-Government Services, e-Government Initiatives, Digital
Government, Mexico, Online Services, Adoption, Perceptions
1. INTRODUCTION
Information and communication technologies have transformed
government service delivery over the past twenty years. With the
emergence of the Internet governments have improved their
internal operations and integrated processes and systems across
multiple government agencies. The impact has also been profound
in the provision of services to citizens, who have traditionally
relied on methods such as over the counter service, ordinary mail,
telephone, and fax to interact with the government. Electronic (e-)
government technologies allow citizens to access a full range of
services in a reliable, secure and convenient manner through
different delivery channels (e.g. web sites, portals, cell phones and
electronic kiosks). To date, government services available online
provide at least the necessary information and materials to initiate
a request for services. Sophisticated applications of technology
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
Celene Navarrete
California State University
Dominguez Hills
cnavarrete@csudh.edu
109
Rodrigo Sandoval Almazan
Universidad Autonoma del
Estado de Mexico, Mexico
rsandovala@uaemex.mx
provide services with transactional and collaboration capabilities
(e.g. income taxes declaration, car registration, political
participation, electronic voting).
Mexico has made important progress in implementing e-
Government services. According to the 2012 UN e-government
survey, Mexico ranks 28 th among the 179 UN member states, and
3 rd in Latin America behind Colombia and Chile in terms of
overall development of e-government services. Mexico provides
64% of all the assessed services over the Internet, from which
69% show some interactive presence (e.g. downloadable
databases or pdf files), 62% offer transactional capabilities, and
57% include networked presence including e-participation
capabilities. The UN report assessed each country’s national
portal, e-services portal and the websites of the ministries of
education, labor, social services, health, finance and environment.
The success of e-government initiatives depends on the citizens’
willingness to use online services [1]. Previous studies have
analyzed the adoption of e-government initiatives [2, 3].
However, a few studies provide evidence of what drives adoption
of online public services in Mexico. Research suggests that
quality of services, poor informational and transactional
capabilities in government Web sites, preference for payments in
cash over credit card use, and trust in the Internet to carry out
transactions can be central for the utilization of e-government [4,
5]. The purpose of this study is to identify the perception-based
factors that influence citizens’ perceptions of e-government
services in Mexico. This study analyzes e-government adoption
across four types of services: vital records (birth, death and
marriage certificates), vehicle and property tax payments
(ownership tax), and fine payment (traffic, parking, civil fines).
All these services are provided at the state level.
Mexico presents an interesting case of study for understanding egovernment
perceptions. This is a risk-averse culture that tends to
distrust technological innovation [6]. In addition, Mexico has a
large digital and educational divides [7]. According to the 2010
Census, in terms of computer and Internet access, 29% of the
Mexican population has a computer at home, 21% has Internet
access, 43% has a telephone line at home and 65% owns a cellular
phone [7]. Almost half of Internet users utilize the Internet at
home (48%) and 52% at some other location. The largest
percentage of Internet users reside in medium-low households
(46%) compared to 16% the high income bracket, 31% in the
medium-high and 37% in the low levels. A small percentage of
Internet users earned a bachelor’s degree (26%) and 2% owns a
graduate degree. 42% of Internet users completed 6 th to 9 th grade
of elementary education and 29% completed high school.

This paper is organized as follows: First, we provide an overview
of e-government implementation in Mexico. Second, we describe
the model that we will use to analyze perceptions about egovernment
services. Finally, we describe the methodology that
will guide the collection and analysis of data.
2. OVERVIEW OF E-GOVERNMENT IN
MEXICO
Mexico is divided into 32 states, which are made up of 2,454
municipalities. Mexico’s government is divided in three levels:
Federal, State and Municipal (local). All levels of government
have implemented e-Government initiatives. At the Federal level,
a relevant achievement in terms of service delivery is the redesign
of the “Citizen Portal” (Portal Ciudadano, http://www.gob.mx).
This portal provides a search engine that acts as a single point of
entry for information and services of the three levels of
government. For example, a citizen considering applying for
public health coverage can conduct one search to find information
on the national public health care system, whether provided by a
federal, state, or local government source. Simplicity and usability
are the main aspects of the Portal's design.
Figure 1. Citizen’s Portal (http://www.gob.mx).
At the state level, a recent study evaluated the 32 State portals
according to five different components: information, interaction,
transactions, integration, and participation. A team of egovernment
experts used a form including 143 questions to
evaluate the portals. They found that Jalisco is in 1st place moving
up from 5th, Aguascalientes is 2nd moving up 15 positions, Baja
California moves into 3rd place from 7th last year respectively.
On the other hand, Puebla, Durango y Coahuila, move down 15,
12 and 9 positions, respectively [11]
At the municipal level, previous research suggests that many local
governments in Mexico do not have the basic infrastructure for
developing a digital government strategy [8] . According to Gil-
Garcia et al., 360 Mexican municipalities (out of 2,454) are
considered moderately or highly technologically prepared. A
more recent study that analyzed 518 local e-government websites
shows that municipalities are making poor use of IT government
openness, web design and Web 2.0 tools. On the demand side,
services offered are not really meeting the needs of citizens [9].
This might be due to the fact that “IT departments have limited
influence on the main government strategies and they do not have
the appropriate organizational structure, trained staff, or budget to
manage a digital government strategy” (p. 2) [10].
In sum, e-Government implementations at the three levels of
government are evolving; not enough to understand the citizens’
110
needs yet, but sufficiently to promote new government services
online. Studies focus mostly on the functionality characteristics
of Web portals [11-13] and the public policy aspects of
implementations rather than service provision [12]. There have
been a few efforts to analyze the impact of e-Government and its
interaction with citizens. Trust in the government and perceptions
about the reliability and security of the online service delivery
medium are two important drivers of service utilization in Mexico
[5].
3. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Adoption of e-government refers to the citizens’ intention to use
public services online, which encompasses the intentions to
receive information, to provide information, and to request
services electronically [14].
This study uses Kumar’s model of E-government adoption [15] to
explain the way citizens are embracing e-government services in
Mexico. According to Kumar et. al., user characteristics, website
design, service quality and satisfaction impact e-government
adoption. User characteristics consist of a) perceived risk, and b)
perceived control. Perceived risk refers to citizens’ concerns
related to the privacy and security of transactions. Previous
research suggests that Mexicans tend to prefer traditional service
delivery methods when the transaction involves disclosure of
personal and financial information [5]. People in Mexico distrust
the Internet to conduct transactions. They also fear their
information could be misused by public servants or other parties.
Thus, we can expect that perceived risk will influence the
behavior of the adoption. Therefore:
H1) Perceived risk about online transactions will influence the
adoption of e-Government services.
Perceived control is defined as user’s perception of being in
charge of the interaction with e-government technologies. If
citizens have more control over the site navigation, the pace or
rhythm of the interaction, and the content being accessed, it can
increase their trust and give them a feeling of more control [15]
ultimately impacting adoption [16]. Therefore:
H.2) Perceived control will influence the adoption of egovernment
services.
Citizen traits that are of interest in understanding adoption include
demographic factors such as age and education. Higher educated
individuals are more comfortable using the Internet to access
information and to shop [17]. Research has shown that individuals
who attain a certain level of familiarity with online purchases tend
to be more confident about their skills to access services online
[18]. Age also influences adoption. Younger adults, especially
those under age 25, are more interested in using new technologies
to access information and services [17].Thus,
H.3) Demographic factors (age and education) will influence the
adoption of e-government services.
Perceptions related to the design elements of a Web site can also
have a direct impact in e-government adoption. According to
Kumar et al. [15], the design of e-government Web sites can be
evaluated based on their usefulness and ease of use. Perceived
usefulness is considered as an extrinsic motivation. It is defined as
the degree that a person assigns to the value of using a particular
information system to improve its work [19, 20]. End-users could
adopt e-Government services when such services deliver a better

performance compared to those provided by traditional means
[21]. Use of a technological innovation can be predicted by its
associated perceived usefulness [19]. Therefore,
H4) Perceived usefulness will influence the adoption of e-
Government
Ease of use is the degree to which the user expects that the target
information system to be free of efforts [19]. An e-Government
service that is perceived to facilitate the interaction process while
being easy to operate is likely to increase citizen’s intentions to
use it [22]. Therefore,
H5) Perceived ease of use will influence the adoption of e-
Government services
Service quality refers to citizens’ perceptions about the
government’s ability to efficiently provide reliable and convenient
online services [23-25]. Reichheld et al. [26] state that service
quality impacts user satisfaction and, ultimately, adoption. Palmer
(2002) identifies quality as a factor that builds trust towards e-
Government utilization. e-Government implementations have the
ability for improving significantly the quality of services provided
to citizens and businesses while attaining greater efficiency for all
participants (Kumar et al., 2007). Thus, understand what citizens
expect from an e-Government service is crucial for governments.
Therefore,
H.6) Perceptions about service quality will indirectly influence
adoption of e-Government services.
Satisfaction is the perception of pleasure which is obtained upon
receipt of a service with quality [15]. Thus, it is very important
that services provided via the Internet not only to be relevant and
efficient, but also they involve the goal of making the user feel
well for using them and not perceived as an imposition by upper
management. Therefore, we believe that:
H.7) Service encounter satisfaction will influence the adoption of
e-Government.
Figure 2 summarizes the constructs discussed above.
User Characteristics
• Perceived risk
• E-Government interaction
• Perceived control over
personal information
• Demographics
Website Design
• Perceived usefulness
• Perceived ease of use
Perceived Service Quality
4. METHODOLOGY
Figure2. Studied Model
eGovernment
Adoption
Users’ Satisfaction
3.1 Sample
We used an online survey to collect perceptions on e-government
in Mexico. The survey aimed to capture information on the
participants’ demographics and e-government perceptions. It
included a total of 38 questions with a 7 point Likert scale ranging
from completely disagree (1) to completely agree (7). An
invitation to participate in the study was sent to public
111
organizations including the National Association of Universities
and Higher Education Institutions (ANUIES in Spanish), National
Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) and a private
financial organization with offices across Mexico. We used
convenience-purposive sampling for data collection [27].
Purposive sampling was appropriate for our study because we
needed participants that already attained some sort of level of
exposure to e-government. Participants with such profile can be
especially useful to understand service utilization. We obtained a
total of 217 responses; all of them were usable. Data were
collected from September to December in 2011.
3.2 Initial Descriptive Analysis
This is a research in progress. Table 1 presents the demographic
profile of participants. We are in the process of analyzing the data
using multiple regression analysis. Additional results will be
presented in the conference.
Table 1. Demographic data
Demographics Values Percentage
Gender
Male
Female
42%
58%
No attended 7%
Finished 6
Education
th grade 17%
Finished 9 th grade 6%
High school
Two-year college
8%
9%
Bachelor 24%
Master 13%
PhD 16%
17 years or less 13%
18 to 24 years 21%
Age
25 - 34 years 26%
35 – 44 years 18%
45+ years 22%
Respondents were asked which types of transactions made
through electronic services; 49% paid vehicle taxes, 55% property
taxes, while 44% different types of fines. Also, 56% made
procedures related to vital records, and 44% responded that he
made use of other services not listed previously.
5. REFERENCES
[1] Carter, L. E-government Diffusion: A Comparison of Adoption
Constructs. AMCIS, 2007.
[2] Carter, L. and Belanger, F. The Utilization of e-Government
Services: Citizen trust, Innovation and acceptance factors. Info
Systems, 15, 1 2005), 5-25.
[3] Bélanger, F. and Carter, L. Trust and risk in e-government
adoption. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 17, 2
2008), 165-176.
[4] Navarrete, C. Utilization of Electronic Government Services in
México: A Matter of Trust. The Journal of Community
Informatics: Special Issue: E-Governance and Community
Informatics., 4, 2 2008).
[5] Navarrete, C., Gil-Garcia, J. R., Mellouli, S., Pardo, T. A. and
Scholl, J. Multinational E-Government Collaboration,
Information Sharing, and Interoperability: An Integrative
Model. IEEE, 2010.

[6] Hofstede, G. and Hofstede, G. J. Cultures and Organizations:
Software of the mind, New York, USA McGraw-Hill, 2005.
[7] INEGI. Censo de población y vivienda 2010. INEGI,
Aguascalientes, Mexico, 2010.
[8] Luna-Reyes, L. F., Gil-Garcia, J. R. and Mansi, C. Hacia un
Modelo de Gobierno Electrónico a Nivel Municipal para
México: Reporte de Resultados de Talleres con Directores de
Informática Municipales. Universidad de las Américas
Puebla-INFOTEC, Puebla, México, 2010.
[9] Sandoval-Almazán, R. and Colin, J. M. Gobierno electrónico
en México: una exploración Municipal 2010. Association for
Information Systems, 2011.
[10] Luna-Reyes, L. F., Gil-García, J. R. and Ramírez-Hernández,
F. A Resource-Based View of Local Digital Government: Core
Capabilities for Success from the Case of Mexico. 2011.
[11] Luna-Reyes, L., J., Gil-García, R. and Rojas-Bandera, J. S.
An Exploratory Study of Electronic Government and State
Portals in Mexico. Idea Group Inc, 2007.
[12] Sandoval Almazán, R. Explorando la Brecha Digital en
México. Diagnóstico del Proyecto E-México en el Estado de
México. 2006.
[13] Sandoval-Almazan, R. and Gil-Garcia, J. R. The Role of the
CIO in a Local Government IT Strategy: The case of Merida,
Yucatán Mexico. Electronic Journal of e-Government, 9, 1
2011), 1-14.
[14] Al-Omari, H. and Al-Omari, A. Building an e-Government e-
Trust Infrastructure. American Journal of Applied Sciences, 3,
11 2006), 2122-2130.
[15] Kumar, V., Mukerjil, B., Butt, I. and Persaud, A. Factors for
Successful e-Government Adoption: a Conceptual
Framework. The Electronic Journal of e-Government, 5, 1
2007), 63-76.
[16] Wu, G. Conceptualizing and Measuring the Perceived
Interactivity of Websites. Journal of Current Issues and
Research in Advertising, 28, 1 2006), 87-104.
112
[17] Pew Research Center Internet Use and Home Broadband
Connections Jul 24, 2012.
[18] Carter, L. and Weerakkoddy, V. E-government Adoption: A
Cultural Comparison. Information Systems Frontiers, 10, 4
2008), 473-482.
[19] Davis, F. D. Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and
user acceptance of information technology. Mis Quarterly,
13,31989), 319-340.
[20] Lederer, A. L., Maupin, D. J., Sena, M. P. and Zhuang, Y.
The technology acceptance model and the world wide web.
Decision Support Systems, 29:32000), 269-282.
[21] Plana, C., Cerpa, N. and Bro, P. B. Bases para la creación de
una metodología de adopción de comercio electrónico para las
Pymes chilenas. Universidad Tarapacá, facultad de
ingeniería, volúmen 142006), 49-63.
[22] Warkentin, M., Gefen, D., Pavlou, P. A. and Rose, G. M.
Encouraging Citizen Adoption of e-Government by Building
Trust. Electronic Markets, 12, 3 2002), 157-162.
[23] Carter, L. and Belanger, F. The Utilization of e-government
Services: Citizen trust, Innovation and Acceptance Factors.
Information Systems Journal, 152005), 5-25.
[24] Reddick, C. G. Citizen Interaction with E-Government: From
the Streets to Servers? Government Information Quarterly,
222005), 38-57.
[25] Welch, E. W., Hinnant, C. C. and Moon, J. M. Linking
Citizen Satisfaction with E-Government and Trust in
Government. Journal of Public Administration Research and
Theory, 15, 3 2004), 371-391.
[26] Reichheld, F. F., Markey, R. G. and Hopton, C. E-customer
loyalty – applying the traditional rules of business for online
success. European Business Journal, 12, 4 2000), 173-179.
[27] Neuman, W. L. Social Research Methods (5th Edition).
Allyn and Bacon, Boston, 2000.

Session 5
Information Sharing, Models &
Platforms

Factors Influencing Exchange Activities in Transnational
Knowledge Networks: The Case of the Hajj-MDSS
Mohammed Gharawi
The Institute of Public Administration
P.O. Box 205
Riyadh, 11141, Saudi Arabia
+1 966 476 8888
gharawima@yahoo.com
ABSTRACT
This paper presents selected results from a study of technical,
information, and knowledge exchange in Transnational Public
Sector Knowledge Networks (TPSKNs). The study contributes to
the growing base of theory relating to TPSKNs presented by
Dawes, Gharawi, and Burke [7]. It explores the TPSKN formed
between the United States Center for Disease Control and the
Saudi Arabian Ministry of Health ahead of the 2009 Hajj, one of
the largest mass gathering events in the world. Data collected
from semi-structured interviews with key participants and a
variety of secondary data that were analyzed with an inductive
approach to identify and address the impact of the influential
factors on attaining the stated goals of the collaboration. The
study extends the current knowledge-base regarding TPSKNs into
a new transnational context, and a new policy domain, public
health. It expands upon the considered contexts to include
technological context, central when exchange centers on
implementing a new system or adopting an existing system. The
study also expands understanding of the influential factors
deriving from knowledge and information; organizational; and
national layers of context.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY, K.4.1 Public Policy Issues,
Transborder Data Flows
General Terms
Theory, Management
Keywords
Transnational Public Sector Knowledge Networks, Knowledge
Sharing, Information Sharing, Cross-Cultural Collaboration, the
Hajj, Saudi Ministry of Health, Center for Disease Control
1. INTRODUCTION
In the era of globalization, governments around the world are
increasingly engaging in Transnational Public Sector Knowledge
Networks (TPSKNs) as appropriate mechanisms for dealing with
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
113
Theresa Pardo
Center for Technology in Government
SUNY Albany
187 Wolf Rd., Suite 301, Albany, NY 12205
+1 518 442 3892
tpardo@ctg.albany.edu
a host of global problems that no one nation or single government
is well-positioned to address individually. Environmental quality,
public health, international trade, and relief efforts relating to
natural disasters are just a few areas where technology,
information, and knowledge need to cross national and cultural
boundaries through channels and mechanisms that are more agile
and less controlled than the formal interactions among sovereign
states [1].
While these networks represent a novel approach to addressing
critical global issues and concerns, they also provide opportunities
for governments to build and diversify their capacities in various
areas and domains. These networks are a key feature of world
order in the twenty-first century, allowing government officials
and organizations to work outside of the formality of sovereign
states to exchange information and coordinate activities to address
problems on a global scale [2].
Several authors have discussed these networks conceptually, and
have described the possibility of empowering them to build
governance capacity around the world [2-5]. There has been little
research conducted, however, which empirically investigates the
complexities surrounding the main function of these networks: the
exchange of different types of content. The dearth of rigorous
study into this phenomenon represents a gap in the pertinent
literature, and a gap in the knowledge available to those
government practitioners who are most likely to engage in these
relationships.
The dearth for theoretical foundations in this area magnifies the
practice gap related to TPSKNs. There have been many binational
memoranda of understanding signed during the past few
years to promote the exchange of technology, knowledge,
information, and practices between governmental agencies; only a
few such documents, however, have been written to guide
practitioners in establishing strategies to manage and guide such
networks. As a result, practitioners engaging in these networks
often lack a clear understanding of the intended nature and
function of a given TPSKN, and further, of the factors which
might promote or hinder its success.
The Center for Technology in Government (CTG) at the State
University of New York at Albany (SUNY) has recently studied
the topic of Transnational Public Sector Knowledge Networks
(TPSKNs) through a National Science Foundation-sponsored
project titled, “Understanding Transnational Public Sector
Knowledge Networks”. The focus of the CTG project centered on
international collaborative efforts to monitor air quality and
reporting initiatives involving the United States and Mexico, and
the United States and China. The project explored the issues

arising as a result of these two bi-lateral collaborations and
analyzed the actual experiences of government and partner
organizations. The resultant conclusions lay the foundation for
future work that goes beyond description, to build a more robust
theory of transnational knowledge- and information-sharing to
better address global problems [6, 7].
This study extends current knowledge about TPSKNs into a new
transnational context involving US and SA and a new policy
domain; public health. It expands context to include technological
context when exchange is centered on implementing a new system
or adopting an existing system. The study also expands
understanding of the influential factors deriving from knowledge
and information; organizational; and national layers of context.
This paper presents selected results from the study that addresses
the following research questions:
o What were the critical factors influencing sharing and
exchange activities during the adoption of the Hajj Mobile
Disease Surveillance System (Hajj-MDSS)?
o What is the impact of the identified factors on attaining the
stated goals of the collaboration?
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
The study is guided by the Dynamic Model of Transnational
Knowledge Networks (DMTKN) developed recently by group of
researchers at the Center for Technology in Government (CTG) at
the University at Albany [6, 7]. The model depicts the contextual
complexity surrounding sharing activities in TPSKNs (Figure 1).
It identifies the contextual elements that characterize the external
and internal environments of the individual organizations that
participate in such networks. These contextual factors are
presented in the model as three layers of complexity: information
and knowledge content; organizational context; and national
context.
Figure 1. Dynamic Model of Transnational Knowledge
Networks [7]
The content layer represents the characteristics of the knowledge
and information being exchanged. Content layer captures the
influence of the existing characteristics of information, and
knowledge being exchanged. Many factors can influence sharing
activities at content layer. While some of these factors are relevant
regardless of the type of content that is exchanged, others become
important only for specific types of content. Thus, the first factor
114
to examine at content layer is the type of content [8]. Following
that, value and sensitivity are to be explored, as they represent two
additional, important factors to be considered when any type of
content is exchanged [9-11] . In the case of information exchange,
the degree of standardization and the existence—or lack thereof—
of metadata describing the information represent additional
factors that has to be considered [9]. Finally, knowledge exchange
is influenced by the degree of embeddedness and articulability of
the exchanged knowledge [13, 14]. Table [1] lists and defines all
such factors which might influence exchange activities at the
content layer of complexity as proposed by the DMTKN.
Table 1. Factors related to technical, information, and
knowledge content
Factor Definition
Type Refers to the type of content being
exchanged (technology, information, or
Value
Sensitivity
knowledge).
Refers to the extent to which the content
being exchanged is perceived as an
organizational, social, or governmental
asset.
Refers to the qualities which make the
exchanged content vulnerable to misuse
or misunderstanding.
Data standards Refers to the extent to which there are
and definitions standard data formats and definitions.
Embeddedness Refers to the degree to which knowledge
is situated in or generated by ongoing
practice and learning by doing.
Articulability Refers to the extent to which knowledge
can be expressed in language, number,
formal procedures, and explicit
techniques.
The organizational context embodies the structures, capabilities,
and constraints of the governmental units involved in the
exchange [6]. The DMTKNs identifies many organizational-level
factors that may influence the effectiveness of TPSKNs. These
factors include the goals and interests of participating
organizations, trust, executive support and organizational
commitment, risks, costs, benefits, authority and hierarchical
structures, organizational culture, leadership, organizational rules
procedures, and regulations, resources, and absorptive capacity [9,
15-18]. Table [2] presents definitions for all such factors.
The national context layer corresponds to the cultures and
political systems surrounding the interaction [1]. Characteristics
of the external environment are likely to influence the sharing in
TPSKNs as indicated by previous research. A review of the
factors which might impede sharing activities at the national level
points to five main factors: national culture [16, 19, 20], laws and
policies [9, 12, 18], political support and interests [15], language
differences [21, 22], and geographic location [14, 22]. Table [3]
presents definitions for the stated factors.
The layers of context, surrounding each participating
organization, represent one of several components of the DMTKN
that emphasize the importance of context in two specific ways.
First, the model depicts the influence of the three layers being
discussed. Second, the layers of context and domestic

elationships among network actors in each country contributes to
a set of contextual distances which represent the differences, in
kind or degree, between the international actors on a set of
influential dimensions: culture, politics, goals and intentions,
organizational factors, ability to form relationships, types and
extent of knowledge, types and extent of resources, physical
location, and available technologies [6, 7]. Variations on these
dimensions form the contextual differences in each country
which, in turn, influence the nature and performance of exchange
processes and interactions and, consequently, products and
performance of TPSKNs [6, 7].
Table 2. Factors related to organizational context
Factor Definition
Goals and
Interests
Trust
Refers to the extent to which participants’
goals and interests are consistent with one
another.
Refers to the degree of confidence or faith in
the intentions and behavior of others (or the
lack of such confidence or faith).
Executive Refers to the extent to which executives and
support and top-level managers from participating
organizational organizations are involved and willing to
commitment commit resources, provide incentives, and
offer direction.
Risks Refers to the extent to which participants
believe their environment, actions, or
relationships threaten something of current
or potential value to their organizations.
Costs Refers to the kind or amount of current or
expected resources and other investments
required of participating organizations.
Benefits Refers to positive results or returns, which
can be financial, societal, political, or
associated with mission performance.
Authority and
hierarchical
structures
Organizational
culture
Leadership
Organizational
rules,
procedures,
and regulation
Resources
Absorptive
Capacity
Refers to formal legal powers, legitimacy,
differences in hierarchical structures, and
formal control over actors and activities.
Refers to commonly accepted and shared
beliefs, values, and practices within the
organization.
Refers to participants’ behavior, such as
taking personal responsibility for actions and
outcomes, providing guidance or direction,
exerting influence, and giving rewards or
punishment.
Refers to the routine, formal policies
defining the ways in which organizations
accomplish their work.
Refers to the extent to which expertise,
funding, infrastructure, staff, technology, or
other suitable organizational assets are made
available.
Refers to the organization’s ability to
identify, assimilate, and exploit knowledge
from the environment.
115
Table 3. Factors related to national context
Factor Definition
Culture
Laws and
policies
Refers to commonly accepted and widely
shared beliefs, values, and practices within a
country.
Refers to formally adopted requirements,
limitations, or obligations which shape and
Political
constrain work practices.
Refers to the support of elected officials and
support
government leaders.
Language Refers to the languages of the participants.
Geographic
location
Refers to geographic or geo-political
locations of the countries involved in the
collaboration.
This study relied on case study methods to identify the factors that
influenced technical, knowledge, and information exchange
during the collaboration between the United States (US) Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia (KSA) Ministry of Health (MoH) that led to the
adoption of the Hajj Mobile Disease Surveillance System (Hajj-
MDSS) in 2009. In the following two sections, A brief discussion
of the Hajj-MDSS case is provided followed by an overview of
the methods.
3. THE HAJJ-MDSS
The Hajj-MDSS initiative is led by the KSA MoH and US CDC.
It allows rapid detection of infectious diseases among Hajj
pilgrims and enhances prevention and control measures through
real-time surveillance information for public health decisionmaking.
The initiative was launched during the period when swine
flu (Pandemic Influenza A, H1N1) had been declared a global
pandemic. The conditions of the Hajj magnified the risks
associated with H1N1. The Hajj is one of the largest, most
culturally and geographically diverse mass gathering events in the
world, attracting more than 2.5 million people of different
nationalities, languages, races, and genders in Makkah. The
guiding vision was to ensure the well-being of Hajj pilgrims and
therefore maintain global public health security. When H1N1 was
declared a global pandemic in June 2009, the Saudi MoH
organized an international workshop of leading global public
health organizations including the World Health Organization
(WHO), the US CDC, and similar institutions in Europe,
Australia, and China. The goals were to pool public health
knowledge about mass gatherings and review the KSA
preparedness plans, focusing on prevention and control of H1N1
[23]. One recommendation was to implement a Mobile Disease
Surveillance System to monitor the epidemiology of swine flu
among Hajj pilgrims.
Immediately following the workshop, the Saudi MoH officially
requested a proposal from the CDC as it has prior experience
using and adopting such technology in many places around the
world. The Request for Proposal (RfP) was followed by extensive
knowledge- and information-exchange through four main phases.
First was the preparation phase, in which participants worked
toward creating a shared understanding and identifying the
responsibilities of each side. In the second phase, a group of
epidemiologists from the US CDC assisted their counterparts at
the Saudi MoH in developing and customizing the electronic

forms for the system. At the same time, the CDC and the MoH
were coordinating their efforts to obtain the necessary technical
resources. During the third phase, participants conducted several
training sessions to train Saudi public health practitioners on how
to use the system and operate the advanced mobile devices used
with it. They also pilot-tested the system during Umrah—an
Islamic ritual performed at Makkah anytime of year. In the final
phase, participants deployed the system and formed one team to
ensure the effective functioning of the MDSS via timely and
accurate data analysis, and reported the results to top-level
management during the days of the Hajj.
During the four phases of the Hajj-MDSS implementation,
participants exchanged a variety of content. Table [4] lists the
content exchanged among participants, and specifies the content
type. Content type is identified based on the extent to which
content was expressed in written form, the extent to which it
adhered to formal procedures, and the extent to which it
conformed to explicitly stated techniques.
Table 4. Content exchanged during Hajj-MDSS adoption
Phase Content (Type)
Preparation
Technical resource
acquisition and forms
development
Training and pilot
testing
Execution
Information about the context of
the Hajj (Explicit.)
Proposal (Explicit &Tacit)
Forms Design (Tacit)
Systems Requirements
(Explicit)
Training materials (Explicit & Tacit)
Installations (Tacit)
System implementation and
troubleshooting (Tacit)
System’s data (Explicit)
After five months of technical exchange, professional visits, and
joint work, the Hajj-MDSS made its official debut during the
2009 Hajj. The system provided public health officials in KSA
with access to timely and accurate information. They were also
able to monitor nine distinct infectious diseases, and make timely
decisions in responding to unexpected situations. By the end of
the 2009 Hajj, only 73 cases of pilgrims with confirmed pandemic
influenza A (H1N1) were reported, and the Hajj was declared a
success [24].
4. RESEARCH METHODS
This research explores exchange activities in TPSKNs and
identifies the factors which might influence the achievement of
participants’ goals and objectives in TPSKNs. The goal of the
study is to extends the current knowledge-base regarding TPSKNs
into a new transnational context, and a new policy domain, public
health. This is achieved by relying on case study methods to
identify the factors influenced the collaboration between the US
CDC and SA’s MoH leading to the adoption of the Hajj-MDSS in
2009. Given the goal of this research and the Hajj-MDSS case
being introduced, the case study approach is most appropriate, as
its main strength lies in its attempts to efficiently reconcile
complexity, detail, and context [25].
Qualitative data has been collected from in-depth, semi-structured
interviews conducted in person, as well as various secondary data
116
sources, including: government documents, participants’ official
websites, training materials, system manuals, news articles, and
related publications. Nine government officials working for the
Saudi MoH, along with three government officials working for the
US CDC, participated in this study. All participants played critical
roles in the project, and most were involved in all phases of the
project’s implementation. Participants also represent different
management levels, and organizational departments and units. A
purposive sampling using a snowball method was used to identify
individuals for interviews, starting with a single manager at the
Saudi MoH.
Two CDC participants preferred to respond in writing; interview
questions were sent to them, and they responded in writing to the
interview questions. Each in-person interview lasted from 1 to 2
hours. Several participants were contacted later, by phone, to
obtain additional information and for the purposes of clarification.
As all Saudi-side participants being interviewed are native Arabic
speakers, all such interviews were thus conducted in Arabic, as
was the interview conducted with one participant from the CDC
who is native Arabic speaker. The two CDC experts who
preferred to respond in writing received an English version of the
research questions and responded in English.
The unit of analysis of the study is the collaboration aimed at
ensuring the successful implementation of the Hajj-MDSS. The
unit of observation of the study is the individual organizations
who participated in this collaborative effort. The interview data
was transcribed and analyzed in Arabic, and the data collected
from the written response of CDC participants, along with the
aforementioned secondary data sources, were analyzed in English.
All collected data was coded and analyzed with an inductive
approach.
In the course of conducting data analysis, the qualitative software
tool (Atlas-ti) has been used to support coding and analysis
activities. Coding was conducted following two separate
approaches proposed by Strauss and Corbin [26], open coding and
axial coding. Open coding refers to the process of reducing the
data to a small set of themes which appear to describe the
phenomenon being studied. In the context of this research, codes
were added to the coding book when data pointed to any new
concept that could refer to an actor, a product, a process, or a
factor influencing the sharing activities in TPSKNs. The outcome
of this step was a series of different concepts representing the
meaning of the data. After completing the open coding, an axial
coding approach was applied. This process involves putting data
together in new ways by making connections between the already
identified concepts. This was achieved by organizing the initial
codes into different categories which reflected the questions of
interest to this research.
5. FACTORS INFLUENCING TPSKNS
Within the case study, a number of factors influenced technical,
knowledge, and information exchange during the collaboration
toward the adoption of the Hajj-MDSS were identified. This
section discusses these factors in four broad contexts:
technological; knowledge and information; organizational; and
national contexts.
5.1 Technological Context
The collaboration toward adopting the Hajj-MDSS was influenced
by several technical factors as the collaboration involves transfer
of a system to suit a new context. Ease of use, the ability to meet

technical requirements, system features, compatibility, and ICT
infrastructure were identified as main technical factors which
influenced the effectiveness of technical exchange between the
Saudi MoH and CDC.
5.1.1 Ease of Use
The system as implemented is perceived as being easy to use as
revealed by the case study. Participants representing the Saudi
team said: “The system, as a system, was not so complicated.”,
“The system is very user friendly from the perspective of the end
user.” The ease of use of the implemented system minimized the
time and energy required to learn how to use it, and increased the
likelihood of successful adoption within the available time frame
as pointed out by one participant: “Understanding the system and
how it works did not represent an issue for us at all, and we were
able to learn it in a short period of time.”
5.1.2 The Ability to Meet Technical Requirements
The ready availability of the required hardware smoothed the
acquisition of the required resources, which in turn accelerated the
implementation process for the Hajj-MDSS. Participants were
able to avoid challenges stemming from a lack of the required
technical resources, as discussed by participants: “There were no
challenges associated with obtaining the required hardware
devices. The purchasing process was handled smoothly, and was
completed in about one day. The servers, too, were readily
available and inexpensive.”
5.1.3 System Features
The study points to the importance of considering national and
organizational contexts during the selection process of any system
to be adapted to suit a new context. In this instance, the selected
software lacks important features such as the support for Arabic
and the Hijri Calender (HC), which is the official calendar in
Saudi Arabia. Top level management at the Saudi MoH adjusted
to these limitations, and agreed to move forward using the
Gregorian calendar and English language. These limitations did,
however, place an undue burden on those Saudi public health
practitioners who worked with the system, as top level
management at the MoH decided to maintain the existing paperbased
system while integrating the new one.
5.1.4 Compatibility
The selected software relies on Extensible Markup Language
(XML) to facilitate the sharing of structured data across the
different components of the MDSS. While XML is becoming the
standard for electronic data exchange and serves the needs of the
implemented system well, it also carries with it some particular
disadvantages which negatively influenced the potential
effectiveness of the system. In this instance, there was other
required software which was incompatible with XML files. Most
importantly, the XML data format is not compatible with the
InstantAtlas software used to display data for decision makers. To
display the data using InstantAtlas, participants had to translate
the XML data file to a discrete data file manually, which was a
time consuming process. The process influenced the quality of
displayed data to some extent.
5.1.5 ICT Infrastructure
The implemented system is dependent on two telecommunication
modalities: the Internet and a cellular network. The use of these
communication modalities peaked during the Hajj, and resulted in
congested communication traffic, which in turn negatively
117
influenced the functionality of the system during the 2009 Hajj, as
discussed by multiple participants: e.g. “The system relies on a
communication network to facilitate the transfer of data from the
field and public health facilities to the server, using the mobile
phones' SIM cards and the Internet. Network traffic peaked during
the days of the Hajj, leading to critical technical challenges, but
there was no way to discover these challenges prior to the onset of
the implementation process.”
5.2 Knowledge and Information Context
The case study identified codifiability, perception of the content’s
value, sensitivity, and confidentiality as additional factors that
influenced the effectiveness of knowledge and information
exchange during the collaboration toward adopting the Hajj-
MDSS.
5.2.1 Codifiability
A portion of the content exchanged was explicit and easily
expressed in written form [Table 4]. The case study found that this
type of content is easy to share among TPSKN participants. The
ready and frequent exchange of such content allowed participants
to speed up the implementation process, in turn allowing more
time for the exchange of the type of tacit content which required
direct interaction. One clear example of this type of content is the
system requirements that CDC experts sent to their counterparts in
the MoH in written form. Saudi IT specialists commented that the
system’s requirements were clear, and they did not encounter any
difficulties in interpreting them: “The CDC gave us the database
design and the technical specifications of the needed resources.
We studied these specifications on our own and obtained the
required smart phones, servers, and other technical resources.”
5.2.2 Value
All interviewees noted the high degree of transparency, and
stressed that content was freely exchanged between both sides.
One Saudi participant commented: “Any time we were set to
conduct an activity which required the exchange of specific
expertise, we found [the CDC] here and willing to assist.”
Similarly, one CDC participant noted, “We were able to access all
of the information we needed to conduct our work.”
The study focused on data stored within the system. This data
consists of both important information about reported cases and
confidential patient information. Participants answered questions
related to their perception of the value, sensitivity, and
confidentiality of this data. The case study revealed that the value
of this data was limited to decision making during the Hajj, and
for subsequent research purposes. The Saudi MoH presented no
obstacles or objections to sharing this data with researchers. As
the CDC experts were there to assist in decision-making, this
attitude facilitated the exchange of system data amongst and
between all participants as revealed in the case study.
5.2.3 Sensitivity
In this case, while participants from the Saudi side discussed the
insistence of the Saudi MoH on having control over the data
stored within the system as they consider such data as being
sensitive, the preference for having full control over the data did
not influence the intention to share that data with the CDC, as the
study has shown. This would not have been the case, however, if
the intention of the CDC had been to secure full access, retain full
control over the data, or connect the system to other existing
systems. Providing evidence for the latter statement requires

further investigation of the relationship between the “intention to
have control” and “the intention to share”, presenting one avenue
for further research.
5.2.4 Confidentiality
The system’s data was considered to be confidential by
participants representing the Saudi MoH as it contains patients’
information. Such confidentiality did not prevent the CDC team
from accessing the data required to conduct their work effectively
and efficiently, although it did restrict the means of access, as
explained in following quote: “Data were all secured, and located
in the server, so that no individual could gain access to it without
prior permission. The specialists from the CDC were able to
access some data independently, and we provided them with the
aggregated data as needed, so that they could assist us in the
analysis. As a result, they were able to access the aggregated data,
and there was no pressure exerted on their part regarding full data
access.”
5.3 Organizational Context
A number of organizational-level factors were identified in the
course of the case study. These factors include: goals and
interests, values, trust and past relationships, executive support,
authority and hierarchical structures, leadership, resources, skills,
capabilities, commitment, organizational culture, and perceived
risk.
5.3.1 Goals and Interests
The goals and interests of participating organizations played
significant roles in bridging the intention distance, and thus in
promoting and sustaining the collaboration. This can be attributed
to three distinct factors: the alignment between the goals of
collaboration and the respective missions and visions of both the
Saudi MoH and the CDC; the consistency of the goals of
collaboration amongst the various participants; and, mutual
interest.
For the Saudi MoH, the Hajj-MDSS discussed in this case study
represents one element of a larger set of tools and strategies which
were implemented to address the challenges imposed by the
H1N1 pandemic during the 2009 Hajj. Accordingly, the goals of
implementing this system were linked to other, larger, goals. One
manager at the Saudi MoH pointed out that, “The ultimate goal of
this collaboration was to protect the well-being of Hajj pilgrims.”
In a similar vein, the goals of the collaborative effort were closely
aligned with the CDC's vision and stated mission. Historically, the
CDC has used its scientific expertise to assist other countries in
improving their public health capacities and conditions for more
than 60 years. It follows that assisting the Saudi MoH in
implementing a system for monitoring H1N1, and controlling the
spread of a major global pandemic, was aligned with that part of
the CDC mission which focuses on “collaborating to create the
expertise, information, and tools that people and communities
need to protect their health (HHS, 2012).” One participant at the
CDC responded to a question asking about the primary goals of
the CDC by saying: “The main purposes of all CDC international
activities are two-fold: sharing experiences, and building local
capacity.”
Second, the consistency of the goals of collaboration amongst
participants played significant role in the success of the
collaboration. As revealed in the case, participants were clearly
and consistently working toward achieving the same goals.
118
Accordingly, they were able to avoid conflicts, and focus
exclusively on achieving their mutual goals. Also, working
towards the same goals enhanced the productivity of participants
from both sides, and led to an open environment where
participants were better able to freely exchange their expertise.
Finally, it is evident that the Saudi MoH was in need of assistance
in implementing the Hajj-MDSS in a period covering less than
five months. As such, there was a real and acute need to
collaborate with the CDC, which possessed the experience and
expertise required to ensure successful implementation. Regarding
the CDC, participants on the Saudi side believe that the access the
CDC obtained to the Hajj through this collaboration added to the
accumulated experiences, and thus to the potential effectiveness,
of the CDC and its researchers.
5.3.2 Values
Participants pointed to organizational values as one of those
organizational characteristics which motivated the Saudi MoH to
collaborate with the CDC. While one participant said: “The CDC
is an organization that has values, and that is why the management
at the MoH was so welcoming towards the idea of a collaborative
effort. When the CDC’s experts come to you, they come to do the
work and give you the knowledge and expertise you need. Also,
they don’t flatter you, or tell you everything is OK. They get
directly to the point and propose clear solutions.”, another one
commented, “I recommend government organizations avoid
collaboration with counterparts that look for profit, and which
lack collaborative values.”
5.3.3 Trust and Past Relationships
Trust played a significant role in establishing, developing, and
maintaining inter-organizational relationships. This was evident
throughout the duration of the collaboration between the Saudi
MoH and the CDC. One participant commented: “Mutual trust is
the most important factor in any transnational collaboration.” The
high level of trust was a product of the historical relationships that
bridged relational distance. The existing relationship also helped
to bridge organizational and knowledge distances, and allowed
both organizations to get to know each other still further, as
commented on by one of the participants: “Previous collaborative
efforts contributed to the success of the system we implemented
during the Hajj. We did not start from scratch, as they already had
prior experiences with our program, and they were familiar with
its strengths. At the same time, we knew what they had to offer,
their capabilities and their skills.”
5.3.4 Executive Support
The case study found that the support of top executives played a
critical role in promoting the collaborative process by dedicating
additional resources as needed. Participants at the management
level discussed the effect of executive support and involvement,
and said: “The minister and the Deputy Minister of the AAPM
provided unlimited support, and gave us unlimited authority to
acquire all of the resources needed to ensure the successful
implementation of the system.”, “The support we received from
the minister played a major role in the eventual success of our
collaboration with the CDC. I believe the access to our minister
was very easy, and this made our entire mission easier. Without
that access, and his presence and follow-ups, our work would
have been much more difficult.”

5.3.5 Authority and Hierarchical Structures
In this case, the main agency involved in the collaboration from
the Saudi side possessed the authority to collaborate with any
international agency, to address any public health issue or
concern. This authority to collaborate played a significant role in
initiating the transnational relationship as discussed by one top
level manager at the Saudi MoH. The data also revealed that there
was delegation of authority to various team members working on
the project. The delegation of authority allowed participants to
speed up the implementation and resource acquisition processes,
as revealed in the case study. Besides, the hierarchical structures
facilitated the acquisition process of all needed resources as the
primary leader on the Saudi side was the Assistant Deputy
Minister of Health for Preventive Medicine and at the same time
the Chairman of the Supervisory Committee for Preventive
Medicine during the Hajj. Through him, the team was connected
directly to the Minister in all matters related to the needs of the
project. On the other hand, the hierarchical structure of the CDC
allowed those CDC participants who were also representing the
Center for Global Health to readily acquire the needed knowledge
and information resources. One participant representing the CDC
team said: “The CDC’s organizational structure is more horizontal
at a higher level, and that allows the CGH to get support from any
subject matter expert inside the CDC, in any office.”
5.3.6 Leadership
Leadership was revealed as one of the critical factors positively
influenced the coordination and management of all aspects of the
collaboration. The formal authority of the primary leader of this
collaboration on the Saudi side was used mainly to facilitate the
acquisition of needed resources, as has been discussed. This
formal authority to command was not evident, however, in the
interaction with those participants who were assigned to work on
the project from the Saudi side. In fact, the power gained through
formal authority was used to guide cooperation, rather than to
direct actions, as discussed by participants. In his effort to further
guide cooperation, than main leader from the Saudi’s side acted as
a focal point between all participants, at all levels. He explicitly
stated that the most critical task in collaboration such as this is to
maintain open channels of communication between all
participants at all levels.
5.3.7 Resources
The ready availability of needed resources contributed
significantly to the sustainability of the collaboration during the
2009 Hajj, and to the overall success of the project. One manager
commented, “The slogan of the government during the Hajj is
‘take whatever resources to accomplish the work.’” He added,
“All resources were in place for this project.” The case study
revealed three types of resources that participants brought to bear,
and which were critical for the eventual success of the
collaboration: financial resources, human resources, and
knowledge and information resources. The availability of funding
resources was critical to the success of the collaboration in
general, and central to the speed with which the proposal was
agreed upon in particular. Little time had to be spent in searching
for funding sources, or on negotiating funding responsibilities.
Participants discussed the ways in which financial resources
facilitated the acquisition of technical resources, eased logistical
concerns, and facilitated the face-to-face meetings which were
critical in bridging the physical distance and enhancing the ease of
119
communication amongst participants toward exchanging tacit
content.
As with regard to human resources, the Saudi MoH and the CDC
each nominated highly skilled professionals to carry out the
implementation. Additionally, all human resources at the Saudi
MoH were made available to the project as needed. For example,
the adoption of the system required trained health care
practitioners to work on mobile surveillance during the Hajj.
Those personnel were made available, and assigned to obtain the
training required to work on the system ahead of time.
Finally, both countries brought considerable surveillance expertise
to the project. While the American team members were more
advanced in using mobile technology in disease surveillance,
Saudi participants brought to bear a greater knowledge of the
unique conditions associated with the Hajj. These different forms
of knowledge were needed in equal amounts to ensure a smooth
and successful adoption of the system as discussed by multiple
participants.
5.3.8 Skills
The case study revealed two skills, both of which clearly and
positively influenced the eventual outcome of the collaboration
between the Saudi MoH and the CDC. These skills are described
as: project management skills, and team working skills. One
participant pointed to the project management skills brought to the
collaboration on the part of the CDC team as one of the factors
that led to a successful completion within the time frame available
to participants while another Saudi participant discussed team
management skills, how they were able to learn those skills, and
how those skills in turn played a significant role in the eventual
success of the collaboration. He said: “One of the most important
things was the team management skills that we were able to
practice during our work with the CDC experts on this project.”
5.3.9 Capabilities
In addition to the enumerated skills, the case study also revealed
certain capabilities that positively influenced interaction among
the participants. These capabilities include the ability to work
across different cultures, the ability to work across various areas
and domains, and absorptive capacity. The CDC specifically
recruited participants who were able to work across different
cultures. Most participants from the CDC had a long history of
doing so; some such prior experiences shared the Islamic cultural
dimensions, as well. In addition, two CDC participants were
fluent in Arabic. On the other hand, all participants recruited by
the Saudi MoH were fluent in English. These characteristics
facilitated communication and better understanding among all
participants, as revealed by the case study. Additionally, both the
CDC and the MoH assembled teams that were able to work across
multiple involved areas. The ability of participants to work across
involved areas bridged the knowledge distance and increased the
likelihood of the project’s success. Finally, the ability of the Saudi
participants to identify, assimilate, and exploit knowledge from
their CDC counterparts played a significant role in achieving the
CDC's goals, which were focused on building the capacity of the
Saudi MoH in using mobile technology to assist in disease
surveillance. One participant from the Saudi side commented:
“The CDC’s experts did not express any kind of difficulty in
working with us. The areas in which we work are the same areas
in which they work, so there were no barriers at all.”

5.3.10 Commitment
Both personal and organizational commitments were evident
throughout all phases of the project and critical to both the success
and the sustainability of the collaboration. The CDC provided an
ideal example of organizational commitment when it continued to
provide technical assistance over the following two years. At the
personal level, participants from both sides were highly
committed. Their commitment was most clearly demonstrated
during the days of the Hajj, as they were routinely working in
excess of 12 hours a day. In addition, the case study revealed that
Saudi participants carried out tasks beyond their defined roles and
responsibilities.
5.3.11 Organizational Culture
The orientation of the Saudi MoH toward transparency and
openness was revealed to be an important factor throughout the
course of this collaboration, and one which influenced the
attitudes of participants towards sharing knowledge and
information. Participants from the Saudi side discussed that
orientation, and how it helped promote the eventual success of the
collaboration: “It would be unreasonable to bring experts in and
then withhold information from them. That simply means you will
not realize the full benefits of cooperation.”
The case study also found that organizational culture could
impose a negative influence. This occurs when collaboration
involves requirements that are not consistent with said
organizational culture. For example, the system proposed by the
CDC allows access to the server through the Internet. That fact
was not considered by the Saudi MoH when they obtained the
SIM cards however, as those purchased allowed access only to the
internal network of the MoH. In this instance, the behavior of the
Saudi MoH emphasized the influence of that part of the Saudi
MoH's organizational culture which values security over
flexibility, and control over cost-effectiveness. These differences
resulted in some challenges during the preparation of the demo lab
for the trainees to practice what they had learned. The challenges
were resolved by participants during the training phase.
5.3.12 Perceived Risk
Perception of risk was identified as a critical factor that influenced
the potential outcomes of the collaboration. One participant said,
“The main risk was that the system would not work.”
Accordingly, the top level management decided to continue
operating the routine surveillance system already in place while
implementing and testing the new Hajj-MDSS. While the two
systems worked fine alongside one another, they resulted in high
overhead costs and placed an undue burden on those health care
practitioners who were reporting the cases.
5.4 National Context
The case study revealed five distinct factors relating to the
national context. Three such factors are identified as enablers—
political support, political relations, and national events—while
the remaining two—national law and national language—are best
described as barriers.
5.4.1 Political Support
Political support was evident throughout all phases of the project.
The speed with which the Saudi government approved the
collaboration with the CDC to implement the Hajj-MDSS, and the
funds it provided, demonstrated the role that political support
plays in initiating, sustaining, and shaping the outcomes of
120
collaboration with the CDC. Top level managers at the Saudi
MoH discussed the positive effects of political support in detail:
e.g. “The AAPM received unlimited support from the government
and the minister. That support opened plenty of doors for us, and
without it we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish anything.”
5.4.2 Political Relations
In this case, the strong relations between the KSA and the US
bridged political distance and led to a stable collaborative
environment, which facilitated the joint activities of participants
and improved the outcome of the entire collaborative endeavor.
Top level management from the Saudi side discussed the roles
that strong political relations had played in facilitating the
logistical issues such as entry visas. Also, they believed that prior
collaboration at the political level had helped to promote
collaboration with the CDC, and served to enhance the eventual
outcomes. Leaders at the CDC shared a similar outlook, and
pointed to the relationship between the US and the KSA as a
facilitator for achieving better public health outcomes. One CDC
participant did state, however, that the CDC’s intention to
collaborate with any country that needs assistance is never
influenced by how that country relates to the US at the political
level.
5.4.3 National Events
Participants pointed to the Hajj and its importance as one of the
main success factors. They discussed different aspects of the
project that were promoted by the fact that the project was
implemented to serve the Hajj and ensure the well-being of
pilgrims. One example of what they said: “If this collaboration
was initiated for a purpose other than the Hajj, or under different
conditions, there would be many more barriers relating to existing
rules and procedures. During the Hajj, all restricting procedures
and bureaucracy diminish, and that contributed to the success of
the project.”
5.4.4 National Laws
The existing laws of the KSA prevent non-Muslims from gaining
entry to the holy cities of Makkah and Al-Madinah. Accordingly,
the core CDC trainers were not able to conduct the last session of
the first phase of training, which was planned to be held in
Makkah. In addition, non-Muslim experts were unable to
accompany the team to Makkah during the execution phase. Thus,
the law added restrictions on the selection process of participants
who provided direct assistance during the Hajj.
5.4.5 National Language
While language did not represent a challenge at the level of the
individual participants, as all participants from the Saudi side
were fluent in English, the influence of national language was
evident on other aspects of the project. One was the lack of
Arabic-language support in the software used, which placed
burdens on participants, as discussed previously. The national
language also increased the amount of effort and energy that
participants from both sides were asked to contribute, to ensure
the successful completion of the training phase. While one
participant took the time to translate the CDC’s training materials
to Arabic, other participants who were fluent in both Arabic and
English were able to act as translators for those health care
practitioners who were not fluent in English during the training
sessions conducted by the main CDC trainers.

6. DISCUSSION
This study expands the concepts and understanding of the factors
related to the three predefined layers of contexts, knowledge and
information content, organizational, and national contexts.
Related to the knowledge and information layer of context, the
case study revealed four factors: codifiability; perceptions of the
content’s value; sensitivity; and, confidentiality. The study
pointed to new ways in which the perceptions of a specific
content’s sensitivity and confidentiality might influence exchange
activities in TPSKNs. As revealed in the case study, the
perception by Saudi participants of the system’s data as being
sensitive did not influence their intention to exchange that data
with their CDC counterparts, although said perception did
influence their intention and desire to have full control over that
data. The same phenomenon can be seen with regards to
confidentiality, in that Saudi perceptions of confidential data—or
data which should be seen as being confidential—did not prevent
the CDC team from accessing the data required to conduct their
work, although it did restrict their means of access to that data.
The case study expands the concepts and understanding of the
factors related to the organizational layer of context as well. These
factors include: goals and interests; trust and past relationships;
executive support; authority and hierarchical structures;
leadership; resources; skills; capabilities; commitment;
organizational culture; and, perceived risk. This research
identified the perceptions of partner’s values as one of those
additional organizational level factors which motivated
collaboration in TPSKNs. Also, the case study discusses the ways
in which the identified factors influenced exchange activities
during the collaboration toward adopting the Hajj-MDSS.
As with regard to the national layer of context, the study discussed
five factors. These factors include: political support; political
relations; national events; national law; and, national language.
The case provided empirical evidence for the influence of these
identified factors and expanded the understanding on the ways in
which they may influence the effectiveness of TPSKNs. For
instance, the case study found that the intention to collaborate
with another country that needs assistance toward addressing
global issues and concerns may not be influenced by relation at
political level while the strong relations at political level still
proved to be significant for ensuring better outcomes. Also, the
influence of national language found to be evident even when all
participants from both sides are fluent and able to speak the same
language.
As the case study was centered on adopting an existing system to
suit a new context, It expands upon the considered contexts to
include a technological context, central when collaboration
centers on implementing a new system or adopting an existing
system. Five distinct factors related to the technological context
were evident in this case. Ease of use, compatibility with other
systems, ICT infrastructures, the ability to meet technical
requirements, and the additional system features, such as culturalrelated
dimensions—e.g. software capable of supporting different
languages and calendars— were identified as additional factors
influencing exchange activities in TPSKNs. Figure 2 depicts the
factors influencing exchange activities in TPSKNs, discussed
above and informed by the collaboration between the MoH and
CDC aimed at implementing the Hajj-MDSS during the 2009
Hajj.
121
Figure 2. Factors Influenced Sharing and Exchange
Activities during the Adoption of the Hajj-MDSS
7. LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE WORK
The research design and methods used by this study have
employed several measures meant to ensure the reliability and
validity of the research and its conclusions. As with any research
endeavor, however, this study is limited in certain respects. One
of the main limitations stems from the low matching level
between those participants representing the Saudi MoH and those
representing the US CDC available to be interviewed as part of
this research. The study faced specific challenges in this regard, as
some CDC participants were unavailable to be interviewed due to
their responsibilities in other countries. Furthermore, Saudi
participants were representative of multiple organizational levels,
from the technical level up to the ministerial level. Such was not
the case, however, with the three CDC participants available and
amenable to being interviewed. Participants from the CDC were,
in fact, representative of essentially the same organizational level,
despite the fact that one such participant had acted as a team
leader throughout the collaborative process. The collected data
would certainly be richer had participants from CDC representing
different organizational levels. Finally, since data collection relied
mainly on semi-structured, face-to-face interviews, bias may have
occurred due to the time lag between the timing of data collection
and the end of the project, the differences between the stated and
actual behavior of the participants, the sensitivity of the questions,
and incomplete or inaccurate recall on the part of interviewees.
Future publications will present the remaining findings of the
study and discuss the extended version of the Dynamic Model of
Transnational Knowledge Networks (DMTKNs) that has been
developed based on the presented findings.
8. REFERENCES
[1] Gharawi, M. and Dawes, S. Conceptualizing knowledge and
information sharing in transnational knowledge networks. In
4th International Conference on Theory and Practice of
Electronic Governance. 2010. Beijing, China.
[2] Slaughter, A. A New World Order. Princeton University
Press, Princeton: New Jersey, 2004.
[3] Betsill, M., and Bulkeley, H. Transnational networks and
global environmental governance: The cities for climate
protection program. International Studies Quarterly.,
48(2004), 417- 493.
[4] Raustiala, K. The architecture of international cooperation:
Transgovernmental networks and the future of international

law. Virginia Journal of International Law. 43, 1(2002). 1 -
92.
[5] Setzer, J. Sub-national and transnational climate change
governance: Evidence from the state and city of Sao Paulo,
Brazil. Fifth Urban Research Symposium. Marseille, France,
2009.
[6] Dawes, S., Gharawi, M., Burke, B. Knowledge and
Information Sharing in Transnational Knowledge Networks:
A Contextual Perspective. In 44th Hawaii International
Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-44). Kauai, Hawaii.
2011.
[7] Dawes, S., Gharawi, M., Burke, B. Transnational public
sector knowledge networks: Knowledge and information
sharing in a multidimensional context. Government
Information Quarterly, 29(1): p. S112–S120. 2012.
[8] Nonaka, I. A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge
creation. Organization Science., 5, 1 (1994),14–37.
[9] Dawes, S. S. Interagency Information Sharing: Expected
Benefits, Manageable Risks. Journal of Policy Analysis and
Management., 15,3 (1996), 377-394.
[10] Kogut B., and Zander U., What firms do?: Coordination,
identity , and learning. Organization Science., 7, 5 (1996),
502–518.
[11] Pardo, T. A., Cresswell, A. M., Dawes, S. S., and Burke, G.
B. Modeling the social & technical processes of interorganizational
information integration. Proceedings of 37th
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
(HICSS- 37)., Big Island, Hawaii, 2004.
[12] Landsbergen, D. J., and Wolken Jr., G. Realizing the
promise: Government information systems and the fourth
generation of information technology. Public Administration
Review, 61, 2 (2001), 206–220.
[13] Bresman, H., Birkinshaw, J., and Nobel, R. Knowledge
transfer in international acquisitions. Journal of International
Business Studies., 30, 3 (1999), 439–462.
[14] Cummings, J, L., and Teng, B. S. Transferring R&D
knowledge: the key factors affecting knowledge transfer
success. Journal of Engineer, Technological Management.,
20, (2003), 39-68.
122
[15] Eglene, O., Dawes, S. S., and Schneider, C. A. Authority and
leadership patterns in public sector knowledge networks. The
American Review of Public Administration., 37, 1 (2007), 91-
113.
[16] Lucas, L. The role of culture on knowledge transfer: the case
of multinational corporation. The Learning Organizations,
13, 3 (2006). 257-275.
[17] Gil-García, J. R., Schneider, C. A., Pardo, T. A., and
Cresswell, A. M. Interorganizational information integration
in the criminal justice enterprise: Preliminary lessons from
state and county initiatives. In Proceedings of 38th Hawaii
International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS ’38)
(Waikoloa, Hawaii), January 2005.
[18] Pardo, T. A., and Tayi, G. K. Interorganizational information
integration: A key enabler for digital government.
Government Information Quarterly, 24, 4 (2007), 691-715.
[19] Bhagat, R., Kedia, B., Harveston, P., and Triandis, H.
Cultural variations in the cross-border transfer of
organizational knowledge: An integrative framework.
Academy of Management Review, 27, 2 (2002), 204-221.
[20] Narteh, B. Knowledge transfer in developed-developing
country interfirm collaborations: a conceptual framework.
Journal of Knowledge Management. 12 ,1 (2008), 78-91.
[21] Duan,Y., Xu, X., and Fu, Z. (2006), Understanding
transnational knowledge transfer, In Proceedings of the 7th
European Conference on Knowledge Management
(Budapest, Hungary, September 2006). 126-135.
[22] Kerndlmaier, R. Transnational exchange and transfer of
knowledge. In A guidebook for riverside regeneration.
Springer, Berlin: Heidelberg, 2006. 50-61.
[23] Memish, Z., The Hajj: communicable and noncommunicable
health hazards and current guidance for
pilgrims. Euro Surveillance, 15,39 ,(2010), 1-4.
[24] Gulfnews, Five succumb to H1N1 virus during Haj. 2009.
[25] Mangen, S., Qualitative research methods in cross-national
settings. Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2, 2,
(1999), 109-124.
[26] Strauss, A.L., and Corbin, J. M. Basics of Qualitative
Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing
Grounded Theory. Sage.,Thousand Oaks, CA, 1998.

Information Sharing and Financial Market Regulation:
Understanding the Capability Gap
Djoko Sigit Sayogo
Center for Technology in Government
187 Wolf road, Suite 301
Albany, New York
dsayogo@ctg.albany.edu
ABSTRACT
In testimony on April of 2012 before the House Financial Services
Committee, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
Chairman, Mary Schapiro, stated that effective information
sharing between financial market actors and their regulatory
bodies is critical to fulfilling the regulatory obligations of the
SEC. The 2008 financial crisis is recognized as a show case for
the risks to the stability of the markets that ineffective information
sharing among supervisory authorities represents. This paper
constitutes a preliminary exploration of the challenges facing
financial regulators building on prior research in the computing
and information science community (CIS). Current literature as
well as data from a recent study of financial market regulation is
used to identify key actors in financial market regulation
information sharing relationships and to begin to outline the
challenges faced in this unique context and the resulting risk if
those challenges go unaddressed. A recently developed theoretical
framework for cross-boundary information sharing (Garcia et al
2007) is used to present insights about challenges and risks from
the literature and the field.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4.1 [Public Policy Issues]: Information Sharing for Regulators
General Terms
Management, Human Factors, Theory
Keywords
Financial Market Regulators, Systematic Information Sharing,
Challenges and Risks Assessment
1. INTRODUCTION
Non-systematic and ad-hoc information sharing practices among
financial market regulatory agencies are regarded as key
contributors to the 2008 financial crisis. The economic crisis of
2008 is a case in point for how ineffective information sharing has
hindered supervisory authorities from detecting vulnerabilities in
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
Theresa A. Pardo
Center for Technology in Government
187 Wolf road, Suite 301
Albany, New York
tpardo@ctg.albany.edu
123
Peter Bloniarz
College of Computing & Information
University at Albany
Albany, New York
pbloniarz@albany.edu
global financial markets [24]. Unfortunately, the impact of
constrained and ineffective information sharing on market
regulation was well-known long before 2008. In a 2004 report the
U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) called for the
creation of routine and systematic fashion of information sharing
across financial regulators [16] citing the vulnerabilities
introduced as a consequence of gaps in these areas. Challenges at
that time were recognized to include lack of authority, multiple
overlapping jurisdictions, security and sensitivity of information,
and protection of turf [16, 17, 30]. Since then researchers and
practitioners alike have worked to understand and mitigate the
challenges to routine and systematic information sharing in
financial market regulation.
The criticality of effective information sharing to the monitoring
of financial markets and the consequences of gaps in capability
for effective information sharing is increasingly recognized by a
range of national and international organizations. Each of these
organizations is calling for specific and significant investments in
the capability necessary to close the gaps in information available
to and held by regulatory agencies. A statement from The
Financial Stability Board to G-20 Finance Ministers and Central
Bank Governors specifically addressed the need for a future focus
on “information exchange standards in the financial regulatory
and supervisory area” [15]. Testimony from the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2009 indicated the need for more
information disclosure at a high level of granularity to cover the
gap of information among supervisory regulators [24]. Crossborder
cooperation and information sharing was among the ten
recommendations of cross-border bank resolution of the Basel
Committee on Banking Supervision reported by the Bank for
International Settlements [1]. In her testimony on the Lehman
Brothers Examiner’s Report before House Financial Services
Committee in April 2010, Chairman of the US Securities and
Exchange Commission, Mary Schapiro called particular attention
to the critical role of information sharing in meeting public
expectations, “Effective information sharing by regulators is
critical to fulfilling our regulatory obligations, and it is something
that the American public has every right to expect. Cooperation
and coordination with other financial institution regulators is
essential [38]” Information exchange standards, more sharing of
more detailed data, cross-border cooperation and information
sharing are clearly recognized as necessary to ensure financial
regulators meet public expectations.
Previous studies, such as Pardo et al [30] identify various
challenges for financial market regulation. On the other hand, they
did not specify the impact of the challenges to the different actors
of financial market regulation. Davenport and Prusak [5] define
information sharing as “the voluntary act of making information

available to others” [5]. Information sharing involves an exchange
between an information holder and requester in the initial stage
and information sender and receiver in the transfer stage. As a
consequence of the above assertion, to understand information
sharing, we need to identify those involved the sharing
relationship, their role in the sharing process, and the challenges
and risks faced by each actor.
This paper will draw on current literature on information sharing
and integration as well as data about information sharing collected
in interviws with inidividuals with a role in financial market
regulation. Using this literature and data we identify a set of
challenges facing systematic information sharing in financial
market regulation. We map current actors in financial market
regulation, specify their relationships to each other, and identify
challenges and risks for each actor in financial market regulation
information and knowledge sharing. Finally this paper lays out a
foundation for future research in this area.
The paper begins by briefly describing inter-agency information
integration and sharing and introducing the framework proposed
by Gil-Garcia et al [20] as a lens to focus the discussion of the
challenges. Section three describes the method used in this paper
Followed by an introducing to the primary actors in financial
market regulation information sharing. Section four focuses on the
challenges facing financial market regulators in their efforts to
share information. The paper concludes in section five a with
discussion on financial market regulation challenges, actors and
risks and epitomes a set of future directions for research on
information sharing in FMR.
2. INFORMATION SHARING AND
INTEGRATION
This paper uses the framework proposed by Gil-Garcia et al [20]
to examine information sharing in FMR. This interagency
information integration framework is useful for characterizing
sharing activities and for focusing discussions of challenges to
that sharing. Building from a close examination of interagency
information sharing Gil-Garcia et al [20] conceptualize an
integrative framework for constituting interorganizational
information integration [20]. They argue for four components of
interorganizational information sharing, namely: a) interoperable
technical infrastructure, b) integrated data, c) shared information,
and d) trusted social network.
Interoperability, as the first component, is regarded as the most
critical element for systematic sharing or integration of
information across different agencies [33]. Gil-Garcia et al [20]
identified the importance of technical aspects of interoperability
for both hardware and software. They argue that despite the
technical difficulties in developing interoperability, an
interoperable system will make sharing information easier and
provide accurate, protected, and usable information [20].
124
Figure 1. Four Components Interagency Information
Integration
Trusted
Network
Source: Gil-Garcia et al, 2010
Integrated Data Shared Information
Interoperable infrastructure
As the second component, integrated data is critical for sharing
information with multiple organizations particularly when it is
required sharing of information in multiple formats [20]. Common
data elements will significantly improve sharing and integrating of
information across organizational boundaries [20].
The third component, shared information, is recognized as
essential to supporting effective information sharing. Information
sharing systems should be designed around an understanding of
the shared information needed [20]. Sharing of information is
regarded as an initial step toward integrated data [20]. The fourth
component of interorganizational information integration is
trusted social networks. Trust among sharing partners is
considered a prerequisite to successful sharing [33]. A network of
trusted actors significantly influences the effectiveness of
communication and reduces resistance to sharing information
[20]. The level of trust is important to reducing turf barriers and
concern over information misuse.
3. APPROACH
The mapping of the literature on information sharing and
integration draws on three sources; 1) Literature in interagency
information sharing and integration 2).Professional reports on
information sharing challenges in financial markets and 3) Article
on the challenges facing 21 st century financial market regulators
detailing the result of interviews with a set of financial market
regulation professionals published in E-Gov conference [30].
4. ACTORS AND CHALLENGES
4.1 Key Actors in Financial Market
Regulation
Financial market regulation in the U.S. is fragmented with
multiple actors responsible for regulating various segments of the
financial industry [28, 30]. In some cases regulatory responsibility
is overlapping resulting in a web of interconnections and intricate
relationships which is then further complicated by informal and
ad-hoc information sharing practices [28]. To begin to understand
this actors and unpack the unique and overlapping regulatory
responsibilities it is necessary to identify the key actors in the
financial market regulation environment. We identify five actors,
each with different roles and responsibilities and each is with
important and unique relationships with other key actors and other
stakeholders. These five key actors identified are federal agencies,
state governments, SROs (self-regulatory organizations), financial
industry entities (firms, investors, rating agencies), and the public.
Federal and state government agencies share responsibility for
setting regulatory policy, enforcing compliance, supervising, and
monitoring specific sectors of financial market activity. Federal
agencies act as primary regulating agencies for most financial

products (securities, commodities, futures, and others) except
insurance. State governments act as the supplementary regulating
actor for the previously mentioned financial products. The State
governments acts as the primary regulators for insurance [28] with
each state have different regulations for insurance.
The US financial market regulation system is based on a
combination of mandatory regulation sanctioned by government
agencies and voluntary regulation, which in the case of financial
markets, is sanctioned by the SROs (Self-Regulatory Agencies).
SROs are self-regulating agencies that exercise some degree of
regulatory authority over the financial market industry and
professionals One example of an SRO in the U.S. is FINRA
(Financial Industry Regulatory Authority). FINRA is an
independent regulator for securities firms listed and doing
business in the U.S with the mission to protect America’s
investors [13]. To a certain extent, SROs are allowed to generate
supplementary rules and policies [22]. For instance, FINRA is
allowed to generate policies and rules for broker-dealer and
trading markets. SROs serve to supplement the government
regulation or fill the vacuum of an absence of government
oversight and regulation.
Financial industry actors in this paper are those organizations
conducting transactions in the financial market such as firms,
investors, and rating agencies, among others. The interest of
financial industry actors lies in the requirement for compliance
with the regulatory framework. These organization need to
comply and trade within the regulation imposed by the Federal,
State and to certain extent the SROs. The public refers to the
general public who have interest on the conduct of financial
market regulations.
4.2 Challenges to FMR Information Sharing
The need for information sharing capability is not unique to the
context of financial market regulation. Public health, human
services, and public safety are just three of the many policy
domains that require effective information sharing across
boundaries of organizations and jurisdictions and across levels of
government. And in each of these areas various communities of
practitioners and academics work to more fully understand
information sharing and the challenges facing those communities
as they seek to effectively share information in the interest of
program execution and policy development. Creating capability
for routine and systematic information sharing has long been a
priority for the U.S. Justice community, in particular. One of the
most recent products of this focus is the National Information
Exchange Model (NIEM), a national program supported by the
federal government. NIEM represents an ongoing collaborative
partnership of agencies and organizations across all levels of
government (federal, state, tribal, and local) and with private
industry for the purpose of effectively and efficiently sharing
information at key decision points [26]. In recent years, NIEM has
expanded to include other federal and state agencies such as the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Federal Bureau of
Investigation, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, and others
[26]. In addition to such nationally led efforts, many efforts at the
state level are resulting in the creation of multi-agency, multijurisdictional
information sharing capability. For example, in
2003 a New York State Criminal Justice Information Technology
Group representing 13 different Justice agencies was tasked with
developing a framework for a new approach to state-wide
125
information sharing among criminal justice agencies [20].
Insights from these efforts and others are increasingly available in
both the practitioner and academic literature as resources to
inform and guide information sharing efforts in other domains.
Likewise, this section identifies and integrates challenges from
financial market regulation and interagency information sharing
literature.
4.2.1 Interoperability As the Key
The application and implementation of any information
technology is nested within a particular organizational,
sociological, ideological and political context [7]. Successful
cross-boundary information sharing requires understanding of the
different and diverse business processes and practices within the
actors’ organizations and in the broader context within which they
operate [7]. As argued by Pardo et al [35] interoperability not only
depends on the ability of systems to communicate with one
another, employing shared terminology and definitions, but also
requires management and policy interoperability. An examination
of information sharing in the criminal justice arena indicated that
differences in agency culture is a significant barrier to interagency
information sharing [33], and requires the identification,
understanding and accommodation of existing organizational
cultures within each agency [to enable successful sharing. In this
context, interoperable management and policy is seen as
necessary for each agency to reduce resistance to sharing
information. An understanding of the critical role of
interoperability in cross-boundary information sharing highlights
the need to understand the social processes required to develop a
shared understanding of terms, concepts and information used and
available within each agency [7], particularly considering that
information is not objective, neutral or readily available within
each agency [36].
For organizations to work together to build interoperable systems
to share information, organization leaders must first understand
the information sharing capability found in each sharing partner.
Information sharing capabilities are dynamic, varied,
complementary and multi-dimensional in nature. Leaders must
assess the capabilities held collectively by the network to ensure
the relevancy and appropriateness of capability to become
interoperable [29]. Within a broader view, these dimensions of
capability can be classified into two closely related but distinct
components [29, 34], namely capability to create effective
collaboration and capability to develop new systems and
procedures.
Capability to create effective collaboration includes five
dimensions, namely: business model and architecture readiness,
strategic planning, collaborative readiness, organization
compatibility, and project management. Building capability along
these dimensions is necessary to develop mutual understanding
and to reduce resistance in information sharing and integration.
Strategic planning is important for clarifying roles and
responsibility among participants [32] and to alleviate resistance
to change and incompatibility of technology [11]. Assessment of
business models is necessary to describe service and operational
components of the organization, their interrelationship, and the
technology used for implementation [25]. Assessment of strategic
planning, business model, and collaborative readiness will
generate information to inform understanding of the extent to
which potential sharing partners are incompatible. It also will
inform and ideally, alleviate resistance and interorganizational

conflict around information sharing. Each organization must
understand each other’s missions, strategic planning and needs.
To have this level of understanding, the agencies often engage in
several types of collaborative activities, such as coordinated
planning and training [34].
Capability to develop new systems and procedure is comprised of
six dimensions, including: data assets and requirements,
information policies, resource and project management, and
technology readiness. Data assets and requirements and
information policies assessment refers to assessments of the
ability to provide and encourage sharing through wide-ranging,
clear, and precise information policies and management [31]. This
requirement includes data governance and policies; developing
policies for data stewardship and use [8, 10]. This capability also
relates to the management of resources owned by different
agencies. Appropriate resource allocation and procurement
strategies to support the interoperable system. The technology
readiness consists of three elements, namely: technology
acceptance, knowledge and compatibility. Technology acceptance
refers to the attitudes of actors toward changes bring forth by
technology, reflecting the comfort of actors in accepting a new
technology or initiative, the degree of trust in the new technology,
and the beliefs on the usability and success of technology or
initiative [31]. Technology compatibility refers to the presence of
agreed-upon standards, interconnectivity among those seeking to
share information, and experience of staff with sharing activities
[4].
4.2.2 Integrated Data
Two interrelated issues in the development of integrated data,
namely: developing linked data and ensuring data integrity and
quality, were identified through the literature review and field
study.
a) Ensuring Data Quality and Integrity
Data has a central role in financial markets. Regulators as well as
firms need data for a variety of reasons; not the least of which is
to protect consumers. Consumer protection, like other uses
regulators and firms make of the data available to them, requires
data to be of high quality and integrity.
The process of ensuring that data from trading, surveillance and
compliance activities is of sufficient quality for the specific or
intended use can be a daunting task. Financial market data come
from many organizations; broker-dealers, banks, and other
sources, with many different data management cultures. Ensuring
a high quality, integrated data infrastructure, including
sophisticated data management strategies, represents a significant
cost [30]. Monitoring the markets in the new environment of
trading; with ever increasing transaction speeds and the
production of vast amounts of data requires whole new classes of
technology and a new approach to data management.
b) Developing Linked Data
Developing shared terminology and common definitions is one
element of creating an interoperable system [27]. Daniel Tarullo’s
statement [40] in front of US Senate points at two important
issues for better oversight mechanism in financial market 1)
access to high-quality and timely data that are organized and
standardized for supervisory agencies, and 2) the availability of
data in appropriate usable form to other government agencies. His
126
assertion implies data sharing will occur through standardization
and linked data [40]. The November 2009 NRC (National
Research Council) workshop describes the need for standard
language development to enable data aggregation, interpretation,
and analysis to support for controlling systematic risks [12].
Technically, the development of common language and schema
through ontology will enable a linkage of different systems which
would support more systematic and routine sharing. The ontology
will enables the creation of “shared and common understanding of
a domain that can be communicated between people and
application systems [6]”, and served as a language to support data
translation and queries from different system design [23]. The
development of common language facilitates automatic reasoning
about financial systems and proposed regulations, sharing a
common understanding of financial structures, and facilitating the
analysis of interrelationship in financial domains. Effort toward
developing linked data for financial market is already being
invested in. For instance, O’Riain et al [27] proposing a linked
data driven information systems for integrating financial data
from multiple web sources. They further outline the challenges
and issues in addressing data integration in financial market
regulation, namely: a) an increase in data inter-dependencies, b)
data quality and c) three different types of mismatch: text/data,
schema, and abstraction level mismatch [27]. Despite growing
research on ontologies for the financial domain, there is still a
great need for a stronger and more focused connection between
regulatory and systematic risk.
4.2.3 Challenges to Sharing Information
As argued by Gil-Garcia et al [20], sophisticated systems do not
necessarily provide effective platforms for information sharing.
Integrating and sharing information across different agencies is a
difficult endeavor to undertake. For example, Agencies sometimes
act defensively in protecting what they see as their own “turf”;
which in this case is their data [21]. The challenges confronting
agencies as they work to share their information with other
entities range from political and managerial to technical. This
section introduces some of these importance challenges.
a) Collaborative Governance Structure and Sharing Strategies
Agency resistance to sharing information is typically driven by a
variety of reasons, such as to avoid additional costs related to
changes, to control risks, to protect autonomy and adversarial
position [21], and to shun “reputation risk”, that is a risk of being
relevant to the market and losing power over the market [30]. As a
result, agencies need to enact strategies to reduce the risks of
information sharing.
One of the strategies proposed by Pardo, Gil-Garcia and Burke
[33] is through the development of an effective collaborative
governance structure organized around the expectation that
agencies will be sharing information. They further outline six
determinants of an effective collaborative governance structure: 1)
knowledge of information needs, 2) knowledge of the
environment, 3) willingness to accommodate to the diversity of
participating organizations and their goals, 4) knowledge about
participating organizations, 5) existing legislation, and 6)
executive involvement [33].
Developing information sharing and integration capability also
requires leadership and legislative support [21]. To achieve
interoperability across the boundaries of agencies, levels of
government, and even across national boundaries, requires

leadership and authority from the most top levels of
government. Because only the highest level of authority will
enable the formation of secure strategic partnership, build
comprehensive planning, secure necessary resources, and handle
conflicting interests across different agencies to sustain the
governance of multi-agencies network [34].
b) Lack of Authority
Lack of legal authority to access information was a challenge
faced by many state insurance regulators [16]. For instance, state
insurance regulators do not have the authority to access the FBI’s
nationwide criminal history record. As a consequence, state
insurance regulators have limited ability to prevent individuals
with serious criminal records from entering the insurance business
in their states. Inter-state migrations complicate the issue when
individuals with serious criminal histories move around [16].
The lack of authority for access is magnified by fragmented
regulatory structures which often overlap. Financial industry
actors and insurance companies find themselves regulated by
different institutions with different approaches to regulation. The
fragmented structure creates two prominent challenges, a)
duplication and overlap of regulation and b) competition among
regulators to be the first to protect consumers and to appeal to the
public [30, 37]. The overlap and competitiveness leads to
redundancy and causes higher costs for firms and regulatory
agencies. It also creates confusion for firms as they must choose
which regulators to comply with. This situation also challenges
regulators themselves as they work to understand how firms are
operating within the multiple fragmented and overlapping systems
of regulation [30, 37].
A proliferation of complex hybrid financial products increases
complexity of authority questions and hinders the ability of
regulators and consumers alike to identify and mitigate potential
risks. The multiple jurisdictions governing the markets is
recognized as not only obstructing the oversight of hybrid
financial products, but also confusing consumers [16]. For
instance, consumers might lodge a complaint about a hybrid
product with wrong regulator and as a consequences the
complaint is not properly resolved by the appropriate regulator.
To complicate the matter, the lack of a central body facilitating
information sharing or negotiating agreements about what
information could and should be shared means that the
appropriate regulator is often left in the dark [19]. The result is
that regulators are left with limited views of issues in the financial
market that impede their ability to deduce potential problems in
the market.
c) Lack of Enforcement Action from the Current Sharing
Mechanism
The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is the primary
mechanism used to establish information sharing agreements.
However, the MOU has been criticized for a lack of enforceable
actions which challenges the extent of sharing. The MOU was
criticized for a high reliance on the “soft power of persuasion”
and willingness to cooperate, instead of taking a coercive
approach [3]. The effectiveness of an MOU largely depends on
the “goodwill” of the counterparties signing the MOU. In
addition, compliance with an MOU also depends on the
underlying legal authority and jurisdictions of each party [14]. In
a similar manner, multilateral arrangements across nations, as a
form of MOU, were also criticized for the high information
127
asymmetries resulting from differences in legal systems,
supervisory arrangements, social and moral habit, and competition
among financial centers for securities transactions [3, 14].
d) Legacy information systems impede the access
Different regulators maintain different and separate information
systems and these different systems can significantly complicate
routine information sharing. The integration of different legacy
systems or the creation of interoperable system out of existing
legacy systems becomes a major hurdle [30]. Different legacy
systems result in systems that “don’t talk to each other” and create
various “gold copies” of data [30]. Gold copies refer to the
different data captured at different levels, organizations, and
formats. These gold copies pose challenges to data accuracy due
to the different formats and metadata and affect the level of
understanding about the data [30]. Considering that information is
constructed from data, the problem with data accuracy could
distort the resulting information and create major barriers for
routine information sharing.
e) Protection of sensitive data and information
Financial regulators expressed their concern over the protection of
sensitive data and information In particular, they expressed
concerns about the need to balance inclinations to share and the
need to protect different types of regulatory information with
varying degree of sensitivity [16]. The legal structure previously
installed to protect financial market consumers, such as the Bank
Secrecy Acts, sometime prohibit the disclosure of certain
information [19].
This concern is not a unique problem to financial market.
Information security and protection are still major concerns in
information sharing across different federal agencies. Looking at
the case of sharing terrorism related information, shows a variety
of weaknesses in the control of information security in federal
agencies [17]. Based on the 2008 GAO report1, almost all 24
major federal agencies continue to have problems with access
control and security management and about 20 federal agencies
have issues with configuration management for information
protection [17, 18]. Pardo et al [30] also pointed at the challenge
of data protection in the financial market. To share information
with various different agencies necessitate sufficient data
protection. With much information that flows around, regulators
need to ensure adequate protection of privacy and proprietary
information. Systems to protect the data and information against
intrusions exist but the problem lies on the protection of data and
information privacy [30].
The development of information policies for information sharing
and integration can be challenged by two factors, 1) the
conflicting interest of multiple agencies and 2) the tension among
security, privacy and sharing needs [30]. Each financial regulator
governs particular financial segments based on their mission;
these regulators intend to protect their autonomy and adversarial
position that can sometimes conflict with other regulators. As
previously discussed, information sharing requirements are
sometimes hindered by the need to protect sensitive data and
privacy rights. There is a conflicting issue between the need to use
shared information with the need to protect the same information
for being misused [9]. Dawes [9, 10] provides a useful framework
1 http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09546.pdf

for understanding information policies supporting informationbased
transparency initiative. Dawes proposed a balancing of two
complimentary requirements in the framework, namely:
information stewardship and information usefulness [8, 10].
Stewardship “conveys the idea that all public officials and
government organizations are responsible for handling
information with care and integrity, regardless of its original
purpose or source [9, 380]”. Using this lens, regulators must
handle any information with care regardless of who the initiator or
owner of the information is. This principle requires agencies to
forgo their differences and could alleviate the concern of misuse.
Information usefulness, on the other hand, refers to the principle
that the information is beneficial. Making the information more
accessible provides a wide variety of public and private uses [8,
10]. This framework of stewardship and usefulness provides
useful guidance for financial regulators in developing policy
management to support inter-regulators information sharing and
integration. Policy management refers to the “way to express,
analyze, and realize desired sharing system behavior [39].
4.2.4 Trusted Social Network
Systematic inter-organizational information sharing requires the
creation of networks consisting of various different agencies and
at different levels. A network might consist of organizations with
overlapping business processes and non-standardized but similar
information [35]. It might be populated by officials from various
different agencies, each having different cultures, practices and
rules to follows. The diversity of actors in this network could
generate a range of potential conflicts of interest. Pardo et al [30]
argued that managing conflict of interests among different
regulatory agencies might be regarded at one of the primary
challenges for 21st century financial market regulators.
There exists high competitiveness among different regulatory
agencies, each strives to become or maintain their functional
relevance to the market [30, 37]. Considering the high potential
for conflict and power negotiation among different agencies
involved in regulating financial markets, enacting trusted
relationships becomes key element to ensuring systematic sharing.
Trust within the network could change the way people work,
communicate and share information hence trust becomes the
“catalyst for information sharing [20]”. Regardless, it seems, of
the sophistication of system, communications and sharing still
benefit from strong interpersonal capabilities.
5. CONNECTING FINANCIAL ACTORS,
CHALLENGES, AND RISKS
Drawing on the analysis in the previous sections, we identify eight
challenges to information sharing in financial market regulation
resulting from fragmented regulatory structures in US financial
markets (table 1). These include: 1) lack of authority for crossjurisdictional
products, 2) conflicting organizational cultures, 3)
challenges due to data interdependency and legacy systems, and
4) the need for collaborative governance. In addition, four other
challenges emerge as side effects of institutional responses to this
fragmented structure, namely, a need 5) to develop linked data
and a common language, 6) to protect sensitive data and
information, 7) to develop necessary capabilities for existing
information sharing and 8) to create more robust sharing
mechanisms and policies.
128
The financial market regulatory structure in the U.S. is
fragmented with different actors regulating different products.
Considering the diversity of financial market stakeholders and
their role and interest in the market, the identified challenges will
affect different actors in the financial market differently. For each
of these actors, the different impacts of these challenges represent
the risks that need to be addressed by them. In this section, we
correlate the identified challenges with the primary actors in
financial market regulation and identify the risks associated with
the challenges for each actor (table 1).
The risks that government (federal and state) and SROs face are
comparable and include 1) having a limited ability to see built-up
vulnerabilities in the market [21], 2) having resistance to change
in order to maintain “turf” [16, 35], 3) hindering interoperability
due to differences in metadata and data formats [25], and 4)
competitiveness and conflicting interests among regulators [30].
The regulators might also need to invest in ensuring data quality,
developing linked data, and assessing gaps in capabilities.
Although the risks faced by Federal and State regulators and the
SROs are comparable, the magnitude of impact is oftentimes
different. For instance, having limited ability to see built-up
vulnerabilities could create a larger impact for Federal agencies
compared to the SROs. The resulting risks could also affect the
effectiveness of relationships among these regulators, especially
considering that the sharing practices among most federal and
state agencies are primarily informal and ad hoc [28]. For
instance, federal agencies and state government could share
trading information and be involved in joint enforcement
coordination.
The risk of resistance to change in order to maintain turf and the
risk of competing and conflicting interests could undermine their
joint efforts to share. As example, the report by the GAO
indicated how sharing between state and federal agencies, as
illustrated by the case of state insurance regulators and the FBI,
are sometimes not fruitful due to the lack of authority and
jurisdictions. The state insurance regulators could not access the
criminal record of an insurer in the FBI database and were thus
unable to assess and prevent potential fraud [16].
For the actors in the financial market industry (trading firms,
broker-dealer, rating agencies, investors, etc), these challenges
also induce risks. The authority barriers and inadequate sharing
mechanisms could create confusion for market actors in filing
complaints or in identifying relevant information. The report by
the GAO illustrates how difficult it is for consumers to lodge
complaints on hybrid products due to the level of complexities
and the intersectional and multilayered nature of financial markets
[16]. The lack of coercive power on the current sharing
mechanism among the regulatory agencies could also create an
opportunity for irresponsible actors to gain advantage by
manipulating the system [14].
As the previous GAO report indicates [16], an insurer who has a
criminal record could manipulate the system by moving to other
states and create a similar fraud because the state insurance
agencies could not access the criminal record in the FBI
databases. The barrier due to lack of authority and legacy systems
could complicate the effort by the public to identify and access
relevant information.

The relationship between regulators and the public is maintained
through two primary activities: 1) public access to information,
and 2) requests for comments on new regulatory proposals [2].
Legacy systems and differing jurisdictions could result in the risk
of multiple points of access [16], because the public has various
points to access information. On the one hand, multiple points of
access provide a wider range of information for the public to
compare and contrast. On the other hand, multiple points of access
could create confusion as to which information is most relevant
for them. As result, despite the notable transparency effort by
regulators to open up access to information and enhance the
public consultative process, this condition will make the
public, especially individual investors, more vulnerable to fraud
and more exposed to losses. Their inability to identify relevant
information could distort decisions that ordinary investors make
regarding their investment.
Table 1. Actors, Challenges and Risks
Challenges Government SROs Fin. Industry Actors Public
Mitigating authority
barriers - Lack of authority
and cross jurisdictions
Accommodating different
organizational cultures
Legacy systems and data
interdependency impede
access
Developing collaborative
governance culture –
involvement of high-level
officials and political
leaders
Developing linked data
and a common language -
Ensuring data quality and
integrity
Protection of sensitive data
and information, balancing
usefulness and stewardship
Lack of enforceable action
for the current information
sharing mechanism
Developing capabilities for
collaboration and
developing new
procedures
Limited ability to
identify built-up
vulnerabilities [24]
Resistance to change
brought forth by new
systems [9, 35]
Different metadata and
formats inhibit
integration and
interoperability. [27]
Conflicting interests
among regulatory
agencies – the
competitiveness and risks
of being relevant to the
market [30]
Investment to ensure data
quality in large datasets
[30]
Liabilities of privacy and
proprietary data and
information [30]
Dependence on the
“goodwill” of
counterparties [3, 14]
Gaps in capabilities that
hamper collaboration
[34, 35]
*) Intersection of challenges and actors represents the risk
Limited ability to
identify built-up
vulnerabilities [24]
Resistance to change
brought forth by new
systems [9, 35]
Different metadata and
formats inhibit
integration and
interoperability [27]
Conflicting interests
among regulatory
agencies – the
competitiveness and
risks of being relevant
to the market [30]
Investment to ensure
data quality in large
datasets [30]
Liabilities of privacy
and proprietary data and
information [30]
Dependence on the
“goodwill” of
counterparties [3, 14]
Gaps in capabilities that
hamper collaboration
[34, 35]
129
Confusion in filing
complaints
Different reporting
formats increase cost
[30]
Investment to ensure
data quality for
compliance [30]
Liabilities of privacy
and proprietary data and
information [30]
Opportunities to
manipulate the system
Confusion in
identifying relevant
information [18]
Multiple points of
access [16]
Distortion due to low
quality data.
Security of personal
data
Higher vulnerability
to fraud and
exposures
The challenge of protecting sensitive data and ensuring data
quality and integrity also creates significant risks for the financial
industry and the public. The challenges of protecting sensitive
data significantly correlate with the firm’s investment in ensuring
data quality, compliance and privacy protection. This condition
creates a risk of protecting the security of the personal data and
information for the general public. For public, this challenge
correlates with the risk of breach in personal data and security of
personal data. For financial industry, the challenge correlates to
the risk of liabilities related to privacy and proprietary data. The
financial industry might have to invest heavily to reduce the risk
of liabilities due to personal data breach.
6. FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Through the review on literature in the interagency information
sharing and integration, this paper provides an initial framework
for understanding the challenges relating to inter-agency
information sharing for financial market regulators, focusing

primarily on the information flows between the different agents
playing significant roles in the regulation of financial markets.
There are a number of other areas in which computer and
information science research can help support this information
and knowledge sharing, through analyses of the types of
information and knowledge that should be shared between the
actors. For example, better analytic tools could build on a formal
specification of trading data and financial actors’ behavior. High
level languages for identifying patterns of interest (e.g., fraud
signatures) in financial data streams should enable highly
scalable, real-time analysis of data streams to support decision
making. As another example, data mining approaches will be
essential to detect patterns of activity that produce anomalous
market behavior, such as the May 2010 “flash crash,” or identify
the possibility of manipulative or fraudulent practice that warrants
further investigation. Predictive data mining could be useful for
identifying impending market destabilization or manipulation and
developing better “circuit breakers.” Social network analysis
could be used in combination with structured data to provide
evidence of individuals or organizations engaged in inappropriate
activities. Financial market professionals can get the information
they need to support their high-stakes decision making. The
ensuing research should lead to new models of computing, system
design, and data analysis that can improve practices in this
important and challenging domain.
7. REFERENCES
[1] BIS 2010. Good Practice Principles on Supervisory
Colleges: Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.
[2] Bradley, C.M. 2011. Transparency Is the New Opacity:
Constructing Financial Regulation After the Crisis.
American University Business Law Review. 1, (2011), 7.
[3] Brummer, C. 2010. Post-American Securities Regulation.
California Law Review. 98, (2010), 327–383.
[4] Cresswell, A. et al. 2008. A Multi-dimensional Approach to
Digital Government Capability Assessment.
[5] Davenport, T.H. and Prusak, L. 1997. Information ecology:
Mastering the information and knowledge environment.
Oxford University Press, USA.
[6] Davies, J. et al. 2003. Towards the Semantic Web: Ontologydriven
Knowledge Management. Wiley Online Library.
[7] Dawes, S.S. et al. 2009. From “Need to Know” to “Need to
Share”: Tangled Problems, Information Boundaries, and the
Building of Public Sector Knowledge Networks. Public
Administration Review. 69, 3 (May. 2009), 392–402.
[8] Dawes, S.S. 2010. Information policy meta-principles:
stewardship and usefulness. (2010), 1–10.
[9] Dawes, S.S. 1996. Interagency information sharing:
Expected benefits, manageable risks. Journal of Policy
Analysis and Management. 15, 3 (1996), 377–394.
[10] Dawes, S.S. 2010. Stewardship and usefulness: Policy
principles for information-based transparency. Government
Information Quarterly. 27, 4 (2010), 377–383.
[11] Ding, W.W. et al. 2010. The impact of information
technology on academic scientists’ productivity and
130
collaboration patterns. Management Science. 56, 9 (2010),
1439.
[12] Engle, R.F. and Weidman, S.T. 2010. Technical Capabilities
Necessary for Systemic Risk Regulation:Summary of a
Workshop. The National Academies Press.
[13] FINRA - About FINRA: http://www.finra.org/AboutFINRA/.
[14] Friedman, F.B. et al. 2003. Taking stock of information
sharing in securities matters. Journal of financial crime. 10,
1 (2003), 37–53.
[15] FSB 2011. Global Adherence to Regulatory and Supervisory
Standards on International Cooperation and Information
Exchange.
[16] GAO 2004. Better Information Sharing Among Financial
Services Regulators Could Improve Protections for
Consumers. Technical Report #GAO-04-882R. Government
Accountability Office (GAO).
[17] GAO 2009. Information Security: Agencies Continue to
Report Progress, but Need to Mitigate Persistent
Weaknesses. Technical Report #GAO-09-546. Government
Accountability Office (GAO).
[18] GAO 2012. Information Security: Weaknesses Continue
Amid New Federal Efforts to Implement Requirements.
Technical Report #GAO-12-137. Government
Accountability Office (GAO).
[19] GAO 1992. Securities and Futures Markets: Cross-Border
Information Sharing Is Improving, but Obstacles Remain.
Technical Report #GGD-92-110. Government
Accountability Office (GAO).
[20] Gil-Garcia, J. et al. 2010. Conceptualizing Information
Integration in Government. E-Government: Information,
Technology, and Transformation. H.. Scholl, ed. M.E.
Sharpe.
[21] Gil-Garcia, J. et al. 2005. Interorganizational Information
Integration in the Criminal Justice Enterprise: Preliminary
Lessons from State and County Initiatives. (Jan. 2005),
118c– 118c.
[22] Jasanoff, S. 2006. Transparency in Public Science: Purposes,
Reasons, Limits. Law and Contemporary Problems. 69,
(2006), 21–45.
[23] Lumsden, J. et al. 2011. Ontology Definition and
Construction, and Epistemological Adequacy for Systems
Interoperability: A Practitioner Analysis. Journal of
Information Science. 37, 3 (Jun. 2011), 246–253.
[24] Manual on Fiscal Transparency, 2007 Revised Edition:
http://www.imf.org/external/np/fad/trans/manual.htm.
Accessed: 2012-04-22.
[25] Mayer, R.C. et al. 1995. An integrative model of
organizational trust. Academy of management review.
(1995), 709–734.
[26] National Information Exchange Model (NIEM):
https://www.niem.gov/Pages/default.aspx.
[27] O’Riain, S. et al. 2012. Linked Data Driven Information
Systems as an Enabler for Integrating Financial Data.

Information Systems for Global Financial Markets:
Emerging Developments and Effects. A.Y. Yap, ed. IGI
Global. 239–269.
[28] Pan, E.J. 2009. Structural Reform of Financial Regulation.
[29] Pardo, T. et al. 2008. Collaborative governance and crossboundary
information sharing: Envisioning a networked and
IT-enabled public administration. (2008), 5–7.
[30] Pardo, T. et al. 2011. Computing and information technology
challenges for 21st century financial market regulators.
(Delft, Netherland, 2011), 198–209.
[31] Pardo, T. et al. 2012. E-Government Interoperability
Interaction of Policy, Management, and Technology
Dimensions. Social Science Computer Review. 30, 1 (Feb.
2012), 7–23.
[32] Pardo, T. et al. 2004. Modelling the Social and Technical
Processes of Interorganizational Information Integration.
(Hawaii, 2004), 10.
[33] Pardo, T. et al. 2008. Sustainable Cross-Boundary
Information Sharing. Digital Government: E-Government
Research, Case Studies, and Implementation. H. Chen et al.,
eds. SpringerLink. 421–438.
131
[34] Pardo, T. and Burke, B. 2008. Government Worth Having: A
Briefing on Interoperability for Government Leaders.
[35] Pardo, T. and Burke, B. 2008. Improving Government
Interoperability: A Capability Framework for Government
Managers.
[36] Radin, B. 2006. Challenging the performance movement:
Accountability, complexity, and democratic values.
Georgetown Univ Press.
[37] Sayogo, D.S. et al. 2011. Understanding the impact of
computing and information technology on critical challenges
facing 21st century financial market regulators. (Maryland,
2011), 345–346.
[38] Schapiro, M.L. 2010. Testimony Concerning the Lehman
Brothers Examiner’s Report Before the House Financial
Services Committee.
[39] Smith, K. et al. 2008. Everybody share: The challenge of
data-sharing systems. Computer. 41, 9 (2008), 54–61.
[40] Tarullo, D.K. 2010. Equipping financial regulators with the
tools necessary to monitor systemic risk.

On Public Service Provision Informative Phase: A
dialogue-based Model and Platform
Efthimios Tambouris
1 University of Macedonia
156 Egnatia Str., 54006, Thessaloniki,
Greece, +30 2310 891 588
2 CERTH/ITI
6 th km Charilaou-Thermi Rd.
57001, Thessaloniki
tambouris@uom.gr
ABSTRACT
Online provision of public services (such as passport issuance and
establishing a new business) is a priority of eGovernment
worldwide for over a decade. Public service provision consists of
two phases: informative and performative. During the informative
phase, citizens or businesses obtain information before actually
invoking a public service. This information includes required
documents to be submitted, cost, responsible authority etc. The
informative phase, although significant, has been overlooked at
eGovernment literature. In this paper we present a notation for
modeling the informative phase of public services as well as a set
of indicators for measuring quantitative and qualitative
characteristics of public services. We further present a prototype
platform than enables modeling the informative phase of public
services and automatically creating online dialogues to be used by
citizens for obtaining personalized information on public services.
We finally demonstrate the use of the platform by using the
passport issuance public service.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.6.1 [MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND
INFORMATION SYSTEMS]: Project and People Management
- Systems Aanalysis and Design, Systems Development
General Terms
Management
Keywords
eGovernment, Public Service Provision, Informative Stage
1. INTRODUCTION
eGovernment is a political priority worldwide with tremendous
amounts of funds being invested, which are estimated to be over $
490 billion worldwide [3]. One of the key eGovernment activities
is online Public Service Provision (PSP) with relevant progress
being regularly monitored [2][13]. A number of stage models
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
Vasiliki Outsetari
University of Macedonia
156 Egnatia Str.
54006, Thessaloniki, Greece
+30 2310 891 589
mis0924@uom.gr
132
Konstantinos Tarabanis
1 University of Macedonia
156 Egnatia Str., 54006, Thessaloniki,
Greece, +30 2310 891 578
2 CERTH/ITI
6 th km Charilaou-Thermi Rd.
57001, Thessaloniki
kat@uom.gr
have been proposed for evaluating sophistication and maturity of
eGovernment solutions [4][5][10]. For example, according to
European Union there are five stages of online sophistication for
public services: information, one-way interaction, two-way
interaction, transaction, and targetization [2].
Academic work to better understand PSP suggests it consists of
two distinct but complementary phases: the informative phase and
the performative phase [9]. During the informative phase the
citizen/business obtains information about the service while
during the performative phase the citizen/business invokes and
eventually consumes the public service.
The informative stage is often considered as straightforward to
fully automate. This is reflected in various stage models that
suggest providing information is the first stage of sophistication
and can be fully accomplished simply by “providing information
online”. Targetization, which is considered as the ultimate stage,
is often related to providing personalization during the
performative phase, i.e. during service execution.
We follow a different path suggesting the informative phase of
PSP is very important and should be also carefully automated.
During the informative phase, citizens/businesses have to obtain
all necessary information with regards to the specific version of
the public service relevant to their circumstances. As many public
services have hundreds or even thousands of different versions
[7], providing personalized information in an efficient and
effective manner is not straightforward. We therefore consider
that targetization is also relevant to the informative phase in
addition to performative.
In this paper we present a model and prototype platform that can
be used for modeling PSP informative stage and, subsequently,
for providing personalized information to citizens and businesses
using online dialogues.
We believe this work contributes to obtaining a better
understanding of PSP informative stage. It reviews relevant work
in the area to propose a notation that enables domain experts to
model the information stage. It further proposes a number of
indicators that can be used to understand the complexity of PSP
informative phase. Finally, it presents a platform that can be used
by domain experts to graphically design the informative phase of
PSP and by citizens and businesses to obtain information based on
an online dialogue that is automatically created from the model.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In section 2 we
present related work in automating the informative phase of PSP.
In Section 3 we present our proposed modeling notation as well as
a number of indicators to better understand the produced public
service models. In Section 4 we present a platform prototype we
have developed for modeling the informative phase of PSP which
enables automatic development of online dialogues to be used by
citizens and businesses. In Section 5 we present a case from using
the platform. Finally, in Section 6 we present the main
conclusions of this work along with future work.
2. PSP INFORMATIVE PHASE (PSP IP)
RELATED WORK
The informative phase is the informative part of the interaction
between a citizen and a public authority providing a public
service. During this phase, the citizen asks questions like Why?
What? Who? Where? When? How? about a public service. When
the answers to these questions have been provided, we can
consider this phase of service provision as complete and the
citizen may proceed to the performative phase i.e. service
invocation.
The informative phase is essential for optimal service utilization
and public administration efficiency however it is often
overlooked by governments. In order to effectively use a public
service, citizens must identify which public services address their
needs and find answers to their questions regarding these services,
e.g. “am I eligible for this service?”, “what documents should I
provide?”, “what is the relevant cost?” etc. [9].
This is particular important as studies suggest public services
often have numerous versions depending on a number of factors
[1] [7]. For example, issuing a passport has many versions
depending on age, whether the application is for a new passport or
renewing a passport or replacing a stolen passport etc. In each
version, the input documents that should be provided are different
whereas the cost may differ as well.
Despite the existence of sophisticated eGovernment PSP systems
for the performative phase, citizens and businesses spend valuable
resources (time and sometimes money) in order to collect the
information required (e.g. about needed documents, cost demands
etc.) in the informative stage i.e. before invoking a service.
In the rest of this section we present three different ways used for
PSP informative stage (PSP IP). We call them unstructured
websites, structured websites and dialogue-based systems.
133
Figure 1. Example of website providing unstructured PS
information
2.1 Unstructured Websites
This category includes websites containing plain information
about public service(s). The information may be excessive
nevertheless there is no structure in the content other than the
menu of the website. Sometimes specific websites have been
developed for single public services such as www.passport.gov.gr
developed for providing information on passport issuance (fig. 1).
2.2 Structured Websites
This category also includes websites containing plain information
about public service(s). This time however information is
provided according to a template that is common for all public
services. It is common that one-stop government portals provide
structured information on public services e.g. www.help.gv.ac
(fig. 2).
Figure 2. Example of website providing structured PS
information
2.3 Dialogue-based Platforms
These platforms guide the visitor through a number of online
questions. By answering, the visitor is provided with personalized
information, commonly on whether he is eligible for the service,
required documents, costs, responsible authority etc.
These platforms are all similar with regards to what the visitor
experiences. However, they are substantially different on how that
information is produced. We will outline three such applications,
namely OneStopGov platform, Rural-Inclusion platform and
Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) platform.
2.3.1 OneStopGov Platform
OneStopGov platform has been developed within the European
Union co-funded project OneStopGov (http://islab.uom.gr/
onestopgov). The platform provides a complete system for online
one-stop government hence covers both the informative and
performative phases of PSP [12]. The public servant (who should
actually be a domain expert) with the assistance of a technical
expert models the public service using a proprietary process
management tool employing BPMN and web services (fig. 3).
The dialogue is automatically created from this model. The enduser
visits the relevant website in order to get informed about the
public service through an online dialogue. OneStopGov platform

employs workflow management technologies for modeling public
services.
Figure 3. Developing a model for PSP IP using OneStopGov
platform
2.3.2 Rural-Inclusion Platform
Rural-Inclusion (RI) platform has been developed within the
European Union co-funded project Rural Inclusion
(http://www.rural-inclusion.eu). RI uses exactly the same
principles as OneStopGov platform. However, the underlying
technologies are different. More specifically, the Semantic Public
Service Portal (S-PSP) developed to support the informative phase
of the public services is based on ontologies technology [6]. As a
result, the domain expert needs to be supported by IT experts in
order to model the public service as an ontology. Recently, the
project has developed a front-end which enables domain experts
to provide all information needed for the online dialogue through
an easy-to-use interface which automatically creates the ontology
(owl file) consumed by the project website visited by end-users.
Rural Inclusion platform employs semantic technologies for
modeling public services.
Figure 4. Developing a model for PSP IP using Rural
Inclusion platform
2.3.3 Oracle Policy Automation Solution for Social
Services (OPA)
The Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) platform was initially
developed from the Australian firm RuleBurst Holdings in order
134
to translate laws and official documents into business rules.
Today, OPA is a tool that serves the modeling and automation of
the business rules’ application (www.oracle.com/technetwork/
apps-tech/policy-automation/). Thus, although it was initially
designed to serve public sector’s needs, it is currently applied in
other sectors as well (e.g. the insurance sector).
OPA consist of two separate applications. The first is Oracle
Policy Modeling, an environment that facilitates authoring of
public services’ rules. The second is Oracle Policy Automation,
which is used to automate public services’ processes. Oracle
Policy Modeling is a windows application that can be employed
by the user (normally a domain expert) in order to author a set of
natural language rules that govern the public service. The tool is
compatible with Microsoft Office automation applications (such
as Word and Excel) hence enables using text properly structured
and annotated in order to describe public services’ rules (fig. 5).
Using these rules, an interview (online dialogue) is automatically
created and deployed. The interested citizens can thereafter visit
the relevant website and initiate this interview in order to be
informed whether they are eligible for the service or not. OPA
platform employs rules management technologies and expert
systems for modeling public services.
Figure 5. Developing a model for PSP IP using OPA
2.3.4 Evaluation of Existing Approaches
Existing solutions for PSP information phase range from simple
websites to sophisticated solutions.
An analysis of advanced solutions suggests they follow an
architecture similar to the one presented in fig. 6.

Expert
1. Expert
describes service
3. Dialogue
launched
«subsystem»
Service Representation
Tool
2. Service model
transferred
«subsystem»
Dialogues Presentation
Website
4. Citizen executes
dialogue
End-­‐user
Figure 6. Main Architecture of dialogue-based platforms
More specifically, the platform consists of two sub-systems: a
Service Representation Tool and a Dialogues Presentation
Website.
The platform is used in a 4-step manner. In the first step, an expert
uses the Service Representation Tool in order to describe
(verbally or using a model) the public service. In the second step,
a file describing the service is transferred from the Service
Representation Tool to the Dialogues Presentation Website. In the
third step, the dialogue is automatically created and launched.
Finally, in the last step the end-user (normally citizen or business)
visits the Dialogues Presentation Website, executes the dialogue
and obtains the required information.
By examining the different approaches for the Service
Representation Tool we decided to endorse modeling of public
services since we believe it is more straightforward and widely
used as it can also be based on open standards for process
modeling. RI platform employs ontologies which we believe is
less straightforward than provess modeling. On the other hand,
OneStopGov platform is based on proprietary software and
handles both informative and performative phases thus is more
complicated than needed for our objectives.
Using a diagram for PSP has significant advantages [11]. In our
case, it enables (a) easy representation of PSP IP by domain
experts (usually public servants) without any programming effort,
(b) analysis and better understanding of PSP IP complexity using
a number of indicators, (c) easy management of PSP IP by reusing
and changing diagrams, (d) easy validation of diagrams, (e)
eventually development of better quality public services, (f)
citizens and businesses to obtain personalized information about
public service simply by answering online questions instead of
face-to-face interactions, using a call center etc.
It should be noted here that extensive research has been conducted
in the area of personalized PSP mainly using ontologies and rules,
e.g. [1]. In this paper however we focus on more visual and easyto-use
technologies for the reasons stated above. In addition, the
descriptions of public services in relevant legal documents are
usually detailed hence can easily result in deterministic models
that can be easily verified.
3. NOTATION AND INDICATORS
An important element for the production of personalized
information is the development of a model that will represent the
public service’s dialogue.
In order to model the informative phase of PSP, we developed a
simple modeling notation that allows for the visual representation
135
of the dialogue. We also present the rules that need to be followed
for the resulting model to be valid.
Having represented a public service using a model enables us to
obtain interesting information about the service. In this respect,
we propose a number of indicators to better understand the
modeled public services.
3.1 PSP IP Dialogue Model
The main idea is to model the PSP informative phase (PSP IP) as
a dialogue (or interview) between the public authority and the
visitor (citizen or business). The model thus mainly contains
questions and possible answers. For example, when modeling
public service “issuing a marriage permit”, a possible question is
“what is your marital status?” with possible answers “single”,
“divorced” etc. The model also contains information on input
documents that should be submitted by the citizen for invoking
the public service as well as information on cost or subsidy
depending on the nature of the service.
Using this dialogue model one can quickly and without any
ambiguity determine whether he is eligible for a service or not.
Eligible visitors can further obtain personalized information such
as required documents to be submitted for service invocation and
costs.
3.2 PSP IP Modeling Notation
In Table 1 we present a simple notation proposed for modeling
PSP informative phase. This notation is influenced by BPMN
(http://www.bpmn.org/), graph theory, academic public service
models (e.g. GEA [9]), templates used for describing public
services (e.g. in national portals) as well as templates proposed in
national eGovernment Interoperability Frameworks. The only
reason for proposing a new notation instead of adopting an
existing such as BPMN is simplicity. We aim at a notation with
only a few symbols since our experience suggests simplicity is of
paramount importance if the tool is to be used by public servants.
The diagrams produced using this notation represent the dialogue
between the system and the user. From a technical point of view
each diagram is actually a directed acyclic graph.
The notation is briefly explained now (the term visitor here
represents anyone executing a dialogue).
o Start node. Represents the start of the diagram.
o End node. Represents the completion of a dialogue in the
diagram. It can be one of the following:
-­‐ Eligible. It suggests the visitor is eligible for the
service.
-­‐ Not Eligible. It suggests the visitor is not eligible for
the service.
o Question. Represents a question posed to the visitor e.g.
“Which is your current marital status?”
o Answer. Represents a possible answer to an expressed
Question e.g. “Married”.
o Input Document. Represents a document the visitor should
provide based on a previous answer. For example, a
“Married” answer to a question might lead to a need for
submitting a “marriage certificate” as a required document
for invoking the public service.

o Information. Represents any information the visitor should
know e.g. “the execution of the service should be completed
within ten working days”.
o Value. Represents an amount the visitor should pay to
invoke the service or receive after the service’s completion
(e.g. in case of a social benefit service). There are three cases
for a Value object:
-­‐ Registration. Represents the amount that the visitor
should pay as a lump sum (e.g. a 20 € fee).
-­‐ Annual Subscription. Represents the amount that
the visitor should pay annually (e.g. an annual
subscription to a chamber of commerce).
-­‐ Subsidy. Represents the amount that the visitor is
entitled from the execution of a service (e.g.
housing benefit).
Value is a subcase of Information but we include it as
separate object due to its particular importance to citizens
and public authorities as well as its semantics (e.g. Values
can be added).
We call Question, Input Document, Information and Value
internal nodes of the graph (diagram).
Table 1. Notation for PSP IP Dialogue Diagrams
Element and Description Symbol
Start:
� Portrays the beginning of the diagram.
Question:
� Is used to represent a question posed to
citizens/businesses.
Answer:
� Is used to represent a possible answer to a
question.
Input Document:
� Is used to represent a document required for
invoking a public service.
Information:
� Is used to represent any additional information
a citizen/business should know.
Value:
� Is used to represent any monetary amount (it is
a special case of Information).
Not Eligible:
� Is used to stop all control flows (thus it
represents an end node)
� It suggests the citizen/business is not eligible
for the service.
Eligible:
� Is used to stop all control flows (thus it
represents an end node)
� It suggests the citizen/business is eligible for
the service.
We should note that the arrow besides representing a Question is
also used to link the Start node to the first Question (hence
representing control flow without any question). We understand a
136
new symbol should have been introduced for that however for
simplicity we decided to use the arrow.
In developing PSP IP diagrams there are certain rules that need to
be respected for the resulting diagram to be valid. These rules are
derived from graph theory and the fact that the graph should be a
directed acyclic one. The most important are presented in Table 2.
Table 2. Rules of PSP IP Dialogue Diagrams
1. There is only one Start node that contains only one
outgoing arrow leading to the first Question.
2. There are one or more End nodes. An End node has one
or more incoming Arrows but no outgoing Arrow.
3. All paths (representing potential dialogues) should end in
an End node.
4. An Arrow always connects two nodes which should be
different.
5. Arrows indicate the control flow of the dialogue.
6. An Answer may lead to only one Question, Information,
Input Document or End Node.
7. Question nodes should have at least two outgoing Arrows.
All other internal nodes should only have one outgoing
Arrow.
8. No node should be “orphan”, i.e. all nodes should have at
least one incoming and one outgoing arrow (subject to
other rules).
9. The resulting graph should be acyclic, thus no cycling
paths should exist.
3.3 Public service indicators
The current effort aims to facilitate, apart from citizens, public
service providers in designing dialogues but also in managing PSP
IP. For this purpose, we introduce a number of indicators. Using
these indicators the domain expert who designs the diagram
obtains interesting information on various aspects of the service.
The indicators measure the behavior of the main objects (i.e.
Question, Document, and Value) and the diagram in general. To
derive these indicators, graph theory was reviewed in the context
of public service provision according to the authors’ relevant
experience. In the rest of this section, we present the proposed
indicators.
3.3.1 Number of Dialogues
This indicator provides the number of different dialogues in a
diagram, i.e. the number of unique paths in the graph. This is an
indication of the service’s complexity, since an increased number
of dialogues suggests an increased number of service’s versions.
3.3.2 Number of Dialogues that Results in a not
Eligible Node
This indicator provides the number of different dialogues that
result in a not eligible node i.e. in cases where the citizen does not
meet the requirements for invoking the public service. This is an
indicator of the number of preconditions that must be fulfilled for

someone to be non-eligible for the service. When this indicator is
equal to zero then everyone is eligible for invoking the service.
3.3.3 Maximum/Minimum/Average Number of
Questions
These indicators provide the maximum, minimum and average
number of questions that are asked to the citizen during the
dialogue. The indicators count only questions that result in an
eligible end node and, thus, show the number of questions
required for the successful completion of the dialogue. An
increased number of questions indicate more complex services.
3.3.4 Maximum/Minimum/Average Total Cost
These indicators provide the maximum, minimum and average
cost of the service. Obviously, they count only the cost coming
from dialogue paths that result in an eligible end node. The
service provider can use these indicators to measure the range of
the service’s cost for the citizen. As a result, they can also
measure the expected income from the execution of the public
service provided details on the number of citizens that will
consume the service are also known.
3.3.5 Maximum/Minimum/Average Total Subsidy
These indicators provide the maximum, minimum and average
expected citizen’s benefit after the execution of the public service.
It can be used by public authorities to compute the range of the
total subsidy as well as its average provided details on the number
of beneficiaries are known.
3.3.6 Maximum/Minimum/Average Number of Input
Documents
These indicators provide the maximum, minimum, and average
number of documents that different citizens’ categories need to
provide for invoking the service. They also count the number(s) of
documents coming from not eligible dialogues, if applicable.
These indicators could be used to examine the level of
bureaucracy as an increased number of required input documents
usually indicates an increased level of red tape.
3.3.7 Indicators for Set of Services
Apart from the indicators that refer to each specific service
diagram, we also propose a number of indicators that apply to a
set of services diagrams. These indicators are helpful to public
administrations responsible for the design and management of
many public services. The indicators include:
o Involvement of Other Public Authorities. This dictates the
number of other public authorities that are involved in
providing a particular public service. It is measured through
the required input documents of each service and the public
authorities that are issuing them.
o Number of Services per public Authority. This dictates the
number of services provided by each public authority. This
information can be useful for planning, including human
resources management.
o Document’s Importance. A large number of input
documents are actually produced by public authorities. This
indicator depicts the number of services using a particular
document. This is useful in planning e.g. to estimate how
many services will be affected if an input document is
abolished or replaced.
137
It should be noted that as all service descriptions can be stored in
a database, additional information may be extracted depending on
specific needs.
4. PSP IP PLATFORM
In order to demonstrate the use of the proposed notation we
developed a prototype platform presented in this section.
4.1 Architecture and Functionality
The architecture of the developed prototype platform is shown in
fig. 7 using UML deployment diagram while its main
functionality is shown in fig. 8 using UML use case diagram.
Figure 7. Platform architecture
As presented in the use case diagram there are three main actors:
domain expert, content manager and citizen/business (visitor or
end-user). It is worth explaining the content manager. This role is
responsible for central activities including managing all public
documents, describing public services, deciding which PSP IP
diagrams to launch in the Dialogue website etc.
Figure 8. Platform main functionality
4.2 Main Usage Scenario
There are many different usage scenarios for this platform. Here
we present one such usage scenario.
Step 1. Input Documents are Described
The Content manager is using the Service Admin Tool in order to
create descriptions of input documents that will be needed when
modeling PSP IP (fig. 9). Ideally, there should be one such

common documents repository at the national level. This list is
stored in an xml file.
Step 2. Domain Expert Models the PSP IP Dialogue
The Domain expert is using the Service Modeling Tool in order to
create the PSP IP diagram for a public service (fig. 10). While
preparing the diagram, the Domain expert is also able to observe
the values of various indicators. He is capable, in that way, to
study the different versions of the service.
Figure 9. Management of public documents
Figure 10. Platform screenshot
It should be noted that the Service Modeling Tool fully supports
the proposed notation including rules as well as indicators
presented in the previous section. In this respect, the Domain
expert can choose to “validate” the diagram which results in
checking that no rule is violated (see fig. 11 and 12).
138
Figure 11. Example of a detected violation
Figure 12. Example of an error message
Finally, the Domain expert can save a dialogue’s graph into an
xml file, which can be retrieved in the future to complete the
design or send it to the Content manager of the system. The
Domain expert can also choose to model a part of the diagram and
send the relevant file to another Domain expert to finalize it. This
is particularly useful for modeling services provided by more than
one public authority or for complex services where many Domain
experts need to collaborate during the design of the diagram.
Step 3. Content Manager Stores the Dialogue to the
Database
For each public service modeled, the Content manager adds some
information such as title, description, responsible authority etc.
Then he can use this information along with the xml file in order
to publish the service in the Dialogues Presentation Website. For
this purpose, he stores the graph in the Services Database that is
accessible by the Dialogues Presentation Website.
Moreover, in case of termination or modification of a service, the
Content manager can delete the service from the database, thus
making it unavailable for the public. Finally, the Content manager
can produce public services’ aggregate statistics using data
extracted from the database.
Step 4. Citizen Launches the Dialogue
The citizen/business visits the Dialogues Presentation Website
and launches the dialogue for a specific service. The dialogue is
automatically created on the fly by accessing the Services
Database (fig. 11). In case the citizen is eligible for the service,
the system also informs him about the required documents that he
should adduce in order to proceed to the execution of the service.

Figure 13. Citizens website
4.3 Technologies
The Service Modeling Tool and Service Admin Tool were
developed in this prototype under a common desktop application
supporting different roles based on credentials. This application
was implemented in Java. The Dialogues Presentation Website
was implemented using PHP programming language. The services
database was implemented using MySQL.
A basic feature of the Service Modeling Tool is the graphic design
and representation of dialogues as graphs. Jgraphx library allows
the visual design, graphical representation and interaction with the
dialogue’s graph.
In the frame of the Service Modeling Tool there was a need for
xml files processing. To this end, the XOM library was employed.
The calculation of indicators was performed using depth-first
search (DFS) graph theory algorithms.
The validation of the graph in terms of identifying cycles was
performed using the topolorder algorithm [8].
5. CASE STUDY
In this section we present a case study to demonstrate the
proposed approach, model and platform. We use the public
service passport issuance (in Greece). In order to model the
service’s informative phase, we gathered and studied all relevant
laws and rules governing the specific public service. Main source
of information was also the official website passport.gov.gr.
In the rest of this section, we present the four main steps that were
followed in the process.
Step 1. Input Documents are Described
In this step the content manager is using the Service Admin Tool
in order to describe all input documents needed for invoking
Passport Issuance service, if these are not already in the database.
In this case, there are 9 different input documents including ID,
application, birth certificate etc. It should be noted that most of
them are provided by other public authorities as the outcome of
other public services.
Step 2. Domain Expert Models the PSP IP Dialogue
In this step the domain expert has to produce the PSP IP diagram.
For this purpose, all service versions need to be documented in
terms of different questions and answers, required documents and
relevant costs.
Next, the domain expert uses the Service Modeling Tool in order
to model the service as a graph. The expert starts using the Start
Node and proceeds with the first Question. This is done by
139
dragging and dropping the symbols from the Symbols area to the
Design area just like in any other drawing tool (see fig. 14).
The questions have to be formulated so that every Answer leads to
a different version or satisfies a service precondition. A basic aim
is to develop a graph that contains the minimum number of
questions. Each question has to be short in length, easy to
understand and focus on one only rule. For example, the question
“Are you an adult Greek?” includes two rules (age and
nationality) and thus should be divided in two questions.
Obviously, there should also be no overlap between questions e.g.
“What is your age?” and “Are you an adult?”
Each Answer is followed by another Question or Required Input
Documents that are needed to verify the answer.
As a good practice, we recommend that the model starts with the
eligibility questions i.e. those that determine whether someone is
eligible and then proceeds with the versioning questions i.e. those
determining the service version along with the needed input
documents and costs.
Figure 14. Modeling Passport Issuance service
The following figure presents the full diagram for the Passport
Issuance service. The diagram is not readable but provides an idea
of the complexity of the dialogue.

Figure 15. Full model of Passport Issuance service
From a technical point of view, it should be noted that the
dialogue graph is stored as an xml file.
An interesting feature of the platform is its ability to calculate and
present a number of indicators for the modeled public service. By
pressing “calculate” in the Service Modeling Tool (tab:
Indicators) we obtain the results presented in fig. 16.
These suggest there are 219 different paths (dialogues) in this
service with 26 leading to a Non-Eligible end node. Hence, the
public service contains 193 service versions.
They further suggest a dialogue has a minimum of 3 and a
maximum of 10 questions for the citizen. The citizen has to
provide between 4 and 9 different input documents (based on his
circumstances) to invoke the public service.
Finally, the costs of the service is between 68.8 € and 84.4 € with
an average cost of 80.11 €.
Figure 16. Indicators for Passport Issuance
140
Step 3. Content Manager Stores the Dialogue to the
Database
In this step the content manager inserts some basic information on
the service (see fig. 17) and stores it to the Service database hence
making it available for launch by citizens.
Figure 17. Inserting basic information about the service
Step 4. Citizen Launches the Dialogue
In this final step, the citizen visits the Dialogues Presentation
website, selects the Passport Issuance service, views the basic
information about it and launches the dialogue. After that, the
questions are asked one by one (fig. 18).
Figure 18. Screenshot presenting one question with possible
answers
Based on the answers, the citizen is informed whether he is
eligible and in this case what are the required documents and the
cost of the service (fig. 19).

Figure 19. Information provided after the dialogue completion
6. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper, we present a notation and platform that facilitates
the informative phase of public service provision (PSP IP). This
model capitalizes on previous work suggesting public services are
represented (usually in models) and subsequently online dialogues
are automatically developed for citizens to obtain personalized
information.
More specifically, we first present a modeling notation for PSP IP.
The notation is influenced by BPMN and graph theory and
suggests PSP informative phase is modeled as a directed acyclic
graph that consists of one start node, one or more eligible and
non-eligible end nodes, questions, answers, information, value
and input documents. Furthermore, we introduce a number of
indicators of graph models such as number of dialogues, max and
min questions in the diagram; max and min required documents;
max and min cost (or subsidy).
We further present a prototype platform that can be used by
domain experts to model PSP IP and by citizens to execute
corresponding dialogues that have been automatically created
from the models. The platform also performs a number of validity
tests on the graph and automatically calculates the values of
indicators thanks to the use of graph theory algorithms. This
platform provides some clear advantage over other approaches
(presented in section 2) as shown at the beginning of section 3.
Future work includes revisiting the proposed modeling notation to
become theoretically solid and robust without losing its
simplicity. It also includes further enriching the modeling
notation. For example, in its current form, the model cannot
handle complex situations such as when Document A or
Document B can be used as required documents to validate an
answer.
Future work also includes a thorough investigation of indicators.
In this work, we introduced a small number of indicators and
implemented a subset of them. However, deeper theoretical work
is needed including validation by experts.
The platform itself is only a proof-of-concept prototype hence
there is substantial room for improvement both in terms of
functionality but also user friendliness, robustness etc.
For example, we would like to enhance the platform to be able to
handle more complex situations, e.g. enabling domain experts
141
from different public authorities to collaborate in order to model a
set of public services required to fulfill a life event. For this
purpose, our intention is to move towards a web-based platform
for service modeling.
Finally, as a next step for our case study, once the above
mentioned work is done, we aim to contact the official authorities
and suggest integrating the Dialogues Presentation Website in the
official Passport Issuance website (www.passport.gov.gr).
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Part of this work was conducted within the eGovPoliNet project
which is co-funded by the European Commission.
8. REFERENCES
[1] Chun S., Atluri V., and Adam N. Dynamic Composition of
Workflows for Customized eGovernment Service Delivery.
In: Proceedings of dg.o 2002, (2002), ACM Press, 383-389.
[2] European Commission. Digitizing Public Services in Europe:
Putting ambition into action, 9th Benchmark Measurement,
2010.
[3] Gartner. Forecast: IT services 20082015, 2Q11 Update,
2011.
[4] Klievink, B., Janssen, M. Realizing joined-up government -
Dynamic capabilities and stage models for transformation.
Government Information Quarterly, 26, 2 (2009), 275-284
[5] Layne K. and Lee J. Developing fully functional egovernment:
A four stage model. Government Information
Quarterly, 18, 2 (2001), 122-136.
[6] Loutas N., Lee D., Maali F. Peristeras V., Tarabanis K. The
Semantic Public Service Portal (S-PSP). In: Proceedings of
8th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2011),
(Heraklion, Greece, 2011), 227-242.
[7] Momotko M., Izdebski W., Tambouris E., Tarabanis K. and
Vintar M. An Architecture of Active Life Event Portals:
Generic Workflow Approach. Electronic Government, LNCS
# 4656, Springer Verlag, (2007), 104-115.
[8] Paparrizos K. Algorithms, Zygos, Greece, 2002.
[9] Peristeras, V. The Governance Enterprise Architecture-GEAfor
Reengineering Public Administration. PhD Thesis,
University of Macedonia, Greece, 2006.
[10] Siau, K., Long, Y. Synthesizing e-government stage models
– a meta-synthesis based on meta-ethnography approach.
Industrial Management & Data Systems, 105, 4, (2005) 443-
458.
[11] Tambouris E. Introducing the need for a Domain Model in
Public Service Provision (PSP) eGovernment Systems. In:
Proceedings of ICDIM 2008, IEEE Press, 794-799.
[12] Tambouris E., Tarabanis K., A dialogue-based, life-event
oriented, active portal for online one-stop government: the
OneStopGov platform. In: Proceedings of dg.o 2008, (2008),
ACM Press, 405-406.
[13] United Nations. Global E-Government Survey 2012, 2012

142

The Complexity of Cross-Boundary Information Sharing:
An Organizational Perspective on Taiwan E-Government
Tung-Mou Yang
Department of Library and Information Science, National Taiwan University
ABSTRACT
Cross-boundary Information sharing has long been considered an
important approach for increasing organizational efficiency and
performance. However, achieving cross-boundary information
sharing is a complex task not only in the private sector but also in
the public sector. This research explores the complexity of crossboundary
information sharing by employing a case study in
Taiwan e-Government. Data are collected through semi-structured
interviews and analyzed by using grounded theory techniques.
While a variety of influential factors can come from different
perspectives such as technology, organization, legislation, policy,
and surrounding environment, this paper takes a deeper look to
focus on the influential organizational factors. The findings of this
exploratory research is also able to contribute to the current
information-sharing literature from an international perspective.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.4.2 [Information Systems Applications]: Type of systems – egovernment
applications
General Terms
Management, Performance, Human Factors, Theory
Keywords
Information Sharing, Electronic Government, Taiwan
1. INTRODUCTION
With the development of information and communication
technologies, e-Government has become an important strategy for
attaining the effectiveness and efficiency in government
operations and public services. Several stage-models of e-
Government developments are proposed by researchers, and the
critical role of cross-boundary information sharing in e-
Government is identified [1]. Although many government
agencies have integrated services within their own agencies,
citizens and businesses still need to interact with various different
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd., Taipei, 10617 Taiwan (R.O.C.)
886.2.3366.2970
tmyang@ntu.edu.tw
143
government agencies to acquire desired services. There is an
urgent cross-boundary information-sharing need among
government agencies of different levels and functionalities.
2. THE COMPLEXITY OF CROSS-
BOUNDARY INFORMATION SHARING
Nevertheless, cross-boundary information sharing in the public
sector is a complex task and usually happens in a diversified
environment with participants having different values, goals, and
cultures. In order to facilitate information-sharing initiatives,
identifying influential factors is critical, and a variety of
perspectives such as technological, organizational, sociological,
ideological, and political contexts should be considered [2].
In the technological perspective, information sharing activities can
be considered as IT projects when there are usually information
system construction and business process reengineering involved
[3]. It is a challenge to integrate heterogeneous information
systems having different platforms, data standards, schemas and
qualities [3]. In addition, technological capability among the
participating organizations is also critical to the success of crossboundary
information sharing [4].
In the organizational perspective, interagency information sharing
involves complex interactions among involving organizations [3,
5]. Organizations have different values and cultures and may
spread in different geographic areas to make communication
difficult and inefficient. The creation and maintenance of interorganizational
relationship also rely heavily on trust building
among involved organizations [5, 6]. However, trust in
information sharing collaboration can decreases due to concerns
of losing autonomy and information misusing by others to incur
liabilities [7, 8]. In addition to trust, leadership can be utilized as
an authority force to promote cross-boundary coordination [9].
The lack of resource such as staff shortage is another challenge.
An agency may focus on urgent issues within its own organization
if the immediate benefits of sharing information cannot be
foreseen by the agency [10, 11].
In the political and policy perspective, legal and policy regulations
can shape relationship building, risk reduction, and trust
development in inter-organizational information sharing when
specific guidance is mandated [3, 4, 12, 13]. Without support from
legislators and policy mandate, cross-boundary information
sharing in the public sector can lose its priority and necessary
resources to make the project sustainable [7]. Nevertheless, crossboundary
information sharing may also be hindered due to related

policies to prevent government agencies from sharing sensitive
and regulated information [3, 7, 12]. Therefore, an explicit
statutory authority should clearly define the circumstances that
information collected in one agency can be shared to other
agencies [4, 10].
3. THE SELECTED CASE STUDY
In the past decade Taiwan government has focused its effort on
developing initiatives of interagency information sharing and
integration. Current focus has been on cross-agency service
integration and the promotion of integrated e-services.” Therefore,
the context of Taiwan e-Government and its past and ongoing
development in cross-agency shared services make a good case
for this study to explore the complexity of interagency
information sharing. Specifically, this research focuses on the
organizational perspective to examine the following two
questions:
1. What are the critical organizational factors that influence
the initiatives of cross-boundary information sharing in
Taiwan e-Government?
2. What is the nature of the impact of the factors on the
initiatives of cross-boundary information sharing in Taiwan
e-Government?
4. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHOD
This study employs a case study methodology, and the selected
case comes from the context of Taiwan e-Government. In
particular, a case study of the e-Networking Project of
Government Online Service in Taiwan is developed and then
applied in the research.
A purposive sampling using snowball sampling methodology is
undertaken to identify the relevant candidates to conduct
interviews. In-depth and semi-structured interviews were used to
collect data. There were in total twenty-eight participants
interviewed in the study. The data analysis process followed an
inductive approach by using grounded theory techniques. During
data analysis, a qualitative software, Atlas-ti, was utilized to
support coding and analysis activities.
5. FINDINGS
In this exploratory research, established organizational structures
and instilled organizational cultures of government agencies are
identified to influence initiatives of cross-boundary information
sharing. In addition, other influential organizational factors are
listed and discussed according to the roles of information provider
and information receiver. Lastly, some organizational factors that
can bring positive impact on the related initiatives are also
addressed.
5.1 Bureaucratic Organizational Structures
Cross-boundary information sharing in e-Government is not just
related to technological issues but is in a complex context
involving different government agencies separated by the
bureaucratic organizational structures. Boundaries of information
sharing are formed by the bureaucracy from both the vertical and
horizontal dimensions. With different operational procedures and
work flows, resources and budgets, government agencies have
respective missions and operations. Different government
agencies can bring up different levels of information quality, and
their approaches and strategies to share information across
organizational boundaries also vary from each other. It is also
144
observed that government agencies within the same Ministry can
encounter fewer obstacles to share information when fewer
organizational boundaries are formed among them.
5.2 Organizational Cultures and Values
Having different missions and operations, government agencies
foster their respective organizational cultures and values. In the
case study, some government agencies such as the Department of
Household Registration are already defined to act as information
providers in their organizational missions. The government
agencies can be more willing to share information to other
agencies. On the contrary, some agencies such as police agencies
and taxation agencies act more conservative to share their
information to others. The negotiation and communication among
government agencies with different cultures and values usually
takes time and cost.
5.3 Influential Factors to Information
Providers
For government agencies acting as information providers, several
factors that influence their intentions to share information are
discussed in the following subsections.
5.3.1 Extra Effort under Limited Resource
The major effort of information sharing usually falls on the
process of information preparation and the following maintenance
and service. The process of information preparation can be a very
time-consuming task especially when a government agency has to
go over some of its information systems or even modify them to
produce the required information. In addition, an information
provider also has to assign necessary personnel to maintain the
hardware equipment and the information systems implemented for
cross-boundary information sharing which require extra time,
labor, and effort. Under limited budget and resource, government
agencies tend to focus on their own businesses first and put the
information-sharing requests from other agencies in the lower
priority.
5.3.2 Concern of Information Quality
The intention of a government agency to share information across
boundaries can also be influenced by the quality of information it
currently possesses. A government agency can be less willing to
share information when its information is in low completeness
and accuracy. A government agency has concerns in incurring
potential scrutiny and does not want to be liable for providing
incomplete and inaccurate information to other government
agencies.
5.3.3 Concern of Information Misuse
Another information provider’s concern is information misuse by
other agencies to incur liability. After information is shared across
boundaries, information providers have little control over the
shared information and encounter difficulty in knowing how the
shared information is utilized by other agencies. Whether the
information is protected in a secured information environment,
whether the information is solely applied to the proposed purpose,
and whether the information is used for other unknown purposes?
The uncertainty regarding how other government agencies may
treat, use, and protect the shared information incur the liability
concern of government agencies to act as information providers to
share information across boundaries.

5.3.4 Limited Incentive and Reward
In the case study, for government agencies acting as information
providers, they have very few and limited incentive and reward to
share information. The limited incentive and reward available is
not encouraging enough for government agencies and their
employees to contribute effort to interagency information sharing.
In most of the cases, major credits are usually taken by
information receivers which acquire information sharing from
other government agencies to provide integrated or innovative
services. Information providers actually care more about the
liability rather than the limited incentive or reward.
5.4 Influential Factors to Information
Receivers
For government agencies acting as information receivers, several
observed factors that influence initiatives of cross-boundary
information sharing are discussed in the following subsections.
5.4.1 Over-Estimated Capability of Information
Provider
Some information requestors may request information that does
not exist in the databases of information providers. The situation
can happen when an information requestor does not really
understand an information provider’s limitation of information
possession. A cognition divide regarding cross-boundary
information sharing exists between some information providers
and information receivers so that related initiatives cannot be
implemented properly.
5.4.2 The Willingness and Trust to Use Shared
Information
It is also observed that some government agencies put little trust
on the shared information from other agencies. Even though the
information is actively shared across boundaries based on
legitimate policy, some conservative agencies still prefer
following their traditional operational procedures without
applying the shared information to their work. They are unwilling
to utilize the information when the shared information can indeed
improve the efficiency and accuracy of their operations and
increase the effectiveness of public services. Hence, the concept
to trust and to utilize shared information is critical to the success
of interagency information sharing.
5.5 Influential Factors to Both Information
Providers and Receivers
The following subsections talk about influential factors that can
be applied to both information providers and information
requestors.
5.5.1 The Long-Been-Ignored Information Unit
The role of IT professionals and information units is critical to the
success of cross-boundary information sharing. The dedicated
time and effort from IT professionals and information units is
required to setup the infrastructure, to prepare and to receive
information. However, in the case study, compared with the
administrative units, the information units generally do not
receive similar support from the leadership. The information units
are mainly defined as the supporting units to facilitate business
operations. In addition, many information units are just temporary
units and are composed of contract employees without suitable
information-related training.
145
5.5.2 Leadership Interactions
The personalities, management styles, and interpersonal
relationships of agency leaders matter, especially for the
horizontal interagency information sharing where the involved
agencies are parallel organizations. Social networks and good
relationships among agency leaders can benefit information
sharing initiatives. When the interactions among agency leaders
are not in harmony, interagency information sharing can even
result in failure.
5.6 Some Suggested Success Factors
The participants of the case study also suggested some factors that
can lead to the success of cross-boundary information sharing.
5.6.1 The Fostering of Reciprocity Concept
In the case study, it is indicated that the existing reciprocal
relationship can increase the success in cross-boundary
information sharing. The participants asserted that cross-boundary
information sharing can be more easily achieved between two
government agencies when they both have information needs to
their respectively possessed information. The incentive to crossboundary
information sharing can be created and enhanced by the
reciprocal information sharing between the two government
agencies.
5.6.2 The Involvement of Higher-Level Authority
The interviewees also mentioned the importance of authoritative
support to push the initiatives of cross-boundary information
sharing. The authoritative support can come from two aspects.
One is the authoritative support from participating government
agencies. The participation and support from high-level authority
can affirm the importance and the priority of related initiatives.
Another aspect of authoritative support comes from the level
involved in the information sharing effort. The involvement of
higher-level government agencies can be the championship to
initiate and direct the process of cross-boundary information
sharing.
6. DISCUSSIONS
In the research, various factors influencing interagency
information sharing are discussed from an organizational
perspective. While some factors mainly have influences solely on
information providers and some on information receivers only,
others have impacts on both providers and receivers (see Figure
1).
- Extra Labor and Effort under Limited Resource
- Concern of Information Quality to Incur Liability
- Concern of Information Misuse to Incur Liability
- Limited Incentive and Reward
Information Provider
Information Retriever
- Over-Estimated An Information Provider’s Capability
- The Willingness and Trust to utilize Shared Information
- The Fostering of Reciprocal Concept
- The Involvement of the Higher-Level Leadership
- Organizational Structures of Bureaucracy
- Organizational Cultures and Values
- The Long-Been-Ignored Information Unit
- Leadership Interaction of Government Agencies
Figure 1. The organizational factors to influence cross-boundary
information sharing
The result of the case study reveals that government agencies
behaving as information providers show less concern of losing
valuable assets and competitive advantages to other agencies,

ecause the majority of the shared information in the case study is
data-oriented information and is subject to being updated daily.
Even though some information receivers may retain the acquired
information, the information still soon becomes obsolete and
inaccurate.
The interviewees agree that when two government agencies are
co-located, their information sharing initiative may benefit from
the better and closer social and personal network among them.
However, the interviewees do not consider the geographic
locations of government agencies an important factor in the case
study. The interviewees point out that, with the advancement of
information technologies, cross-boundary information sharing is
no longer obstructed by geographic limitations. The interviewees
also state that Taiwan is small so that geographic location is not
the major concern.
Overall, from an organizational perspective, the paper takes a
deeper look at the complexity of inter-agency information sharing.
The observed influential factors provide insights to researchers
and also practitioners. The paper also contributes to the current
information-sharing literature from an international perspective.
In addition, while open data has become an important
governmental movement in recent years, open data can be viewed
as one type of cross-boundary information sharing among
government agencies and the public including individuals and
businesses. Some of the identified factors in the paper can be
applied to explain the behaviors of government agencies
participating in open data initiatives. Future research can focus
more on other perspectives including technology, legislation and
policy, and surrounding environment to provide a more complete
and integrated discussion to understand the complexity of crossboundary
information sharing among government agencies.
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wants to thank Dr. Yu-Hsieh Sung, the Minister of the
Research, Development and Evaluation Commission and other
government officials of the Taiwan government for their
important help during the interviewee recruitment of the research.
The author is also thankful for all the interviewees participating in
the research for their time, patience, and valuable information and
suggestions.
8. REFERENCES
[1] Klievink, B. and M. Janssen, Realizing joined-up
government -- Dynamic capabilities and stage models for
transformation. Government Information Quarterly, 2009.
26(2): p. 275-284.
[2] Dawes, S.S., A.M. Cresswell, and T.A. Pardo, From "need to
know" to "need to share": Tangled problems, information
boundaries, and the building of public sector knowledge
146
networks. Public Administration Review, 2009. 69: p. 392-
402.
[3] Gil-Garcia, J.R., I. Chengalur-Smith, and P. Duchessi,
Collaborative e-Government: impediments and benefits of
information-sharing projects in the public sector. European
Journal of Information Systems, 2007. 16(2): p. 121-133.
[4] Lam, W., Barriers to e-government integration. Journal of
Enterprise Information Management, 2005. 18(5/6): p. 511-
530.
[5] Pardo, T.A. and G.K. Tayi, Interorganizational information
integration: A key enabler for digital government.
Government Information Quarterly, 2007. 24(4): p. 691-715.
[6] Zaheer, A. and B. McEvily, Does trust matter? Exploring the
effects of interorganizational and interpersonal trust on
performance. Organization Science, 1998. 9: p. 141-158.
[7] Zhang, J., S.S. Dawes, and J. Sarkis, Exploring stakeholders'
expectations of the benefits and barriers of e-Government
knowledge sharing. The Journal of Enterprise Information
Management, 2005. 18(5): p. 548-567.
[8] Faerman, S.R., D.P. McCaffrey, and D.M. Van Slyke,
Understanding interorganizational cooperation: Publicprivate
collaboration in regulating financial market
innovation. Organization Science, 2001. 12(3): p. 372-388.
[9] Willem, A. and M. Buelens, Knowledge sharing in public
sector organizations: The effect of organizational
characteristics on interdepartmental knowledge sharing.
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2007.
17(4): p. 581-606.
[10] Landsbergen, D.J. and G.J. Wolken, Realizing the promise:
Government information systems and the fourth generation
of information technology. Public Administration Review,
2001. 61(2): p. 206-220.
[11] Zhang, J. and S.S. Dawes, Expectations and perceptions of
benefits, barriers, and success in public sector knowledge
networks. Public Performance & Management Review, 2006.
29(4): p. 433-466.
[12] Gil-Garcia, J.R. and T.A. Pardo, E-Government success
factors: Mapping practical tools to theoretical foundations.
Government Information Quarterly, 2005. 22(2): p. 187-216.
[13] Otjacques, B., P. Hitzelberger, and F. Feltz, Interoperability
of e-Government information systems: Issues of
identification and data sharing. Journal of Management
Information Systems, 2007. 23(4): p. 29-51.

Session 6
Digital Records & Information
Management

A Patent System Ontology for Facilitating Retrieval of
Patent Related Information
Siddharth Taduri, Gloria T. Lau, Kincho H. Law
Engineering Informatics Group
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
{staduri, glau, law}@stanford.edu
ABSTRACT
The recent years have seen a tremendous growth in research and
developments in science and technology, and an emphasis in
obtaining Intellectual Property (IP) protection for one’s
innovations. Information pertaining to IP for science and
technology is siloed into many diverse sources and consists of
laws, regulations, patents, court litigations, scientific publications,
and more. Although a great deal of legal and scientific
information is now available online, the scattered distribution of
the information, combined with the enormous sizes and
complexities, makes any attempt to gather relevant IP-related
information on a specific technology a daunting task. This paper
describes a knowledge-based software framework to facilitate
retrieval of patents and related information across multiple diverse
and uncoordinated information sources in the US patent system.
The document corpus covers issued US patents, court litigations,
scientific publications, and patent file wrappers in the biomedical
technology domain.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search
and Retrieval – Retrieval Models, J.1 [Administrative Data
Processing]: Law
General Terms
Algorithms, Design, Economics, Experimentation
Keywords
Ontology, Patent, Information Retrieval, Knowledgebase
1. INTRODUCTION
The recent years have seen a tremendous growth in research and
developments in science and technology, and an emphasis in
obtaining Intellectual Property (IP) protection for one’s
innovations. IPs are important assets of any organization. During
the lifetime of a patent, from its initial filing, patent issuance to
disputes and litigations, the patent system will constantly be
searched for information. However, information pertaining to IP
and the patent system for science and technology is siloed into
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights
for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be
honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to
republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior
specific permission and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 -­‐ 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-­‐1-­‐4503-­‐1200-­‐4/12/10...$15.00
147
Jay P. Kesan
College of Law
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
kesan@illinois.edu
many diverse sources and consists of laws, regulations, patents,
court litigations, and more. Although a great deal of legal and
government information is now available online, the scattered
distribution of the information, combined with the enormous sizes
and complexities, makes any attempt to gather relevant IP-related
information, even on a specific technology, a daunting task.
Currently, the task of gathering IP-related information is
performed manually and is both laborious and expensive. This
falls disproportionally on smaller firms, start-ups, and individual
inventors who have very limited resources. This paper describes
the development of a patent system ontology to facilitate retrieval
of patents and related information across multiple diverse and
uncoordinated information sources in the US patent system.
This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses the
background and motivation for this research. Section 3 briefly
describes our use case and document corpus. Section 4 introduces
the patent system ontology and its structure. Section 5 briefly
describes the Information Retrieval (IR) framework. Illustrative
examples are provided in Section 6. Section 7 concludes this
paper by summarizing the current status.
2. BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION
The following scenarios illustrate some of the issues faced with
the current patent system:
o A company looking to patent its technology on medical
imaging devices, for example, is required to perform an
initial patentability search and establish the usefulness,
novelty, and non-obviousness of the technology [1]. The
patentability search involves a thorough study of prior art
including scientific literature and patent databases,
competitor analysis, existing litigations to similar
o
technologies, and regulations issued by government agencies
such as the Federal Drug Agency (or any agency enforcing
laws with respect to medical imaging devices and related
technologies).
Similar to the patent applicant, a patent examiner performs
patentability search when examining an application. As of
2009, the United States Patent and Trademark Office
(USPTO) employs about 6,242 patent examiners and
received over 456,106 utility patent applications [28]. 1
Roughly, this translates to around 73 patents per examiner
annually and approximately 1.5 patents per examiner per
1 The USPTO’s annual statistics can be accessed at
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/reports.htm
(Accessed on 03/01/2012)

o
week. Although a patent examiner is generally well-versed
with the technological domain of the patent application, the
situation imposes a serious time constraint during the review
process. Hence, each application receives lesser time and
leads to insufficient examination, and possibly infringement
or invalidation at a later stage.
To protect IPs, companies may perform an infringement
analysis to ensure that a particular patent’s right is not being
infringed. The consequences of an infringement can be
severe and result in heavy losses. Infringement analysis
involves a thorough search in the issued patents database,
patent application database, prior court litigations,
regulations, and any form of documented evidence to help
assert the infringement or invalidate an infringing patent’s
claim as a defensive measure.
Irrespective of the scenario, whether a company intends to patent
its technology or to perform an infringement analysis, or a patent
examiner intends to perform a patentability search, several
questions arise:
o What are the issued patents in related technologies?
o What is the legal scope of similar patents?
o Who are the competitors?
o Have any similar patents been challenged in court?
o How can one work around existing body of knowledge?
o Are there any scientific literatures, or regulations which can
potentially be used to challenge and to invalidate a patent’s
claims?
Many existing methods attempt to improve IR within a single
information source [9][12][14][16][26][27][30][31]. However,
these questions cannot be answered from any single information
source. An integration framework is needed to enable the retrieval
of relevant information from diverse sources. This research
explores a knowledge-based approach to address two fundamental
information integration issues – (a) the lack of interoperability
among the information sources in the current patent system; and
(b) the varying information needs by the users of the patent
system.
Interoperability between information sources is essential in order
to perform multi-source IR [29]. E-government initiatives in the
US and Europe are increasingly adopting interoperability
frameworks [11]. An important step in achieving interoperability
is to allow the information sources to communicate with one
another. To achieve this, we propose a Patent System Ontology
(PSO) to standardize the representation of the information sources
and achieve interoperability. While the documents are vastly
diverse, the information is implicitly cross-referenced. For
example, a court document which involves a particular patent
document reveals a high relevancy between the two documents.
Such relevancy is central to our method for multi-source IR and is
captured by the PSO.
Terminological variations such as synonymy and polysemy are a
common source of problems which often hinder the effectiveness
of traditional term based IR methods. We develop a knowledgebased
method that uses external knowledge sources such as
domain ontologies to provide the required semantics to resolve
terminological inconsistencies and improve semantic
interoperability between information sources. The IR framework
148
then integrates the patent system ontology and the domain
ontologies to retrieve a set of related documents across multiple
sources.
3. USE CASE AND DOCUMENT CORPUS
We demonstrate our methodology through a use case in the
biomedical domain – erythropoietin, a hormone responsible for
the production of red blood cells. The synthetic production of
erythropoietin has enabled the treatment of chronic diseases such
as anemia. Epogen - the production brand of synthetic
erythropoietin manufactured by the pharmaceutical giant Amgen
Inc. is protected by five core patents namely – US 5,547,933, US
5,618,698, US 5,621,080, US 5,756,349, and US 5,955,422. These
patents have been central to many related court cases involving
other pharmaceutical companies such as Hoescht Marion Roussel
and Transkaryotic Therapies, and heavily cite scientific literature
from top journals. Our corpus includes a total of 1150 patent
documents downloaded from the USPTO database related to
erythropoietin [28]. We identified 135 relevant patents amongst
the 1150 patents by following forward and backward citations
from the five core patents that will serve as the ground truth.
Several court litigations, involving these five patents and some
others, date back to the late 1980's. Around 30 U.S. patent
litigation documents are collected which are closely related to the
use case from Public Access to Court Electronic Records
(PACER), an electronic system to access the databases of the 94
District Courts and 13 Courts of Appeals (CAFC) [22]. The
repository includes file wrappers for the core patents. The
repository also contains the 2007 Text Retrieval Conference
(TREC) Genomics data set, which consists of over 162,000
scientific publications from 49 prominent biomedical journals
[32]. All in all, the repository contains a diverse set of information
from different domains.
4. PATENT SYSTEM ONTOLOGY
In this section, we describe a patent system ontology which
provides standardized representation and a shared vocabulary of
the information sources to facilitate interoperability. The ontology
will also provide the required declarative syntax to express multisource
queries, rules, and relevancy metrics.
Many ontology development methodologies have been proposed
and implemented over the years [6][8][10][18]. In general, the
development of ontologies consists of several steps starting from
the conceptualization of the domain, defining the properties interrelating
the defined classes, instantiating the classes with physical
objects and the verification of the constructed ontology. The
development process is iterative as the ontology evolves to satisfy
the requirements of the application it is being designed for [18].
The resulting ontology is instantiated with actual physical
documents from the document repository.
Another practical aspect of ontology development is the
specification language in which the ontology will be coded.
Several specification languages have evolved over the years
including frame based languages such as F-Logic and OIL, and
descriptive logic based languages such as DARPA Agent Markup
Language and Ontology Inference Layer (DAML+OIL), Resource
Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language
(OWL) [21,24]. The factors for choosing a specification language
include expressivity, reasoning capabilities, availability of tools,
re-use and personal preference. RDF is a widely used language to
conceptualize domains. OWL is a W3C recommendation which is

uilt on top of the semantics of RDF to provide higher
expressivity levels. These higher expression levels allow us to
define disjoint classes, ‘sameAs’ or ‘differentFrom’ axioms
among others [21]. Several tools have also been developed for the
construction and modeling of ontologies such as Protégé and
Chimaera [7][23]. Protégé supports both OWL and RDF, and
provides useful features and plugins allowing us to query and
visualize the ontology. Taking into account the above mentioned
considerations, we choose OWL as the specification language and
Protégé-3.4 as our development tool for the patent system
ontology. However, it should be noted that not all OWL axioms
are highly scalable; hence, to the extent possible we make
maximum use of the RDF subset of the OWL axioms.
4.1 Scope
Ontologies are typically developed with specific applications as
targets. Gruninger and Fox suggested that a set of competency
questions be developed; these are questions that the ontology is
expected to answer [10]. Developing these questions not only
helps define the scope of our ontology but also allows us to verify
the usefulness of the ontology both throughout and after the
development phase [18]. In the patent system domain, the target
applications may include patent claim invalidation, and patent
infringement analysis. The following are selected examples of
competency questions.
Patent Domain:
o Return all patent documents which contain the phrase
‘recombinant erythropoietin receptor’ in the claims
o Return all the patent documents which contain the phrase
‘recombinant erythropoietin receptor’, at least 3 claims,
issued before 02-02-1999 and assigned to Genetics Inc.
Court Case Domain:
o Return all court cases which contain the term –
‘erythropoietin’
o Return all court cases which involve the company Amgen
Inc. either as the plaintiff or defendant, and from the District
Court of Massachusetts
Multi-domain:
o Return all patents which contain the term – ‘erythropoietin’
in their claims, which are involved in at least one court
litigation.
o Return all court cases with the term ‘erythropoietin’. From
these court cases, return the patents involved. From these
patents, follow the backward and forward citations to
identify more important patents.
Note that the questions can get more complex depending on the
requirement of the user. The results of one query can be further
re-filtered with additional constraints. In each of the listed
questions, the main terms (or objects) are underlined. First, these
terms are grouped together into concepts or classes such that they
represent a collection of items corresponding to that term. Second,
relations are drawn between classes such that the competency
questions can be sufficiently expressed as a query using those
classes and relationships. The competency questions shown in no
way limit the use of the ontology to these applications alone,
rather they are examples of questions the ontology must be
capable of answering at the minimum. Furthermore, the list of
149
competency questions presented is not meant to be an exhaustive
list, but to illustrate how the metadata and text fields parsed from
the documents.
Relations in OWL are binary relations, i.e. they can be used to
relate exactly two classes, two individuals or an individual to a
value. These can be represented in triple form as {subject,
predicate, object}. The values that the subject and object take on
can be restricted by defining the domain and the range of the
relation; where domain refers to the subject end of the relation and
range refers to the object end of the relationship [13]. OWL
additionally allows us to define logical characteristics such as
transitivity and symmetry on these binary relations which enhance
the meaning of this relation. For example, if the ‘=>’ relation is
defined as a transitive relation, then {A => B} can be used to infer
{B => A}. Hence, if properly defined, new knowledge can be
derived from existing knowledge. Additionally, we can define
necessary and sufficient conditions on classes which can be used
to logically classify instances into classes [13].
4.2 Conceptualization
Figures 1 and 2 show a conceptual view of the patent and court
case documents respectively. The relations between two entities
(shown as a black line) are directional from patents and court
cases out to other classes, e.g. {Patent, hasTitle, Title}. The
relations are not symmetric and hence the inverse {Title, hasTitle,
Patent} does not hold true. As shown in the figures, the remaining
classes can be grouped under either metadata or textual
information. This form of classification helps to address all the
metadata at once, instead of individually calling out to each one.
For example, if an application requested for all metadata of a
patent, using the ontology we can return all metadata entities such
as Title, Date, Classification, etc.. We can further group metadata
and textual information into a single parent node Information.
When the patent and court case hierarchies are combined, classes
which are common to both documents will refer to the same
concept and not two different concepts.
This form of abstraction is not only possible for classes, but also
for relations, made possible by the rdfs:subPropertyOf construct.
Court cases and Patents are related to each of the classes shown in
Figures 1 and 2. These relations, such as ‘hasTitle’, ‘hasAbstract’,
and ‘hasPlaintiff’, etc., can also be abstracted into a common
parent relation ‘hasInformation’. This relation has a domain of
either Patent or Court Case and Information as a range.
File wrappers are not documents themselves, but in fact a
collection of documents. This makes modeling file wrappers
trickier than the other documents such as patents and court cases.
Firstly, a vocabulary of all kinds of documents contained within
the file wrapper must be defined. Since each of these documents
refers to a particular event of communication between the
applicant and patent office, we will call it Event instead of
document to avoid confusion between the class Document and a
file wrapper event. The events of importance to us are shown in
Figure 3. We group application events and office actions
separately to allow representation of queries such as – “Return all
office actions for file wrapper A”. Each file wrapper event must
be individually modeled keeping in mind the information it
contains. For example, each examiner Rejection contains critical
information such as – the allowed claims, the rejected claims, and
the withdrawn claims (see Figure 4). Similarly, other events such

as Interference, Restriction, and Amendments can be modeled
using the patent system ontology.
The Patent, Court Case, and File Wrapper classes shown in
Figures 1-3 are different types of documents available from
different information sources. The patent system comprises many
such information sources and many such documents. In the top
level ontology for the patent system (shown in Figure 5), all types
of documents are abstracted into a single parent class (Document).
The Document class can be sub-classed any number of times to
include other forms of documents such as regulations and laws
which are currently not in the scope of our study. The classes
Document, Information, and Event correspond to the three root
nodes of the patent system ontology. Additionally, the classes
Figure 1. Conceptual View of Patent Documents
Figure 2. Conceptual View of Court Case
150
Inventor, Examiner, Author, and Judge, etc., can be abstracted
into a common parent node such as Person.
As mentioned earlier, information sources in the patent system
implicitly cross-reference one another (see Figure 6). These
implicit cross-references show relevancy for comparing
documents from different information sources. When manually
comparing two documents, these cross-references are rather
obvious to the human eye. For example, a human could easily
spot a reference to a patent document in the court case. These
references can very quickly help identify relevant documents to a
user query. The power of the patent system ontology lies in the
ability to integrate information across multiple information
sources by explicitly expressing such cross-references.
Applications built around the patent system ontology can

dynamically derive relevancy based on these pre-defined crossreferences.
4.3 Populating the Ontology
The ontology is populated with information from actual physical
documents from the document repository. The instantiation is
done automatically using the standard Jena and Protégé Java
libraries [23]. Once the instantiation is complete, a standard OWL
reasoner such as Pellet is triggered to check for consistency and
make inferences [33]. For example, an entity in the class Patent
will be additionally classified as a Document, since Patent is a
subclass of Document. The current version of the knowledge-base
is populated with the actual documents from our corpus described
in Section 3. Other documents which may have been found in
Figure 3. Events Contained in a File Wrapper
court cases or through patent citations, but not in the corpus are
instantiated but contain no information about the patent since the
original document itself is unavailable. A file wrapper has also
been partially (including the first amendment, rejection,
interference and the original application) incorporated into the
knowledge-base.
RDF Triple stores are specialized databases to manage large
amount of information written in RDF [5][17][20]. Due to the size
of the ontology, we create a local instance of a triple store
(Virtuoso) and store all the triples in it. Using a triple store will
allow us to scale our ontology to millions of instances
(documents). Moreover, ontology editors such as Protégé require
Figure 4. Excerpt from the Patent System Ontology: Rejection class
151

Figure 5. Top Level Ontology for the Patent System
Table 1. Expressing Competency Questions in SPARQL
Competency Questions SPARQL Query
Return all court cases which involve the company
Amgen Inc. as the plaintiff and from the District Court
of Massachusetts
Return all patents which contain the phrase
‘recombinant erythropoietin receptor’ in the claims
and IPC class “A61K”
152
SELECT ?case WHERE {
?case type CourtCase .
?case hasPlaintiff “Amgen Inc.” .
?case hasCourt “District Court…”
}
SELECT ?pat WHERE {
?pat type Patent .
?pat hasClaim ?clm .
?clm hasTerm “recombinant …” .
?pat hasIPCClass “A61K” .
}

Figure 6. Cross-­‐Reference between Documents in the Patent System
loading the ontology each time the application is executed. The
triple stores provide a persistent store for the triples and
significantly lower the loading time. The ontology can be queried
using SPARQL through both Protégé and Virtuoso interfaces
[20][23].
Table 1 shows examples of how we can represent any natural
language question in SPARQL to query the ontology, as long as
the classes and relations required to express the query are defined
in the ontology. The queries do not always have to return
documents, but can return other classes like Inventors or
Examiners as well. These SPARQL queries will generally be
handled at the application level and will be abstracted from users.
Applications can request any information they want from the
ontology. In fact, even the applications do not have to fully know
the details of the ontology. The ontology can be queried for all its
relations for a particular class or between two classes. For
example, the query:
SELECT ?rel WHERE {
}
?pat type Patent .
?pat ?rel Information
will return all relations (variable ?rel) which have the class Patent
as the domain. In other words, all relations defined on patents
such as hasTitle, hasAbstract, hasIPCClass, etc., will be returned.
Hence, updating the underlying ontology with new information
will automatically update the application using it as well.
153
5. INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
FRAMEWORK
In information retrieval, the information desired is seldom
achieved with a single query. Queries are typically reformulated
several times based on intermediate search results until the
information need is satisfied [25]. This reformulation could
include the addition of synonyms, new search terms, and other
constraints. When performing multi-source search, information
obtained from searching one domain is applied to another. The
patent system ontology provides the backbone for automating this
process by standardizing representation of the information
sources. In this section, we present an IR framework which builds
on top of the semantics of the patent system ontology in multiple
stages to enhance multi-source IR (see Figure 7):
Step–I Expand Query: In this stage, the user’s initial query is
expanded using external knowledge such as dictionaries, thesauri,
or domain ontologies. While the patent system ontology provides
a framework for the structural interoperability between the
information sources, domain ontologies provide semantic
interoperability within a specific technical domain. The term
expansion is based on several properties of domain ontologies
such as abstraction, synonymy, and term mapping, etc.
Step–II Search Information Sources: Information sources are
independently searched using the expanded query from Step–I.
The required vocabulary and syntax for searching the information
sources is contained in the patent system ontology. For example,
the patent system ontology provides the syntax for searching the
titles of documents – hasTitle:‘erythropoietin’. The information

sources are searched independently in this stage to retrieve highly
relevant documents from each source.
Step–III Cross-Reference Information: The cross-referenced
information is highly important for multi-domain retrieval. The
cross-references explicitly defined in the patent system ontology
are used as relevancy measures to correlate search results between
information sources. For example, a relation defined in the patent
system ontology – {caseA, patentsInvolved, patentA} will help
the framework to extract patent numbers from the court case.
These patent numbers can be used to repeat or enhance the search
for the patent domain. Similarly, text from one document can be
used to search an entirely different information silo. For example,
Figure 7. Information Retrieval Framework
Figure 8. System Implementation
the abstract of a patent document can be used as a query to search
for relevant scientific publications. In fact, the extracted text can
be directly fed back into Steps 1 and 2.
Step–IV User Feedback: Besides the diverse information and
knowledge sources, the users in the patent system domain area
also come from a diverse background – scientific/technical, legal,
154
business, and more. The intention of the user must be captured
through the search process in order to ensure that the results
retrieved are indeed relevant to the user. User-relevancy feedback
has been an important part of IR research [4][15]. However, the
user relevancy feedback stage is out of this paper’s scope and will
not be discussed.
5.1 Implementation Details
In this section, we provide a brief overview of the implementation
of the IR framework and its basic features (see Figure 8). The IR
framework is implemented entirely in Java with abstractions of
several modules that are critical for the system. The actual
documents are parsed in order to populate the patent system
ontology and perform reasoning using standard Jena libraries. A
persistent storage such as Virtuoso or Mulgara is used to store the
RDF triples [17][20]. Apache Lucene is a widely used text mining
library [2]. In order to provide text-based search, a simple user
interface is developed which interacts with the lucene text index.
A summary of the implementation is provided below:
o Jena libraries and triple store integration for modifying the
patent system ontology through new constructs, crossreferences,
or rules.
o Solr and Lucene libraries to create, update, and query the text
indexes [3].
o Generic API for integration with sources of domain
knowledge such as BioPortal [19]
o Automatic query generation, abstracting the syntactic details
from the user.
6. ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES
As explained in Sections 1 and 2, during the lifetime of a patent,
the patent system will constantly be searched for information.
Examples include prior art searches, patent claim invalidations,
and infringement analysis, etc.. In this section, we demonstrate
how the patent system ontology enables queries across multiple
sources in order to retrieve related information. Specifically, we
focus on Step-III of the framework, i.e., the cross-referencing
capabilities of the patent system ontology. We develop a
SPARQL query to search for information related to US patent
5,955,422 (see Figure 9). The individual clauses in the query are
grouped into three categories each meant to retrieve related case
documents, patents, and scientific publications respectively.
Category I: Court cases provide important information regarding
the major competitors, and successful patents, etc.. A patent
which has been challenged in court several times is considered
very important in its respective technology class. Clauses 1-3
attempt to retrieve related documents by following the crossreferences
between court cases and patent documents. Court cases
related to US patent 5,955,422 are identified by querying the
ontology for all court cases that involve the patent. This search
retrieves around 20 patent litigations from our corpus. In addition,
other patents involved in the court case are also extracted as
relevant documents using clause 3.

Category II: After identifying some relevant patents, some of the
possible next steps could be to retrieve patents by following the
forward and backward citations etc. (clause 4), to get more
relevant results. The information extracted from the ontology can
also include names of inventors (clause 5), assignees (clause 6),
and technology classifications (clause 7) that appear in the patent
documents, which can in turn be used to search the documents.
The extracted information from the documents is summarized in
Table 2.
Category III: In addition to metadata such as inventors and
assignees, the text of the patent documents can also be used to
search for related documents. For example, clauses 9-12 show
how the claims of a patent can be used to search for related
scientific publications.
The query discussed in this section shows how the semantics
provided by the patent system ontology can be used to integrate
information across multiple domains, with a potential to improve
search. Similar to the above example, in practical applications,
SPARQL queries can be formulated to express extremely complex
information needs. Figure 10 shows the actual documents
retrieved from this query.
Precision, a common metric used to evaluate the quality of IR
methodologies, is measured as the ratio of the number of relevant
documents retrieved to the total number of documents retrieved.
In addition to the query in Figure 9, we retrieve patent documents
related to the top inventors, assignees, and technology classes
from Table 2. We calculate the precision of the retrieved patent
documents with respect to the ground truth discussed in Section 3.
Table 3 summarizes these results.
Plaintiffs/Defendants Patents Involved in
Cases
Table 2. Summary of Extracted Information
SELECT ?pat1 ?pat2 ?case ?pub ?inv ?assg
?class
WHERE {
Category I:
Clause 1: ?case a CourtCase .
Clause 2: ?case patentsInvolved
US5955422. Clause 3: ?case
patentsInvolved ?pat1
Category II:
{Clause 4: ?pat1 hasCitation ?pat2 .}
{Clause 5: ?pat1 hasInventor ?inv .}
{Clause 6: ?pat1 hasAssignee ?assg .}
{Clause 7: ?pat1 hasUSClass ?class .}
Category III:
Clause 9: ?pat hasClaim ?claim .
Clause 10: ?pub a Publication .
Clause 11: ?pub hasBody ?body .
Clause 12: FILTER REGEX (?body,
?claim, “i”)
US Class Inventor Assignee
Amgen Inc. 5,955,422 514/8 Lin, Fu-Kuen Kirin-Amgen, Inc.
Chugai Pharmaceuticals 5,547,933 530/350 Hewick, Rodney, M. Amgen, Inc.
Hoescht Marion Roussel 5,621,080 536/23.51 Seehra, Jasbir, S. Kiren-Amgen, Inc.
Genetics Inc. 5,618,698 435/325 Seenra, Jasbir, S. Genetics Institute, Inc.
155
}
Figure 9. SPARQL Query to Retrieve
Information Related to U.S. Patent
5,955,422

Figure 10. Actual Documents Retrieved by Querying Patent System Ontology
Table 3. Precision of Retrieved Patent Documents
Related to a Set of Inventors, Assignees or US Class
Query Precision
Top 5 Technology Classes 0.183
Inventors 0.8
Assignees 0.256
Combined 0.186
7. CONCLUSION
Intellectual Property (IP) related information for science and
technology is distributed across several heterogeneous
information silos. The scattered distribution of information,
combined with the enormous sizes and complexities, make any
attempt to collect IP-related information for a particular
technology a daunting task. Hence, there is a need for a software
framework which facilitates semantic and structural
interoperability between the diverse and un-coordinated
information sources in the patent system. In this paper, we present
a knowledge-based software framework to facilitate retrieval of
patents and related information across multiple diverse and
uncoordinated information sources in the US patent system.
Specifically, we discuss the patent system ontology which
provides standardized representation and a shared vocabulary of
the information sources to facilitate interoperability.
Through an illustrative example in Section 6, we showed how the
patent system ontology can be used to integrate information and
query multiple information sources to retrieve related information.
156
The patent system ontology provides the necessary semantics to
allow users to develop complex declarative queries. The
methodology presented will benefit many end users ranging from
lawyers, start-up companies, to large corporations.
8. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research is partially supported by NSF Grant Number
0811975 awarded to the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign and NSF Grant Number 0811460 to Stanford
University. Any opinions and findings are those of the authors,
and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science
Foundation.
9. REFERENCES
[1] 35 U.S.C. Sec. 103 (United States Code). “Conditions for
Patentability; Non-Obvious Subject Matter,” 2010.
[2] Apache Lucene. http://lucene.apache.org/
[3] Apache Solr. http://lucene.apache.org/solr/
[4] Baeza-Yates, R. and Ribeiro-Neto. B., Modern Information
Retrieval, ACM Press, 1999.
[5] Broekstra, J., Kampman, A. and Harmelen, F., V., “Sesame:
A Generic Architecture for Storing and Querying RDF and
RDF Schema”, The Semantic Web – ISWC 2002, Lecture
Notes in Computer Science, 2342:54-68, 2002.
[6] Bruijn, J., D. et al. State-of-the-art Survey on Ontology
Merging and Aligning. V1. SEKT-project report D4.2.1
(WP4), IST-2003-506826, 2003.
[7] Chimaera Website.
http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/software/chimaera (Accessed on
03/01/2012).

[8] De Nicola, A., Missikoff, M. and Navigli, R., "A Software
Engineering Approach to Ontology Building,” Information
Systems, 34(2):258-275, 2009.
[9] Fujii, A. Enhancing Patent Retrieval by Citation Analysis.
Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in
Information Retrieval, Proceedings of the 30th annual
International ACM SIGIR, Amsterdam, The Netherlands,
2007.
[10] Gruninger, M., and Fox, M., S. Methodology for the Design
and Evaluation of Ontologies. In: Proceedings of the
Workshop on Basic Ontological Issues in Knowledge
Sharing, IJCAI-95, Montreal, 1995.
[11] Guijarro, L. Interoperability Frameworks and Enterprise
Architectures in e-Government Initiatives in Europe and the
United States. Government Information Quarterly, 24, 1,
January 2007, 89-101.
[12] Higuchi, S., Fukui, M., Fujii, A., Ishikawa, T., Iwayama, M.,
Fujii, A., Kando, N. An Empirical Study on Retrieval Models
for Different Document Genres: Patents and Newspaper
Articles. Information Retrieval, 2003, 251-258.
[13] Horridge, M. A Practical Guide To Building OWL
Ontologies Using Protégé 4 and CO-ODE Tools. The
University of Manchester, March 2011.
[14] Li, Y., Taylor, J., S. Advanced Learning Algorithms for
Cross-Language Patent Retrieval and Classification.
Information Processing and Management, Elsevier, 2007.
[15] Manning, C., D., Raghavan, P. and Schutze, H. An
Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University
Press, 2009.
[16] Mase, H., Matsubayashi, T., Ogawa, Y., Iwayama, M., and
Oshio, T. Proposal of Two-Stage Patent Retrieval Method
Considering the Claim Structure. ACM Transactions on
Asian Language Information Processing (TALIP) Archive, 4,
2, June 2005, 190 – 206.
[17] Mulgara triplestore. Available online:
http://www.mulgara.org/ (Accessed on 03/01/2012).
[18] Noy, N., F., and McGuinness, D. Ontology Development
101: A Guide to Creating your First Ontology. Stanford
Knowledge Systems Laboratory Technical Report KSL-01-
05 and Stanford Medical Informatics Technical Report SMI-
2001-0880, March 2001.
[19] Noy, N., F., Shah, N., H., Whetzel, P., L., Dai, B., Dorf, M.,
Griffith, N., Jonquet, C., Rubin, D., L., Storey, M., A.,
Chute, C., G. and Musen, M., A., “BioPortal: Ontologies and
Integrated Data Resources at the Click of a Mouse,” Nucl.
Acids Res., 37(2):W170-W173, 2009.
[20] OpenLink Virtuoso. http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/
(Accessed on 03/01/2012).
[21] Dean, M. and Schreiber, G. (Eds.). OWL Web Ontology
Language Reference. W3C Recommendation, 10 February
2004.
157
[22] PACER. http://www.pacer.gov/ (Accessed on 03/01/2012).
[23] Protégé Website. http://protege.stanford.edu/ (Accessed on
03/01/2012).
[24] Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax,
W3C Recommendation, 22 February 1999.
[25] Spink, A. A User-Centered Approach to Evaluating Human
Interaction with Web Search Engines: An Exploratory Study.
Information Processing and Management, 38, 3, May 2002,
401-426.
[26] Takaki, T. Associative Document Retrieval by Query
Subtopic Analysis and its Application to Invalidity Patent
Search. Conference on Information and Knowledge
Management. Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM
International Conference on Information and Knowledge
Management, Washington, D.C., USA, 2004, 399 - 405.
[27] Tseng, H., Lin, C., J., Lin, Y., I. Text Mining Techniques for
Patent Analysis. Information Processing & Management,
2007, Elsevier.
[28] USPTO. http://www.uspto.gov/ (Accessed on 03/01/2012).
[29] Wache, H., Vogele, T., Visser, U., Stuckenschmidt, H.,
Schuster, G., Neumann H., and Hubner, S. Ontology-Based
Integration of Information - A Survey of Existing
Approaches. In Proceedings of IJCAI-01 Workshop:
Ontologies and Information Sharing, Seattle, WA, , 2001,
108-117.
[30] Wanner, L., Baeza-Yates, R., Brugmann, S., Codina, J.,
Diallo, B., Escorsa, E., Giereth, M., Kompatsiaris, Y.,
Papadopoulos, S., Pianta, E., Piella, G., Puhlmann, I., Rao,
G., Rotard, M., Schoester, P., Serafini, L., and Zervaki, V.
Towards Content-Oriented Patent Document Processing.
World Patent Information, 30, 1, March 2008, 21-23.
[31] Xue, X., Croft, W., B. Automatic Query Generation for
Patent Search. Conference on Information and Knowledge
Management, Proceeding of the 18th ACM Conference on
Information and Knowledge Management, Hong Kong,
China, 2009.
[32] Hersh, W. and Voorhees, E. TREC Genomics Special Issue
Overview. Information Retrieval, Special Issue on TREC
Genomics Track: Guest Editor: Ellen Voorhees, 12, 1, 2009,
1-15.
[33] Sirin, E., Parsia, B., Grau, B., C., Kalyanpur, A., and Katz,
Y. Pellet: A Practical OWL-DL Reasoner. Web Semantics:
Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 5, 2,
June 2007, 51-53.
[34] Gruber, R., T. Toward Principles for the Design of
Ontologies used for Knowledge Sharing. Int. J. Hum-
Comput. Stud, 43, 5-6, November 1995, 907–928.
[35] Damiani, E., Fugazza, C. Toward Semantics-Aware
Management of Intellectual Property Rights. Online
Information Review, 31, 1, 2007, 59 – 72.

Digitisation of Electoral Rolls: Analysis of a Multi-Agency
E-Government Project in Pakistan
Hasnain Bokhari
Faculty of Humanities
University of Erfurt
Postfach 90 02 21. D-99105 Erfurt
+491632359046
hasnain.bokhari@yahoo.com
ABSTRACT
Mobile governments are seen as an ancillary extension of egovernment
practices. The low cost of mobile equipment, its
mobility factor and a personalised device may however, herald
them as the predominant means of e-government in developing
countries. Inclusive participation to mobilise and engage the
poorer, excluded and lesser-informed citizens has been the bane of
e-government yet, but it may change by including m-government
as an emphasis factor in the national e-government plans. This
paper considers the case study of the Election Commission of
Pakistan, which initiated a SMS-based voter verification system
with the central database authority in order to inform over 85
million voters of their electoral registration in March 2012. This
unique service is among the first public mobile based initiatives in
Pakistan which builds upon an inter-agency collaboration drawing
on the success of a digitized and central database.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.6.1 [Management of Computing and Information Systems]:
Project and People Management - Strategic information systems
planning; J.1 [Computer Applications]: Administrative Data
Processing – Government; H.1.2 [Information Systems]:
User/Machine Systems - Human information processing
General Terms
Management, Documentation, Human Factors, Verification.
Keywords
E-government, Developing Countries, Interagency collaboration,
M-government, Alternative public service delivery
1. INTRODUCTION
Rapidly declining costs of Information and Communication
Technologies (ICTs) and mobile phone equipment are paving new
ways for a digitally connected society through a variety of
communications spectra. e-government initiatives are now taking
a crucial turn in the domain of public service delivery. A number
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
158
Mustafa Khan
Willy Brandt School of Public Policy
University of Erfurt
Postfach 90 02 21. D-99105 Erfurt
+4917671704089
mmmkhan@gmail.com
of countries are emphasizing horizontal and vertical integration of
governmental agencies to ensure the one-stop-shop promise of egovernment.
Thus, multiple governmental agencies cooperate
with one another and more importantly with private partners in
order to develop innovative eServices. Similarly, countries
especially in the developing world are increasingly moving
towards the concept of electronic public service delivery over
multiple channels digital communication other than the internet.
To connect with and inform citizens, governments around the
world are now considering mobile phones as an alternative service
delivery channel for government data. In the context of
developing countries, mobile phones offer a feasible opportunity
for governments to expand their digital focus to the disconnected
areas. The entire ‘e’ lexicon of e-government is now focusing
towards ‘m’ making a plausible case for m-government. Mgovernment,
in a nutshell is not hugely different from its
predecessor. Rather it offers a strategy for providing information
and services through mobile or wireless technology [21]. As the
definition relies on e-government practices, the basic theory and
implications of m-government are going to work as
complementary to e-government.
What sets m-government apart and makes it a new focus area are
its strengths of “mobility” and being “wireless” [33]. Freeing the
user from desktop-bound and wired internet access, it allows
information access on the move, increased functionality, low
opportunity cost for access and more pervasive reach into
‘unwired’ or physically unsupported areas. This latter property
makes it the ideal infrastructure choice in developing or underdeveloped
countries, where internet access is expensive or not
available and requires more technical literacy. It must, however,
be noted that m-government does not need to eliminate the online
and offline modalities of service-delivery but it aims at harnessing
the powerful and transformational capacity of the mobile platform
to enhance public service [16].
Since the beginning of new millennium, there has been a
phenomenal growth in mobile subscription around the world. In
2011, International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimated
5.9 billion mobile subscriptions, with a global penetration rate at
an astounding 87%-79% in developing countries against a global
internet penetration rate of 35% [17]. What matters here the most
is the social construction of mobile technology, which qualifies
the mobile platform as a preferred means of communication due
to the oral communication culture it espouses. Given its spatial
mobility and flexibility to manage contextual mobility with an

oral option, it also allows for a much wider usability within
digitally challenged or ageing populations.
The prevalent oral communication culture that is inherent with
mobile phones has found a strong audience in rural and
geographically-isolated communities of developing and under
developed countries that have shown considerable acceptance
towards mobile technologies. Such a communal reliance has led a
number of local and state level agencies to provide emergency,
health, agriculture and education related information through
mobile phones [23] [25]. The location-based targeting system of
m-government is becoming increasingly popular way to
communicate with only certain geographically proximate
communities, which can prove to be a vital mobilisation tool in
the case of natural disasters, epidemics or accidents.
Figure 1: Mobile and Internet subscribers per 100
inhabitants in Pakistan
The urban-rural divide and the digital imbalance more
synonymous with the developing world has so far not let Layne &
Lee widely debated model of e-government provide a functional
solution for developing countries. The Layne & Lee model based
on catalogue stage, transaction stage and vertical and horizontal
integration stage gets seriously challenged by the cost of
infrastructure, limited government budgets and the lack of
information in local and regional languages [14]. A number of
developing countries are now moving beyond the informational
web portal (which is a catalogue stage in Layne & Lee model) and
are concentrating on multiple channels of public service delivery,
either through kiosk machines, telecentres, over-the-counter
approaches and now mobile phones to digitally facilitate their
public. In India for example, a free SMS service, launched in
February 2007, enables farmers in rural areas to ask agricultural
or animal husbandry related queries to experts. Similarly in
Pakistan, an SMS service was launched by the Pakistan Telecom
Authority (PTA) to facilitate citizens for SIM verification against
their unique national identity cards [18].
159
Hereinafter, this paper discusses the case of multiagency
collaboration for an m-government application for voters’
registration and verification in Pakistan. Taking into consideration
all the above-mentioned limitations and opportunities, this paper
analyzes Pakistan as an aberrant transitive democracy to see if and
how a m-government initiative led by the Election Commission of
Pakistan (ECP) in collaboration with National Database and
Registration Authority (NADRA) could facilitate voting for the
general elections planned in 2013. The paper touches upon a brief
chronological progress of e-government evolution in Pakistan
with the formation of NADRA, which eventually guided ECP in
its m-government application.
2. E-GOVERNMENT AND
PARTICIPATORY FACTOR OF
DEMOCRACY
The driving force behind the phenomenon of e-government was to
make governments rely on digital gadgetry in order to provide
services that are more responsive and effective. This in turn could
bring more transparency to administrative processes, thereby
triggering a democratic culture which is supported by new
communication media. For a more responsive government, it is
inevitably necessary for governments to assure access and the
right to information. It is perhaps the similar motivation held by
Layne & Lee model of e-government whose first phase, the
catalogue model, focuses on the availability of government
information via web portals. However, such a model has
repeatedly been rebuffed academically and contested for its
viability in developing countries where there still is a huge digital
gap and illiteracy. This brings the participatory promise of egovernment
in a questionable position where governments on one
hand try to offer multi-channel public services but on the other
hand are unavailable to deliver the basic promise i.e. the
availability of government information – the first requirement in
almost every possible e-government model. In order to ensure the
participatory nature of democracy, would it not be just to assure
the access to the portal or at least an alternative way to provide
government information [1]. With his empirical findings Donald
Norris has challenged these early hyperbolic claims [27] that
provisions for better governance through digital means does not
essentially translate into enhanced or increased public
participation in governments. Also, in case of developing
countries, most are delineated by fledgling democracy that are yet
to take root in relatively younger states staggering on to postconflict
and transitional stages where the need for stability often
trumps egalitarian inclusion into governments and elections. The
case of e-government in Pakistan suffers from the similar
developing country syndrome of digital divide where the
government has not been able to reach out to its public via its web
portal. There are, however, a number of multi-channel electronic
public services that continues to facilitate the citizens. With the
inception of the m-government application in February 2012, the
Government of Pakistan introduced probably for the first time, a
digital service via a short message (or SMS) that enable citizens to
verify and confirm them as registered voters for the general
elections in 2013. For a transitional democracy such as Pakistan,
an eService of such sort can have a considerable impact on voter
turnout. However, can it be claimed if an eService of this calibre
delineates the participatory element for Pakistani voters? To
answer, one probably needs to revisit the most celebrated and
equally contested theorist of democracy, Robert Dahl, whose
general set of criteria for evaluating democratic process includes

effective participation, voting equality, enlightened understanding,
and control of the policy agenda [7]. If the democratic and
participatory element of the ECP’s SMS application is gauged
with Dahl’s criteria, this application does seem to qualify at least
for one of Dahl’s five criteria. However, before dwelling upon the
details of this application, it seems necessary to give a brief
chronology of events that has eventually led ECP to undertake a
rather sensitive and careful task of voter registration and
verification via the m-government application.
3. E-GOVERNMENT SCENARIO IN
PAKISTAN
The Government of Pakistan started its chapter of e-government
in 2002 by forming a separate organisation under the Ministry of
Information Technology named Electronic Government
Directorate (EGD). EGD’s major tasks included to plan, prepare
and implement e-government projects in Pakistan and to provide
technical guidelines on the implementation of these projects at the
federal, provincial and district levels. Since 2005 EGD has also
put an e-government strategy and action plan for years 2005-2010,
which so far has not been revised, at least publicly. At the
beginning of millennium, offering a web portal remained the first
task for national governments and Pakistan’s one-stop-shop
solution was to initiate web portal of government ministries,
divisions, and its sub organisations accessible via Internet at
www.pakistan.gov.pk. The portal provided information about the
ministries and explained their functioning albeit in English – a
language which is only spoken and understood by a small
minority of a population of 185 million people. The portal, which
was revamped in 2008, does not yet offer or indicate any
interactive G2C service in order to qualify for the second stage
(transaction) of e-government model (by Layne & Lee) [18].
While the EGD together with Government of Pakistan was trying
to delve into e-government, a number of parallel initiatives started
in the G2C scenario in Pakistan. Due to deregulation in the
telecommunications sector, various telecom operators started their
services in Pakistan. Over the course of 10 years the low rates of
the mobile telecom sector found a strong audience all over the
country. The figures mentioned by the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU) clearly indicate that Pakistani
citizens prefer mobile phones to the internet. According to the
ITU statistics, mobile users in Pakistan increased from 0.21 users
in 2000 to 57.14 users per 100 inhabitants in 2010 [17]. As of
May 2012, the PTA puts the cellular mobile teledensity at 68.6%
making it the most highly penetrated South Asian country in this
regard.
The increased reliance on mobile phones made a number of
telecom operators in Pakistan realise the potential of mobile
penetration and they started offering G2C services by acting as a
middle agency. Currently, Norwegian telecom operator Telenor’s
easy Paisa service for the payment of utility bills and money
transfer is considered the most frequently used service, which has
triggered a new era of branchless banking in Pakistan. However, a
major development in e-government scenario that took place in
Pakistan is the formation of National Database Registration
Authority (NADRA). In order to digitise the population data, the
Ministry of Interior initiated a technical wing named as the
NADRA to develop Computerised National Identity Cards
(CNICs), which eventually became one of the first G2C electronic
public services. Over a number of years NADRA has initiated
other G2C projects as well. These projects include the
160
development of the electronic passport, driver’s license, birth
registration certificate and/or the vehicle identification and
tracking system. Pakistan moved beyond the web portal when in
2005 NADRA started a kiosk machine service in order to pay
utility bills. The idea behind kiosk machine was the lack of
internet penetration and possibility of mCommerce application on
official web portal. The kiosk machine service is now being
franchised and exists as a part of the eSahulat project, which
allows people to transfer money without involving any bank
transaction for the recipient and sender. It would not be wrong to
mention that in Pakistan NADRA has now assumed the role of a
master agency as it possesses the major citizen database and
collaborates in a number of intergovernmental projects such as the
World Bank supported cash transfer programme called Income
Support Programme and the Watan Card for flood afectees.
NADRA has also collaborated with the PTA by sharing its
database with telecom operators in order for people to verify their
SIM cards against their CNICs. This paper considers NADRA’s
most recent collaboration with another governmental agency- the
Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP). The next section
describes the role of the ECP and its collaboration with the
NADRA to develop the digitised electoral rolls.
4. ELECTION COMMISSION OF
PAKISTAN
The Election Commission of Pakistan presides over the voting
proceedings of the State and National assemblies and the Senate.
Its Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) is appointed by the
President of Pakistan and with amendments made in the
constitution during 2012; it has been made an autonomous and
independent organisation with separate funds and appointment
powers for interim government, which will be responsible for
organising fresh national elections [32].
The ECP adopted a five-year strategic plan in May 2010, taking
various stakeholders such as political parties, Civil Society
Oraganizations (CSOs), female councillors, minorities, lawyers
and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) on
board. The strategic plan was aimed at overhauling various
technical, organizational and legal functions of the ECP.
Alongside, the ECP also came up with strategic deliverables to
foster digitization of the electoral rolls, building a new website,
translation of content in regional languages, a better Content
Management System (CMS), adoption of Electronic Voting
Machines (EVM), a mobile version of the website and online
availability of all ECP information, results and notifications as
and when announced [11]. The following section details the
collaborative model that the ECP adopted in order to verify and
collate the digitization of electoral rolls with the help of NADRA.
4.1 Multiagency Collaboration at Work:
Preparation of the Computerised
Electoral Rolls System (CERS II)
In June 2011, ECP and NADRA signed a formal contract for the
revision of electoral rolls and the updating of the 2006
Computerised Electoral Rolls System (CERS I). NADRA
extended its support by sharing the citizen database and by
appending and adding supplementary information from their
unique CNIC system against every voter. The CNIC carries
unique identification card with multiple biometric features,
photograph and includes details of residence, contact information
and family status. This inter-sectoral and inter-organisational

mapping of citizens would ensure unique identity within the
system and prepare clear transparent rolls which would be now
called as CERS II.
The ECP established a project management unit comprising ECP
and IFES officials to steer and monitor this enormous task. The
ECP handed over the existing electoral rolls data to NADRA in
February 2011 for verification, updating and augmentation of
electoral rolls 2006-07 on the basis of CNIC database.
Simultaneously, the Population Census Organization (PCO)
which conducts census every five years was instructed in its April
2011 census to collect the information of the head of family’s data
on a specially designed form for preparing preliminary electoral
rolls on the basis of new census blocks as prescribed by the
Census Organisation previously and now adopted by the ECP as
revised electoral areas. These data were handed over to NADRA
offices at district level. NADRA used the data for assignment of
new census block codes after verification and augmentation of
existing electoral rolls with its CNIC data. In effect, NADRA
created a new database for the ECP from a data image of its CNIC
database but customised it along the lines of the newly defined
electoral areas. This meant further clarity and precision of voter
distribution [11].
NADRA prepared preliminary electoral rolls on the basis of new
census blocks, using CNIC as unique identifier of voters. The
ECP then conducted a country-wide door-to-door verification of
these rolls in August-October 2011. A pilot project was completed
in 60 selected electoral areas in four districts through door-to-door
verification which helped in identifying issues during field
exercise which were taken care of while rolling out the national
level verification project.
Figure 2: Digitisation flowchart of electoral rolls by the
Election Commission of Pakistan
.
161
NADRA then entered the data changes on the basis of voters’ data
forms collected during door-to-door verification in light of
guidelines/business rules, using double-blind data entry
mechanism. Thereafter, the preliminary electoral rolls were
printed by NADRA and delivered to the ECP’s field offices on 23
February 2012. The ECP released the draft electoral rolls at
52,166 display centres across Pakistan for public display for
inviting claims and objections for corrections on the prescribed
forms as per existing legal framework. On 29 February, both the
paper-based electoral rolls and a unique SMS facility (explained
in the next section) to verify citizens’ voting details were launched
[8]. After incorporating the decisions of the revising authorities,
the final electoral rolls were displayed successfully in May 2012.
Thus, from 2012 onwards, the revised CERS-II can be updated
annually as originally envisaged in the constitution of Pakistan.
NADRA and the ECP plan to extend its cooperation to the next
level by updating the voter data simultaneously in the ECP
database when voters visit the NADRA offices for renewing or
changing the personal details of their CNIC.
4.2 SMS Voter Verification Application
After an extensive multi-agency collaboration in collecting the
voters’ data the ECP planned to not only announce the paperbased
results of the voters but it also launched a unique SMS voter
verification application on 29 February 2012. A widespread print
and electronic media campaign was organised and the
announcement of the electoral roll received prime coverage on all
leading television channels, given the loaded political atmosphere
with the impending 2013 elections. With regard to geographically
isolated and rural areas, these campaigns were chiselled with the
ECP conducting radio spots in six local languages to advertise the
publication of the electoral rolls and the SMS verification
application.
Figure 3: Sample of return SMS with voter registration
details
.
The SMS application requires a voter to text her/his unique CNIC
number to a short code ‘8300’. Irrespective of the mobile network
operator, the voter is charged, Rs. 2 (USD 0.02) and a reply SMS
in the national language Urdu is received, showing the CNIC
number, electoral area name, block code, tehsil/district and serial

number [10]. Keeping in view that multiple voters may use one
mobile phone in a household to verify their vote and to protect the
privacy of the voter, the name, parentage and home address which
are attributes of CNIC are not included in the return SMS.
The block code is the assigned block or colony number allotted
after the new housing census of 2011 as mentioned before. The
serial number replaces the old manual slip system that was issued
to every voter with the serial number and name upon registration.
The idea of digitally replacing the paper slip system intends to
save cost and paper waste and also reduces the chances of
misplaced slips. Another important issue it helps address is a
voting malpractice, which was often reported in rural areas with
illiterate or inexperienced voters. It is observed during elections in
Pakistan that political party agents canvassing outside polling
station would try to influence the voter in the guise of providing
support to inexperienced voters [20]. With a new digitised version
of electoral rolls, voters only need to carry their CNIC and newly
issued serial number via digital electoral rolls to polling stations
and cast their ballot. It shall , however, be noted that physical
display of electoral rolls will continue side by side in order to
ensure that no voter is denied this right. The electoral roll
verification drive ended on March 20, 2012.
5. ECP-NADRA SMS APPLICATION
ANALYSIS
It is perhaps the first time in Pakistan that a number of
governmental agencies namely, the ECP, NADRA and the
Population Census Organisation have cooperated with one another
in order to make a digital electoral roll. The Pakistani voters’
uptake on this service was considerable in both rural and urban
sectors. With mobiles, virtual display centres for a small price
could be created anywhere at the convenience of the voter.
Indicative of the demand shift in the new service delivery, voters
opted to use the SMS service and the display centres were not
crowded, making it easier and speedier to deal with modification
complaints of effected voters. Within 17 days of the launch of the
application, 4.6 million people had used it to verify their electoral
details [28]. By end of March 2012, the number of verified voters
exceeded the 7 million that used this facility.
The SMS service serves as an auxiliary provision that enabled the
8.4% registered voters in Pakistan. However, this level of
collaboration will be able to open new areas of interagency
collaborations, which actually could be considered as the third and
fourth phase of horizontal and vertical integration, if compared
with the Layne & Lee model of e-government. Similarly, the SMS
service has landed the ECP in the Guinness Book of World
Records for having the World’s largest voter verification SMS
service with a voter density of 83.28 million [31]. Introducing this
application on an even bigger network of almost 111 million
mobile users in one go, relying on indigenous technology and
skills without physical external assistance bodes well for
developing countries and their m-government plans. As of 2012,
the ECP plans to launch the same SMS service to announce and
inform voters of their allocated polling stations before the national
elections are conducted.
An instance of this provision was observed in July 2012, after the
dismissal of the then Prime Minister Gillani by the Supreme Court
of Pakistan. His seat in the Pakistan National Assembly eventually
fell vacant and bye-election had to be held. Here the ECP
provided information to over 138,000 voters in that constituency
162
using location based targeting and its new CERS II rolls to SMS
voters their block codes, polling station names and numbers and
serial numbers.
The architecture behind the SMS application is a G2C
informational exchange initiated by texting a short code- a C2G
pull communication. On the front end, it is a text-based
communication on the GSM cellular network in a local language
and numbers. The middleware is a NADRA SMS Gateway. All
the Mobile Network Operators (MNO) have reserved short code
8300 for the ECP. Once a network operator receives an SMS, it
passes the message to the NADRA SMS gate way. In return, if the
message is appropriate (i.e. if it contains 13 digits of CNIC) the
voters’ information is returned.
If this application is analysed against the Task-Technology Fit
model [13], it can be argued that the ECP-NADRA’s application
is a useful one in a way that a huge chunk of the target audience is
available on the employed platform, the task (here informational)
can be viably transmitted. Given the text-based informational
request in a mobile and geographically diverse target area, with a
varied skill set and technical abilities and round the clock access
to ensure all voters could verify their status within the 20-day
period- this match serves a useful proposition for the SMS
verification system. Had the ECP launched a website version of
this application then, , the application would not have even
achieved the 8.3% of audience due to limited internet penetration
in Pakistan as compared to the mobile phone subscription as
indicated in Figure 1. Building up on the location-based facility in
m-government, the future plan to inform voters of their designated
polling stations through a similar SMS based application may also
be successful, which was test run in the bye-elections of
constituency Multan-IV as pointed before.
Incorporation of an external facilitator or technology provider in a
highly sensitive national affair such as the national election is not
desirable [19] especially with regard to credibility and neutrality
of an election body. By hiring an indigenous public firm on a
formal contract to implement both the software and hardware ends
of a project, while keeping check and balance on the tailored
solution, ensured control with the contractee. The digitisation of
voters’ registration roll brought together not only the government
officials but also IT experts to ensure that the design phase does
not suffer from the absence of experts from both ends. Brewer
et.al. [5] have argued that the combination of bureaucracy and
technology experts would minimise the pitfalls in an egovernment
application. The ECP relied on NADRA’s
accumulated experience of over 10 years in the automation and
biometric business. A unique factor was that NADRA customized
a data image of its CNIC and appended the CERS I with it to
create CERS II. Such a multiagency cooperation for interagency
information sharing can be extended and scaled to further future
projects [35].
Ideally, there should not have been any costs involved for an
SMS, but to avoid jamming of the SMS service by miscreants the
ECP decided to keep a minimal cost. Despite the lower cost of
SMS, it may still prevent the marginally poor people from
availing it. However, the government did not abandon the paper
display of electoral rolls to ensure no citizen is missed out.
Security and trust though remain tangible issues to be addressed
as with all e-government initiatives- establishing an identity
versus the anonymity of a citizen have confounded electronic
notions of governance and elections [19].

Here the authors wish to extend the analysis of the ECP project by
gauging against the success factor model proposed by Sandy and
Macmillian [29] to evaluate the internal effects on the government
based on six points:
Cost: Governments need to find cost effective solutions to ensure
funding and look into options for joint operations. In this case,
even buying services from MNO in the long-term or in a bulk
package lasting only during the verification drive, might have
further lessened or eliminated the charge of the service on the
public, perhaps making it more inclusive. Who might pay for the
novelty of receiving an SMS for a service viewed as too
expensive? After all e-government services tend to have an elastic
demand [24] and do not stand the test of the cost distribution well.
Similarly, attracting and keeping staff with “requisite agility” will
make for a self-conscious government that can adequately handle
and deal with citizen demand [5].
Business Reengineering: A central authority and political support
in the form of a coordinated and bench-marked national egovernment
plan with specific m-government services recognized
with clearly defined deliverables would ensure a better and
cohesive strategy. This would mean that dependency on legacy
systems be reduced and government should try to keep or
maintain central databases or platforms that can be used to test,
pilot-run and launch e-government or m-government initiatives,
which will prove to be launching pads and resource centres for all
departments and sectors.
Education: Better access and training programs to ensure adoption
of m-government initiatives so as to have stronger back office
work. Identifying and maintaining open source international
standards that would make it easier for both employees and public
to remain at the top of the infrastructural game and the everchanging
technology blitz.
Acceptance: There should be ownership of the projects to ensure
that the increased participation of the public is handled well or it
would have a reverse effect on inclusive nature of m-government.
Here, the popularity of the e-Sahulat programme over the Kiosk
system may explain the local populace’s preference for human
interaction rather than machine-human interfaces [3]. For this
purpose, incorporating government officials in the design and
feedback of such initiatives will create interest. Supporting
employees with technically sound and well-fitted offices with
clearly defined job descriptions will ensure accountability.
Security: Data loss in terms of device theft can be limited by
ensuring that mobile phone SIMs are registered against CNICs.
Similarly providing access to an online temporary identification
should also be accepted in case of ID theft. Data protocols on
office machinery should be defined and stripped down for work
purposes only and IT administrators should have strict policies
against external data storage devices in workplaces. These
policies currently prevail in NADRA offices.
Access: Providing key infrastructure to all actors, both within and
without the government. Presence of content in local language,
regular and audited updating of CMS system and providing
similar opportunities for people with physical disability and
special needs will ensure equal access for all.
163
5.1 Litmus Test- Requisite Agility of the
CERS II and SMS application
Coming to the last factor- has the governance module succeeded
with this initiative? Coupling this system with the aforementioned
electoral bill, the CNIC numbers have essentially become unique
identifying factors in elections. The ECP’s initiative has the
potential to promote transparency and would help in removal of
defunct or fraudulent votes from the vote bank - hence the
strengthening of related factors of openness, accountability and
participation. Here, one recent incident that was reported during
the verification procedure serves as a litmus test of this initiative’s
working. After the display of electoral rolls, a member of national
and another of provincial assembly observed abnormal increase in
the electorate records of their respective constituencies and
reported it to the ECP. The ECP gave NADRA and its provincial
election commission office a forty-eight hour deadline to explain
the cause behind this anomaly. Not only was the mistake traced
and rectified, but NADRA investigated that five people had tried
to manually fill thousands of vote-transfer forms and migrated
voters in these districts. As they had submitted these forms with
some identification, NADRA used the biometric assets of the
CNIC and traced the culprits. Similar patterns were also traced out
in two other constituencies and rectified [9] [26].
6. CONCLUSION
Encouraging as the result of this debilitation may be, it is
however, difficult to say as to what extent governance will be
fostered by this initiative in the long run despite its wide usage
and demonstrated benefits. But the ECP-NADRA app surely is a
unique experiment in strengthening the democratic culture in
Pakistan. Apart from NADRA’s kiosk machine project and an
eSahulat programme, the ECP SMS app can be considered as
another contribution in the category of alternative channel of
electronic public service delivery which excludes the web portal
as a main communication medium. This app has tried to exploit
the most frequently used gadget, i.e., a mobile phone which does
not even have to be a smart phone to use this app. For a young
democracy like Pakistan the ECP-NADRA collaboration seems to
have contributed to a larger extent in assuring the effective
participation and/or voting equality in Dahl’s sense of effective
democracy. The way multiple governmental agency have
collaborated in the preparation of electoral rolls, the ECP and
NADRA have set up a decent example for other developing
countries how vertical boundaries can be overcome in such inter
agency collaborations. M-government presents a substantive case
in enfranchising the participatory nature and equal rights to
information sharing for all citizens. Once this information divide
is plugged, participation may seep into the public policy
formulation sphere. However, the external implication of mgovernment
on public is not the only factor in their success.
The internal implications that m-government will have in making
the government effective and efficient in its function is also
important. There is diverse literature from organisational
behaviour studies that shows that lack of ownership for projects
from within governments can kill the most promising innovations.
The public and governments are generally seen as complacent in
their business models and more so when accountability and
checks and balances are absent or hindered by fledging,
discontinuous democracies. This is also the political case of
Pakistan, where change in governments leads to entire and sudden
shifts in policy which means squandering the already deficit

public money. As most of the e-government initiatives in
developing countries are based on legacy systems, there is little
scope for backward compatibility for newer front-end
applications. Additional training cost, quality of manpower and
organizational rigidities are hindrances [33] [34], which ideally
the private sector has always adapted better to. Thus, Public
Private Partnerships (PPP) maybe the way forward as public
sector brings in money, employees and better business models,
while the government ensures that the role of governance and
common public good are not lost in capital building.
7. RECOMMENDATIONS
With regards to the case study, certain recommendations that
could facilitate newer m-government initiatives and thus make
room for innovative and useful e-government initiatives which are
user-centric are listed below:
1. Establish a Mobile Service Gateway Delivery system, which
could be an incubation cell for all or any government initiatives
into m-government. It would maintain a technical infrastructure
and staff to help formulate, devise, test-run and then deploy
various m-government initiatives. It would be ideal to have one
central Mobile Gateway with networked centres in all provinces
to keep a balanced and federal linearity in equal funding but will
allow them flexibility to identify preferred areas for action thus
promoting a bottom-up approach.
2. Ensure that the format of the CNIC database is the groundwork
database for all new initiatives for e-government and mgovernment.
This would allow mapping of citizens across
different organizations building up a single unified repository on
user-id with unique biometric features. These would prevent
identity theft or misuse of data, as biometric checks are embedded
within these systems.
3. Establish a market for m-government applications not only for
smartphones but normal cellular phones that can exploit the
location-based context of the mobile phone to provide crucial
information. The Government should provide incentives to mobile
application programmers to compete and design comprehensive
application that can be used to facilitate agricultural, medical and
educational initiatives over the mobile channel.
4. Initiating a standard for mobile applications and incorporating it
within the National e-government plan. The EGD of Pakistan has
to revise and update its e-government strategy plan and design a
separate model for m-government that can be used to benchmark
and help future initiatives on this platform across the public
sector.
5. Pre-designated short codes should be reserved for future mgovernment
initiatives. Reserving short codes on a national level
and then using them for deploying essential services comes in
handy for the recalling abilities of these short codes. Similarly, a
long number should be reserved which would be the touch point
of all m-government initiatives. It would feature a menu-based
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) menu that would serve to be a
repository for accessing, using and interacting with all mgovernment
initiatives through oral occupation thus involving
illiterate or technically challenged citizens.
6. Developing mobile websites for all government websites which
would have the same URL but would divert the user to the mobile
website after it has been established that it is being accessed
through mobile. Mobile websites need to be text-rich and without
164
too many graphics, and they should be available in the national as
well as regional languages.
8. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors are indebted to the technical wing of National
Database Registration Authority (NADRA) for their assistance in
providing information about the case study.
9. REFERENCES
[1] Baums, C. H., & Maio, A. D. Gartner's Four phases of
EGovernment Model. Retrieved March 12, 2012, from
GARTNER: www.gartner.com, 2000
[2] Bokhari, H. Paradigm shift in service delivery channels for
G2C services–Service Oriented Architecture an option for
the success of eGovernment in Pakistan? In International
Conference on Information and Communication
Technologies, University of Science and Technology, Bannu,
Pakistan, 2008.
[3] Bokhari, H. Multi-channel Electronic Public Service
Delivery Mechanisms in Developing Countries- A Case
Study of the Esahulat Programme in Pakistan. In Janowski,
T. and Davies, J. (Ed). 4th International Conference on
Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance.ACM: New
York, 2010.
[4] Bokhari, H. Realising hybrid model of eGovernment for
citizen-centric eServices in developing countries. Analysis of
eSahulat programme in Pakistan. In IEEE 13th International
Multitopic Conference, UET Taxila and MAJU Islamabad,
2009.
[5] Brewer, G. A., Neubauer, B. J., & Geiselhart, a. K.
Designing and Implementing E-Government Systems :
Critical Implications for Public Administration and
Democracy. Administration and Society (July, 2006), p. 472-
500.
[6] Castells, M. The rise of the network society: volume i: the
information age: economy, society, and culture. Willey-
Blackwell, 2009.
[7] Dahl, R. A. Democracy and its critics. New Haven CT: Yale
University Press, 1989.
[8] Dawn. ECP starts Rolls display, SMS service for voters
verification. Retrieved March 25, 2012, from Dawn:
http://www.dawn.com/2012/02/29/ecp-starts-rolls-displaysms-service-for-voters-verification.html
[9] ECP. Press Release. Retrieved March 25, 2012, from
Election Commission of Pakistan:
http://www.ecp.gov.pk/ViewPressReleaseNotific.aspx?ID=1
538&TypeID=0
[10] ECP. Press Release: ECP inaugurates SMS facility
tomorrow. Retrieved March 25, 2012, from Election
Commission of Pakistan:
http://www.ecp.gov.pk/ViewPressReleaseNotific.aspx?ID=1
503
[11] ECP. Progress Report on Implementation of the Five Year
Strategic Plan. Retrieved March 24, 2012, from Election
Commission of Pakistan:

http://www.ecp.gov.pk/Reports/SPStrategicPlanProgress.pdf,
January, 2012.
[12] El-Kiki, T., & Lawrence, E. Emerging Mobile Government
Services: Strategies for Success. 20th Bled eConference.
Bled, Slovenia, 2007.
[13] Gebauer, J., Shaw, M. J., & Gribbins, M. Task technology fit
for mobile information systems. Journal of Information
Technology. p. 259-272, 2010.
[14] Ghyasi, A. F., & Kushchu, I. mGovernment: Case for
developing countries. Retrieved March 24, 2012, from
Mobile Government Lab: http://www.mgovernment.org/
resurces/mgovlab_afgik.pdf.
[15] ITU. ICT- Facts and Figures: The World in 2011. Retrieved
March 24, 2012, from International Telecommunications
Union: http://www.itu.int/ITU/ict/facts/2011/
material/ICTFactsFigures2011.pdf
[16] ITU & OECD. M-government: Mobile technologies for
responsive governments and connected societies. ITU &
OECD, 2011.
[17] ITU. (2011, December). Key 2000-2010 Country Statistics.
Retrieved March 10, 2012, from International
Telecommunications Union: http://www.itu.int/ITU-
D/ict/statistics/
[18] Karen, L., Jungwoo L. “Developing Fully Functional E-
Government. A Four Stage Model”. Government Information
Quarterly, Vol. 18, Issue 2 (2001). p. 122-136.
[19] Krimmer, R., Triessnig, S., & Volkamer, M. The
Development of Remote E-voting Around the World: A
review of roads and directions. Vote ID (pp. 1-15).
Heidelberg, DE: Springer-Verlag Berlin, 2007.
[20] Khan, I. H. Electoral malpractices during the 2008 elections
in Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011.
[21] Kushchu, I., & Borucki, C. Impact of Mobile Technologies
on Government. Retrieved March 25, 2012, from Mobile
Government Lab: http://www.mgovernment.org/resurces/
mgovlab_ikcb.pdf
[22] Kushchu, I., & Kuscu, M. H. From M-government to Egovernment.
Retrieved March 24, 2012, from Mobile
Government Lab: http://www.mgovservice.ru/upload/
uploadfiles/From%20eGov%20to%20mGov.pdf
[23] Moon, M. J. From E-government to M-government?
Emerging trends in the use of mobile technology by State
governments. Washington: IBM Centre for the Business of
Government, 2004.
[24] Naik, G., Joshi, S., & Basavaraj, K. Fostering inclusive
growth through e-Governance Embedded Rural Telecenters.
Government Information Quarterly (2012), p. 81-89.
[25] Naqvi, S. J., & Al-Shihi, H. M-government initatives in
Oman. Issues in Informing Science and Technology (2009),
p. 818-824.
[26] News, T. ECP, Nadra solve mystery of abnormal increase in
registered voters. Retrieved March 25, 2012, from The
News: http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-6-98244-
165
ECP-Nadra-solve-mystery-of-abnormal-increase-inregistered-voters
[27] Norris, D. F. E-Government...Not E-Governance...Not Edemocracry
Not Now! Not Ever? ICEGOV 2010 Beijing,
China: ACM. pp. 339-346, 2010
[28] Pakistan Today. Over 4.6m citizens verify vote through
SMS. Retrieved March 25, 2012, from Pakistan Today:
http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2012/03/18/city/islamabad
/over-4-6m-citizens-verify-vote-through-sms/
[29] Sandy, G. A., & Macmillian, S. A success factors model for
M-government. Euro mGov (pp. 349-352). Brighton, UK:
Mobile Government Consortium International Pub, 2005
[30] Symonds, M. A survey of government and the internet: The
next revolution. The Economist (June, 2000), p. 36.
[31] Tribune. ECP 'SMS voters’ verification service may break
World Record. Retrieved 2012 25, March, from The Express
Tribune: http://tribune.com.pk/story/350452/ecp-sms-votersverification-service-may-break-world-record/
[32] Tribune, P. Neutral caretakers, independent EC promised;
passed 20th amendment bill. Retrieved March 24, 2012, from
Pakistan News Service: http://paktribune.com/news/Neutralcaretakers-independent-EC-promised;-passed-20th-
Amendment-bill-247519.html
[33] Trimi, S., & Sheng, H. Emerging trends in M-government.
Communications of the ACM (May, 2008), p. 53-58.
[34] VR Salkute, S. K. Implications of mobile communication
technologies (mct) in m-government: challenges, technology
and applications. International Research Journal of
Management and Business Studies (2011), p. 62-67.
[35] Yang, T.-M., Zheng, L., & Pardo, T. The boundaries of
information sharing and integration: A case study of Taiwan
e-government. Government Information Quarterly (2012), p.
51-60.

Integrating Argumentation Technologies and
Context-Based Search for Intelligent Processing
of Citizens’ Opinion in Social Media
Carlos Chesñevar,
Ana Maguitman
Dept.of Computer Science and Eng.
Universidad Nacional del Sur
Av. Alem 1253
8000 Bahía Blanca, Argentina
+54 291 459 5135
{cic,agm}@cs.uns.edu.ar
ABSTRACT
Nowadays, governments are adopting Web 2.0 technologies for
interacting with citizens, empowering them to share their views,
react to issues of their concern and form opinion. In particular,
social media play an important role in this context, due to their
widespread use. For governments, a major technical challenge is
the lack of automated intelligent tools for processing citizens’
opinion in government social media. At the same time, during the
last decade, argumentation theory has consolidated itself in
Artificial Intelligence as a new paradigm for modeling common
sense reasoning, with application in several areas, such as legal
reasoning, multiagent systems, and decision support systems,
among others. This paper outlines an argument-based approach
for overcoming such challenge, combined with context-based
information retrieval. Our ultimate aim is to combine contextbased
search and argumentation in a collaborative framework for
managing (retrieving and publishing) service- and policy-related
information in government-use social media tools.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J.1 [Administrative Data Processing]: Government; I.2
[Artificial Intelligence]: Learning; H.3 [Information Storage
and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval
General Terms
Algorithms, Human Factors, Languages
Keywords
Social media; Government 2.0; e-Governance; Participation;
Intelligent Tools
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
Elsa Estevez
United Nations University
Int. Institute for Software Technology
Center for Electronic Governance
P.O. Box 3058, Macao SAR, China
+853 85040491
elsa@cs.uns.edu.ar
166
Ramón Brena
ITESM Monterrey
Av. E. Garza Sada 2501,
Col. Tecnológico, 64849 Monterrey,
N.L., México
+52 81 8358-2000 ext. 5246
ramon.brena@itesm.mx
1. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATIONS
Government 2.0 refers to government's adoption of Web 2.0
technologies to socialize government services, processes, and data
[1][2]. Enabling new ways of communication – text, audio, video
as well as two-way communications, Government 2.0 provides
new mechanisms for government agencies to: 1) increase
transparency – bringing public sector agenda and government
activities closer to citizens [3], 2) facilitate participation –
engaging citizens in making opinion and contributing to policydecision
making; and 3) enhance service delivery – pushing
service-related information and gathering citizens’ opinions about
service delivery. As an example of Government 2.0 adoption, the
Government of Singapore offers a directory of the web 2.0 and
other social media initiatives, such as Facebook pages, Flickr
photostreams, Twitter accounts, and YouTube channels, among
others; used by government agencies [4].
Aware of the benefits and willing to pursue them, governments
first need to overcome various types of challenges posted by
Government 2.0. In particular, the use of social media requires
governments to overcome challenges related to privacy, security,
data management, accessibility, social inclusion, governance and
policy-related issues [5]. Focusing on the data management
perspective, only integrating data streams from social media
requires solving two important issues: 1) the magnitude of the
information flow associated with such data streams (e.g. Twitter
disseminates 55 million tweets a day), and 2) extracting
meaningful information –social media data streams are usually
incomplete which may be potentially inconsistent, as citizens
might have different views on a certain issue.
Addressing technical challenges of data management in
government-use social media tools, this paper presents DECIDE
2.0 – a framework integrating argumentation technologies and
context-based search for intelligent processing of citizens’ opinion
in social media. The framework relies on text mining and opinion
mining techniques to filter noise and detect main topics being
discussed by citizens in social media. Recognizing that the use of
such techniques is not a common government practice, the main
contribution of DECIDE 2.0 is to provide an automated tool for
extracting arguments based on citizens’ opinions. The framework

will enable to assess and confront pro- and cons- arguments to be
used by policy makers and government officials as inputs in
decision making processes.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents
an overview of the framework; while Section 3 explains the main
technologies applied in DECIDE 2.0 – context-based search and
argumentation using Defeasible Logic Programming (DeLP).
Finally, Section 4 outlines a roadmap for future work.
2. DECIDE 2.0 - OVERVIEW
DECIDE 2.0 aims at extending the current state of the art of web
2.0 technologies by integrating existing social media tools with
argumentation and context-aware technologies. Following its aim,
DECIDE 2.0 combines context-based search [6] and
argumentation [7] in a collaborative system for managing
(retrieving and publishing) service- and policy-related information
in social media tools used by governments. Therefore, DECIDE
2.0 contributes to a more enhanced set of Government 2.0 tools.
Context of
e-Government-
related
issue
Citizens
Citizens’
Opinion
Knowledge
base
post
opinions
C2) Argument-based
decision making
C1) Extracting opinions
using context-based
search
3. INTEGRATING ARGUMENTATION
AND CONTEXT-BASED SEARCH
Our approach involves two main stages: a) context-based search
from social media - C1 in Figure 1; and b) argumentative decision
making on the basis of the obtained information – C2, C3 and C4
in Figure 1. Next we will analyze these two stages in more detail.
3.1. Context-Based Search for Social Media
Context-based search in Twitter is an instance of context-based
search in general [6]. The task of context-based search could be
applied in many different situations. For example, a
contextualized suggestion interface could be useful to a journalist
for exploring information sources while she writes a news article.
It could also be helpful to a researcher, to identify novel but
r
Citizens’ Opinion
Database
Fig. 1. DECIDE 2.0 Framework
DECIDE 2.0 was originally presented in [8] and a revised version
of its architecture is presented in Figure 1. The architecture
comprises four main components: C1) Extracting Opinions -
based on data provided by social media, extracts citizens’
opinions on a given theme using context-based search and
produces formal predicates, and stores opinions and predicates in
a knowledgebase; C2) Argument-based Decision Making – based
on the generated knowledgebase, the component selects predicates
on a given theme; C3) Applying DeLP Web Services – predicates
are analyzed with DeLP web services to assess whether they
follow some assumptions or not; C4) Producing Global
Assessment – based on the results of the previous stage, arguments
are classified into pro- and cons- and are consolidated into a
global assessment of citizens’ opinion on a given theme.
Even though DECIDE 2.0 is intended to capture citizens’ opinions
from different social media, our current research is particularly
focused on the use of Twitter. Consequently, in what follows we
will outline part of our ongoing research in this direction.
SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS
167
C3) Applying Defeasible
Logic Programming
(DeLP) web services
C4) Producing global
assessment of citizens’
opinions
post
policy-related
issues
Citizens’
Opinion
(with details for
policy-making
oriented
decisions)
Government
Officials
related material to consider or to help assure that relevant areas
have been considered in her research work.
To illustrate our approach, we define a case study where
government stakeholders involved in a particular policy area are
interested in collecting opinions from Twitter on a topic that is
openly discussed by community members.
One of the goals of the proposed framework is to develop a topic
suggestion tool that has the capability of identifying a set of
opinions that share a common theme. We assume that a citizen’s
opinion refers to a certain theme and contains several terms. In
turn, the opinion may be related to one or more topics and it is
possible to associate each topic with the related terms in the
citizen’s opinion. In addition, the suggested topics can be
evaluated in the light of a set of criteria for assessing their quality.

The concepts are illustrated in Figure 2. Technically. given a
corpus of opinions O = {o1, o2, … ,om}, and a universe of possible
terms K ={k1, k2, …, kn}, we consider a topic ti of an opinion oj to
be a nonempty subset of the terms ki1, …, kip contained in K
satisfying a set of criteria for topic quality. In this sense, a topic
can be characterized as a set of cohesive terms associated with
opinions that share a common theme.
Fig. 2. DECIDE 2.0 Concepts
A contextualized search system starts with a piece of text d
reflecting a general context or topic of interest td and identifies a
set N = {t1, t2, …, tq} of new topics related to topic td. The
performance of the main component of the system - a
contextualized topic suggester, can be judged according to various
criteria [10]:
o Global coherence: The new suggested topics (topics in N)
must be relevant to the general topic of interest td.
o Local coherence: Each suggested topic must be of high
quality according to the criteria of the domain. Such criteria
might include: 1) measures of coherence - each topic
description is constituted of tightly related terms and opinions,
2) descriptiveness - the terms used to identify the topics are
good descriptors, 3) discriminative power - the terms help
differentiate among other suggested topics , 4) conciseness -
the topic is summarized in few terms; etc.
o Coverage: The set of new suggested topics (N) must contain
most of the topics considered to be relevant.
o Novelty: The set of new topics (N) must go beyond the
information captured in the initial topic td.
o Diversity: topics in N must be sufficiently diverse from each
other.
Using context-based search, given a set O of opinions provided by
citizens via Twitter and a set of possible terms K on a topic of
community discussion td, we can identify new topics associated
with those opinions. Clearly, users might confront opinions,
including positive or negative remarks within their tweets.
Sentiment analysis techniques [11][12] allow to determine the
attitude of a speaker (citizen) or a writer with respect to some
topic or the overall contextual polarity of a document (e.g.
positive, negative, neutral). As a final result, we will be able to
identify different logical predicates associated with a user’s
opinion, the topics involved, and the attitude of the speaker.
As an example, consider the following piece of text d (extracted
from http://www.conservapedia.com):
ObamaCare, more formally known as "The Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act," was passed by Congress on March 21,
2010, and signed into federal law by President Barack Obama on
March 23. This law began the process to socialize the United
States health care system. The centerpiece of ObamaCare is the
individual mandate, a provision that makes it mandatory for every
citizen to purchase private health insurance, which is
unprecedented in American history.
168
By applying techniques described in [13] it is possible to identify
a set of good topic descriptors and topic discriminators (e.g.
preventive health care , obamacare, etc.) as well as a list of
representative hashtags associated with this topic, such as #hcr
and #obamacare. A context-based search system might then
identify the following set of opinions, among others:
o1: Thanks for the new health law, pregnant women can receive
many free preventive health services and screenings. (tweeted by
user U1)
o2: Health care reform does not make health care more
affordable it makes people buy something they can’t afford.
(tweeted by user U2)
From the opinions above, logical predicates can be extracted,
structuring previous information in logic programming fashion:
opinion(o1, “Thanks for…”)
opinion(o2, “Thanks for…”)
topic(t1, preventive health care)
useropinion(u1,o1, t1, positive)
useropinion(u2,o2, t1,negative)
Such set of logical predicates derived from citizens’ opinions on a
particular context will provide a Citizens’ Opinion Knowledgebase
(see Figure 1), on top of which an argumentative analysis
will be carried out.
3.2. Argumentation using DeLP
Over the last few years, argumentation systems have been gaining
increasing importance in several areas of Artificial Intelligence,
mainly as a vehicle for facilitating rationally justifiable decision
making when handling incomplete and potentially inconsistent
information [7]. Argumentation provides a sound model for
dialectical reasoning, which underlies discussions or opinion
confrontation in social networks.
Rule-Based Argumentation Systems, such as Defeasible Logic
Programming (DeLP) [14] are increasingly being considered for
applications in developing software engineering tools, constituting
an important component of multi-agent systems for negotiation,
problem solving, and for the fusion of data and knowledge. Such
systems implement a dialectical reasoning process by determining
whether a proposition follows from certain assumptions,
analyzing whether some of those assumptions can be disproved by
other assumptions in our premises. In this way, an argumentation
system provides valuable help to analyze which assumptions from
our knowledge base are really giving rise to inconsistency and
which assumptions are harmless.
In DeLP we refer to a knowledgebase as a pair of sets (KS, KD),
distinguishing strict and defeasible knowledge. Strict knowledge
(KS) corresponds to the knowledge which is certain; typical
elements in KS are statements or undisputable facts about the
world (e.g. adopting the representation used in logic
programming, implications of the form Q(x)←P(x)). The strict
knowledge is consistent, i.e. no contradictory conclusions can be
derived from it. Defeasible knowledge (KD) corresponds to that
knowledge which is tentative, modelled through “rules with
exceptions” (defeasible rules) of the form “if P then usually Q”
(e.g., “if somebody is a citizen, it usually votes”). Such rules
model our incomplete knowledge about the world, as they can
have exceptions (e.g., a citizen may be travelling abroad without
access to a voting place, or may not be willing to vote).
Syntactically, a special symbol (⇐) is used to distinguish
“defeasible” rules from logical implications.

The underlying DeLP process is as follows. Given a particular
query Q - e.g. assessing whether ObamaCare Programme is
supported by citizens’ opinions – isSupported(ObamaCare),
DeLP will automatically perform a backward chaining process to
obtain a sequence of defeasible rules instantiations allowing to
conclude Q. Such a sequence is called an argument supporting Q.
Clearly, as contradictory information can be present in the
defeasible knowledgebase, counter-arguments might arise (e.g. an
argument supporting ~isSupported(ObamaCare). When two
arguments A and B are in conflict, a preference criterion is used in
DeLP to determine which argument should prevail. The argument
that prevails will be called a defeater. The preference criterion to
be applied (e.g. specificity [14]) can be defined in a modular way.
Note that the notion of defeat among arguments may lead to
complex “cascade” situations: an argument A may be defeated by
an argument B, which in turn may be defeated by an argument C,
and so on. Besides, every argument involved may have on its turn
more than one defeater. Argumentation systems allow us to
determine when a given argument is considered as ultimately
acceptable with respect to the knowledge we have available by
means of a dialectical analysis, which takes the form of a tree-like
structure called dialectical tree. The root of the tree is a given
argument A supporting some claim, and children nodes for the
root are those defeaters B1, B2, .. Bk for A. The process is repeated
recursively on every defeater Bi, until all possible arguments have
been considered. The tree leaves are arguments without defeaters.
Some additional restrictions apply - e.g. the same argument
cannot be used twice in a path, as that would be fallacious and
would lead to infinite paths.
In DECIDE 2.0 we expect to have a knowledge engineer with
expertise in DeLP, who will be in charge (along with egovernment
officials) of characterizing a knowledge base of strict
and defeasible rules for assessing valuable aspects for policymaking
oriented decisions. Through suitable visualization tools,
the DeLP machinery will provide an automated dialectical
analysis of arguments and counterarguments when facing a
problematic situation (associated with a particular topic or context
for decision making), helping government officials to make better
and more informed decisions. It must be remarked that DeLPbased
recommender systems have been already successfully
formalized [15]. A particular deployment of DeLP for integrating
sentiment analysis and recommendations has also been applied
previously in a commercial software product for travelling
recommendations [16]
4. BRIEF ROADMAP: CONCLUSIONS
Research on the proposed framework will lead directly to
improved coverage, scalability and context-awareness with
respect to the current model of information delivery and retrieval
in social networks. Governments can greatly benefit from the
proposed solution in twofold - by having adequate mining
techniques to retrieve valuable information provided by citizens
on social media, and by targeting different announcements to the
appropriate group of government stakeholders.
In order to materialize the proposed solution, some important
technical problems are to be solved, and constitute research
questions of this work. Major challenges that we intend to address
defining a roadmap for our future work include: 1) developing
algorithms for integrating information - several users may post
messages related to the same topic; hence accrual of information
needs to be modeled properly; 2) implementing efficient models
of trust and reputation propagation - users post information on
social media whose reliability has to be assessed in order to
169
effectively use such information for decision making; and 3)
developing customized information models providing targeted
information to various categories of stakeholders requires having
different “views” of the issues under analysis.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research is funded by LACCIR (Latinamerican and Caribbean
Collaborative ICT Research), Microsoft Research, CONACyT
(Mexico) and Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) and PIP
CONICET Projects 112-200801-02798 and 112-200901-00863.
6. REFERENCES
[1] O’Reilly, T. Government as a Platform. Innovations, vol 6,
no.1, pp 13-40, 2010.
[2] DiMaio, A., Government 2.0: A Gartner Definition, 2009.
http://blogs.gartner.com/andrea_dimaio/2009/11/13/governm
ent-2-0-a-gartner-definition/, last retrieved 28 February 2012.
[3] Bonson, E., Torres, L., Royo, S., and Flores, F., Local e-
Government 2.0: Social Media and Corporate Transparency
in Municipalities, Government Information Quarterly, vol.
29, pp 123-132, 2012.
[4] Government of Singapore, Government Social Media
Directory, available at: http://www.socialmedia.gov.sg/Web/
Home/Default.aspx, last retrieved 15 April 2012.
[5] Bertot, J.C, Jaeger, P.T, and Hansen, D., The Impact of
Polices on Government Social Media Usage: Issues,
Challenges, and Recommendations, Government Information
Quarterly, vol. 29, pp 30-40, 2012.
[6] Lorenzetti, C., Maguitman, A. A Semi-supervised
Incremental Algorithm to Automatically Formulate Topical
Queries. Information Science. Elsevier. 179 (12), 2009.
[7] Simari, G., Rahwan, I. (eds), Argumentation in Artificial
Intelligence, Springer Verlag, 2009.
[8] Estévez, E., Chesñevar, C., Maguitman, A., Brena, R.
DECIDE 2.0 – A Framework for Intelligent Processing of
Citizens’ Opinion in Social Media. In Proc. dg.o 2012,
Maryland, USA, pp.266-267, ACM Press, 2012.
[9] Guo, L., Lease, M. Personalizing Local Search with Twitter.
SIGIR 2011 Workshop on Enriching Information Retrieval
(ENIR 2011).July 24–28, 2011, Beijing, China. Available at:
http://select.cs.cmu.edu/meetings/enir2011/papers/guolease.pdf.
[10] Maguitman, A., Leake, D., Reichherzer, T., Suggesting novel
but related topics: towards context-based support for
knowledge model extension, Proc. of the 10th IUI Conf., San
Diego, California, USA, January 2005.
[11] Twitter Sentiment Corpus, available at: http://www.
sananalytics.com/lab/twitter-sentiment/, retrieved April 2012.
[12] Bing Liu. "Sentiment Analysis: A Multifaceted
Problem." IEEE Intelligent Systems, 25(3), pp. 76-80, 2010.
[13] Maguitman, A., Leake, D., Reichherzer, T., Menczer,
F. Dynamic Extraction of Topic Descriptors and
Discriminators: Towards Automatic Context-Based Topic
Search. Proceedings of the 13 th CIKM Conf.. ACM Press.
Washington, DC, USA, November 2004
[14] García, A., Simari, G. Defeasible Logic Programming: An
Argumentative Approach. Theory and Practice of Logic
Programming 4(1-2): 95-138, 2004.
[15] Chesñevar, C., Maguitman, A, Simari, G. Recommender
Systems based on Argumentation, in "Emerging Artificial
Intelligence Applications in Computer Engineering".
Maglogiannis et al (eds). Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence
and Applications, Vol. 160, pp. 53-70.. IOS Press, 2007.

[16] Galitsky, B., McKenna, E. Sentiment Extraction from
Consumer Reviews for Providing Product Recommendations.
US Patent Application US 2009/0282019 A1
170

Preparing for Digital Curation Governance: Educating
Stewards of Public Information
ABSTRACT
We report results of research into curriculum development for
dual degree programs and the development of a dual degree
curriculum jointly undertaken by the University of North
Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and
School of Government (SOG). This IMLS-funded program
provides training in public information stewardship to four
cohorts of eighteen masters’ level students. The curriculum
development rests upon previous curriculum development
projects, examination of masters’ programs throughout the world,
semi-structured interviews of public sector information experts,
recommendations from an expert Advisory Board, and focus
group responses from current and alumni project Fellows.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J.1 [Computer Applications]: Administrative Data Processing –
Government
General Terms
Professional Development, Digital Curation, Electronic
Governance
Keywords
Continuing Education, Digital Information, Public Sector,
Government
1. INTRODUCTION
Curation of digital assets from all sectors of society provides
fundamentally new challenges and opportunities. Nowhere is the
need for stewardship of digital content greater than with
government information. Government activities and services are
now predominately performed using computer systems, and many
interactions with government are now performed over the
Internet. According to a recent study, 82% of internet users (61%
of all American adults) “looked for information or completed a
transaction on a government website” in the past year [7]. There
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
Christopher A. Lee and Helen R. Tibbo
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina
216 Lenoir Drive, CB #3360
1-(919)-962-7024
callee, tibbo@email.unc.edu
171
has been a dramatic push in many countries toward open access to
government data, which will only be successful if appropriate data
are retained and long-standing issues of data fragmentation can be
addressed [6].
The public administration literature uses the term “governance”
for the exercise of authority and control, in order to advance goals
of the state. In contrast to “government,” which suggests
established structures, governance is a continually evolving and
interactive set of processes. The governance concept has spawned
many associated terms within both the public and private sectors,
including corporate governance, information technology
governance, and data governance. Effective governance requires
an understanding of stakeholder needs, existing policies, social
norms, individual behaviors, incentive structures and
characteristics of potential implementation mechanisms.
“Digital curation governance” is an increasingly important arena
of activity with associated requirements for professional education
and engagement: ensuring the quality, integrity, discovery, access,
and meaningful use of digital collections over time. Digital
curation governance is a shared responsibility that requires
extensive communication, collaboration and mutual learning.
Those advancing the cause of digital curation governance must
have skills and competencies to navigate the policy arena, manage
projects, mobilize stakeholders and dig into the bits of digital
collections.
Many schools of information and library science have established
curricula to prepare professionals to establish and administer new
arrangements between information, technology and people. As
these professionals move into higher levels of responsibility and
authority, they engage not only in management but also in
governance, which includes “specifying the decision rights and
accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the
use” of information and technology [14].
A common theme in the literatures on governance and digital
curation has been the shared and distributed nature of the
activities. Governance can be driven and shaped by many nongovernment
actors, facilitated by changes in the geopolitical
landscape [10] and information technologies [9]. Successful longterm
stewardship of public information depends upon
contributions and actions of individuals from various sectors.
This will require “effective governance mechanisms…to
aggregate the collective interest into an effective preservation
strategy that ensures that the effort and cost of preservation are
appropriately apportioned” [3]. Innovative and timely professional
education will need to support new forms and features of
governance.

2. NEW NEEDS AND EXPECTATIONS
Navigating the current environment increasingly requires the
development and implementation of clear policies for data
curation. The National Association of State Chief Information
Officers (NASCIO) includes among its top state CIO priorities for
2011: document/content/records/e-mail management; data and
information management; data ownership in cloud computing;
and data governance [11]. Supporting, documenting and
evaluating government activities requires responsible stewardship
of public digital information, which will involves coordinated
efforts by a diversity of players. Professional education for
stewards of public information is most effective if it can
incorporate fundamental elements of both library and information
science (LIS) and public administration curricula.
Many records services and archives have developed and
advocated standards, policies and guidelines for public officials.
The most common examples are email policies, metadata
standards and recordkeeping system functional requirements.
While these documents are valuable, they have often not been
implemented widely and rarely carry enforcement mechanisms.
Records professionals often have not integrated the documents
into the larger arenas of policy and public administration in which
they operate.
Based on early experiences with electronic records, two
prominent themes in the literature are that records professionals
must collaborate with and draw expertise from other professionals
[8][12], and records professions must influence practices within
the public sector, rather than focusing solely on the management
of records already transferred to archival repositories [2].
As public digital information was becoming ubiquitous, there was
significant parallel growth in “strength and individualization in
graduate level archival education programs, a dramatic increase in
full-time, tenure-track faculty, a growing number of course
offerings often eclipsing the LIS offerings in an archival student’s
course of study, and the nascent development of degrees
acknowledging the archives and records field” [5]. Within the
United States, “new archivists and career changers (from another
career into archives) increasingly view the master’s degree as a
necessary requirement” with a master of library and information
science (MLIS) or an equivalent being “the degree of choice” [1].
Unfortunately, these developments have not yet translated into
widespread education on electronic records [1], nor have most
records professionals had any formal education in issues of policy
development, implementation or analysis. We believe it is
important to develop clear tracks of graduate study that (1) attract
students who already have an interest in government service, (2)
bring government service opportunities to the attention of those
already pursuing ARM careers, and (3) be built in programs that
have a robust technology infrastructure.
3. EDUCATING STEWARDS OF PUBLIC
INFORMATION
In 2009, the School of Information and Library Science (SILS)
and School of Government (SOG) at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) began a project called Educating
Stewards of Public Information in the Twenty-First Century
(ESOPI-21), funded by the Institute of Museum and Library
Services (IMLS). The project has redesigned and enhanced a dual
degree program that was earlier developed by SILS and the SOG.
172
Students in the program earn dual MSIS/MPA or MSLS/MPA
degrees, in order to prepare for careers in stewardship of digital
information in the public sector. In 2011, IMLS funded a second
project called Educating Stewards of the Public Information
Infrastructure (ESOPI 2 ).
The ESOPI projects have developed educational and professional
engagement opportunities. They fund two cohorts of eighteen
graduate-level Fellows, who are pursuing dual degrees at SILS
and SOG. The projects build on the work of two other IMLSfunded
projects: the DigCCurr I & II (Digital Curation
Curriculum) projects.
4. DUAL-DEGREE CURRICULUM
The MSIS/MSLS and MPA dual degree program at UNC-CH is
offered jointly by SILS and the SOG. It integrates policy
development, issues of legal compliance, and knowledge of
government structures and information with principles, values,
methods and technologies of the information professions.
4.1 Master of Information/Library Science
The School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at UNC-
CH offers two masters degrees: Master of Science in Information
Science (MSIS) and Master of Science in Library Science
(MSLS). Each degree requires 48 semester hours, which students
usually complete in four semesters (two academic years) of fulltime
study. This includes 24 semester hours of required core
courses and 24 semester hours of elective courses. Students must
also complete a comprehensive exam and a master’s paper.
The MSLS and MSIS core courses address five functional areas:
organization, collection and retrieval, information-related
behavior, design and evaluation, and management. The majority
of the required courses are the same for both degrees. The
differences are: MSLS students complete courses on Information
Resources and Services (INLS 501) and Resource Selection and
Evaluation (INLS 513), while MSIS students complete a course
on Information Retrieval (INLS 509); and MSIS students take a
class on Systems Analysis (INLS 582), which is not required for
MSLS students.
4.2 Master of Public Administration
The Master of Public Administration degree at the SOG is also
designed to be completed in two years of full-time study.
Students must complete at least 44 semester hours of course work.
Core courses address: Public Administration Institutions and
Values, Organization Theory, Public Service Leadership, Public
Administration Analysis and Evaluation, Professional
Communications, Human Resource Management, Public
Financial Management, and Law for Public Administration.
MPA students must also complete of a summer-long management
internship in a position with meaningful administrative
responsibilities, and a portfolio during the final semester of study.
One component of the portfolio is a comprehensive oral exam.
4.3 MPA and MSIS/MSLS Dual Degree
The UNC-CH MPA/MSIS and MPA/MSLS dual degree program
is designed to prepare students to deal with information issues in a
variety of public sector settings. This dual degree opportunity is
designed as a three-year, full-time program, requiring at least 71

semester hours. Nine of the forty-four (44) semester hours
required for the MPA may be counted from the SILS curriculum,
and twelve of the forty-eight (48) semester hours required for the
SILS degree may be counted from the MPA curriculum.
5. PRACTICAL ENGAGEMENT
COMPONENT
Project Fellows engage in coursework and simultaneously work
for 15 hours per week (or 360 hours over the summer) at one of
the projects’ participating partner institutions: the National
Archives and Records Administration, University Archives at
UNC-CH, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources,
Town of Chapel Hill, NC Orange County’s CIO’s Office, NC-
LIVE, the H. W. Odum Institute of Research in Social Science,
and UNC-CH Environmental Finance Center. The ESOPI projects
have provided fellowships to eighteen students 2009-2014.
Tasks performed by the fellows have included the creation of
various policies and policy-related guidance documents (on social
media, email, and text messaging), authoring an article on
eDiscovery software capabilities, revising and developing new
online training modules, and advising government energy
efficiency and water quality programs on possible financing
options and institutional arrangements.
6. RESEARCH METHODS
ESOPI research has included investigation of functions and
activities reflected in current research literature; professional
association guidance on key curricular needs; and current
offerings of graduate programs in public policy, information
science, and archives and records management.
The project has engaged in various research approaches, including
a comprehensive literature and website review of information and
library science and public administration masters-level programs,
a series of interviews with Advisory Board Members, a series of
interviews with public sector information experts, and a focus
group study of current and alumni Fellows from the project.
In 2010, we conducted two sets of semi-structured phone
interviews with experts in public administration and public
information management. The first eight interviews were with
members of the ESOPI advisory board. These were followed by
interviews with ten public-sector professionals who had presented
their work at the 2010 Best Practices Exchange.
In 2011, we conducted a focus group with four ESOPI fellows in
their final semester of the dual degree program. The discussion
revealed many program strengths, challenges and opportunities
for improvement.
7. FINDINGS
Findings can be characterized in terms of factors related to
“stewardship of public information,” desired knowledge and
competencies, current professional challenges, and SILS/SOG
dual degree integration.
7.1 Interviews
When asked to explain what is meant by “stewardship of public
information,” participants in our studies have provided a variety
of answers, often emphasizing characteristics of stewardship that
173
are particularly relevant to their own jobs or disciplines.
However, there were four main themes that emerged from the
interview data about this issue. First, many interview participants
discussed the importance of being able to understand and apply
the definition of public record, whatever that might be within
one’s particular jurisdiction. A second theme was balancing
privacy or confidentiality on the one hand with public access on
the other. A third theme was that of needing to understand the
value of public information (what makes certain forms of
information valuable and how to convey that importance to
relevant stakeholders). Finally, interview responses suggested the
need to differentiate the role of custodian as opposed to owner
which may overlap but often reside in different individuals or
organizations).
Many of the interview questions related to desired knowledge and
competencies. Participants identified many different responses,
which we have grouped into three broad categories: contextual
background knowledge; technical and operational skills; and
social skills and approach to work (see Table 1).
Table 1 - Desired Knowledge and Competencies
• Contextual background knowledge - how government works,
legal frameworks, accountability mechanisms, third party
agreements and contracts, comprises in information
lifecycle, balance between privacy and accessibility,
planning and evaluation processes, project management and
requirements definition and design, recordkeeping
requirements, patterns of information use, environmental and
budgetary drivers of workplace evolution
• Technical and operational skills - integrating technological
knowledge with understanding of government functions and
processes; allocating storage and space; identifying and
recommending access methods, preservation techniques and
system designs; data quality and data management, metadata
and access provision via interface design; identifying and
explaining which information does or does not have longterm
value; data and workflow modeling
• Social skills and approach to work - verbal and written
communication skills; teamwork skills; “thinking on one’s
feet”; appreciating importance of speaking carefully and
thoughtfully in the public sector; commitment to open
government and public accountability; focus on creating
efficiency and economy in processes; thinking at the
enterprise level to act as change agents; capabilities to gain
sponsorship, build coalitions, and get support by engaging in
stakeholder identification and team building; ability to
“manage people when you are not their boss”; curiosity and
willingness to engage in ongoing education
We also asked interview participants about current professional
challenges. Responses fell into the following categories: limited
funding for infrastructure (including storage); insufficient IT skills
of responsible staff; outreach to stakeholders and making business
case for investment in information stewardship; characteristics of
data creation (large volume, highly distributed, often unstructured,
inconsistent metadata conventions and quality); underdeveloped
user interfaces and access mechanisms; and defining new job
roles and categories.
Members of the ESOPI Advisory Board have also provided
substantial input on how to approach the dual degree, what

practical work experience contexts to pursue, and how to set the
future direction of the dual degree.
7.2 Focus Group and Dual Degree Findings
Our research has revealed numerous benefits and
complementarities of completing both degrees. Interview
participants and graduating ESOPI fellows have identified a
variety of advantages, including complementary knowledge, skills
and perspectives, as well as a wider range of employment
opportunities.
We have also learned about cultural differences between the SOG
and SILS. The SOG has a more regimented curriculum and
smaller number of students, resulting in a more tight-knit cohort
of students. The SOG also places heavy emphasis on preparing
students to behave as public officials, with associated expectations
for personal presentation and interaction. By contrast, SILS has a
more individually-crafted curriculum and a larger set of students,
resulting in less of a cohesive cohort. SILS courses often place
great emphasis on scholarly knowledge and recent research
literature.
Feedback from ESOPI Fellows has revealed that the majority of
content from the MSIS/MSLS and SOG degrees is
complementary, rather than being repetitive. The dual degree has
been designed to allow students to replace similar courses from
one program to the other, e.g. the SOG course on Public Service
Leadership (PUBA 711) can substitute for the SILS course on
Management for Information Professionals (INLS 585). Courses
in the two programs related to research methods, analysis and
evaluation do have similarity in scope, but they address the topics
quite differently given the nature of the two programs. SILS is
considering changes to its research methods course sequence, and
we may need to revisit this area of the dual degree.
8. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
Stewardship of public information is a fundamental responsibility
of a democratic society. Providing appropriate access to public
information promotes accountability, rights of citizens, effective
administration of policy, and social memory. Public officials and
public servants must increasingly make and enact decisions
related to information systems; this requires an understanding of
ways in which people, information and technology can best
complement each other. Information professionals are also
increasingly required to engage in policy discussions and
processes; this requires an understanding of the history, principles,
processes and methods of public administration.
Fundamental to ensuring successful e-governance is appropriate
stewardship of the information that supports, documents and
advances governance processes. This work includes its own flavor
of governance, which we have called digital curation governance.
Enabling it will require professionals with a range of skills and
capabilities that may not have previously been considered part of
public administration or the work of information professionals.
We see great potential for advancing professional capabilities
required at the frontier of public information stewardship.
9. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Research associated with this work has been supported by the
Institute for Museum and Library Services (Grant Awards # RE-
05-09-0085-09 and # RE-05-11-0076). We would like to
174
acknowledge numerous contributions of Lori Richards to the two
ESOPI projects and to various products reported in this paper.
10. REFERENCES
[1] Bastian, J. and Yakel, E. 'Are We There Yet?'
Professionalism and the Development of an Archival Core
Curriculum in the United States. Journal of Education for
Library and Information Science, 46, 2 (2005), 95-114.
[2] Bearman, D. and Hedstrom, M. Reinventing Archives for
Electronic Records: Alternative Service Delivery Options. In
Electronic Records Management Program Strategies.
Archives and Museum Informatics, Pittsburgh, PA, 1993, 82-
98.
[3] Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation
and Access. Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet:
Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information. 2010.
[4] Conference of Directors of National Libraries. Resolution on
the Preservation of the Digital Heritage - Adopted by the
General Conference of UNESCO at the 31st session. United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,
Paris, 2001).
[5] Cox, R. J., Yakel, E., Bastian, J. A., Wallace, D. and
Marshall, J. Archival Education at the Millennium: The
Status of Archival Education in North American Library and
Information Science Schools. Library Quarterly, 71, 2
(2001), 141-194.
[6] Doyle, C. D. Federal Electronic Information in the United
States. In Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences.
CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 2010, 1823-1833.
[7] Government Online. Pew Research Center, Washington, DC,
2010.
[8] Hedstrom, M. Building Record-Keeping Systems: Archivists
are Not Alone on the Wild Frontier. Archivaria, 44 (Fall
1997), 44-71.
[9] Marche, S. and McNiven, J.D. E-Government and E-
Governance: The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be. Canadian
Journal of Administrative Sciences, 20, 1 (March 2003), 74-
86.
[10] Rosenau, J.N. and Czenpiel, ed. Governance without
Government: Order and Change in World Politics.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992.
[11] State CIO Priorities for 2011. National Association of State
Chief Information Officers, October 19, 2010.
[12] Walch, V.I. Maintaining State Records in an Era of Change:
A National Challenge. Council of State Historical Records
Coordinators, 1996.
[13] Wallace, D. A. Survey of Archives and Records Management
Graduate Students at Ten Universities in the United States
and Canada. American Archivist, 63, 2 (Fall 2000), 284-300.
[14] Weill, P. and Ross, J.W. IT Governance: How Top
Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results.
Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, 2004.

REGNET: Regulatory Information Management,
Compliance and Analysis
ABSTRACT
This paper describes a research effort that aims to develop
information infrastructure and tools to facilitate access,
compliance and analysis of government regulations. It is well
recognized that the complexity, diversity, and volume of
government regulations are detrimental to business and hinder
public understanding of government. The burden of complying
with regulations can fall disproportionately on small businesses
since these businesses may not have the expertise or resources to
keep track of the regulations and the requirements. The situation
can potentially be improved by developing appropriate tools that
can help facilitate the regulatory and compliance process. To
illustrate, this paper discusses the applications of information
technology for selected services related to regulations, such as
compliance assistance, comparison of regulation from diverse
sources, and e-rulemaking.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search
and Retrieval – retrieval models, I.2.1 [Artificial Intelligence]:
Applications and Expert Systems – law.
General Terms
Algorithms, Management, Legal Aspects.
Keywords
regulations; compliance assistance; relatedness analysis; erulemaking;
information retrieval; e-government.
1. INTRODUCTION
This paper provides an overview of the REGNET research project
at Stanford University, which aims to gain insights on information
infrastructure and tools that can facilitate access, compliance,
analysis and use of government regulations. Regulations, in
general, provide many social benefits, such as protecting our
environment and improving public safety and accessibility.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Kincho H. Law and Gloria Lau
Engineering Informatics Group
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Stanford University
Stanford, CA, 95014, USA
law@stanford.edu; glau@stanford.edu
175
However, the complexity, diversity, and volume of Federal and
State regulations are detrimental to business and also hinder
public understanding of government. As new issues arise, new
regulations are promulgated; old regulations, however, are rarely
removed. Regulations emanating from different agencies often
overlap; because settings and objectives differ, they may be
inconsistent. The scope of concern and the terminology used to
express those concerns often differs among agencies. The
distributed responsibilities also increase the complexity in dealing
with regulations. Advances in information technology can
potentially improve the situation by developing appropriate tools
that can help facilitate the regulatory process, from rulemaking to
compliance assistance.
“Deciphering and complying with federal regulations is a legal
and paperwork nightmare for many businesses. To keep pace,
some hire consultants--sort of regulatory accountants--to keep
track of the applicable health, safety, environmental and equalopportunity
rules [1].” Regulations can be particularly
burdensome on small businesses since they often do not have the
resources to keep track of and to deal with these complicated
regulations and the compliance procedures. This burden has been
recognized and targeted by legislation through the Regulatory
Flexibility Act (RFA), which was amended by Small Business
Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA). Agencies
have a commitment to take into account the burden that
regulations can place on small businesses. SBREFA requires that
agencies to establish procedures, policies and guides to promote
compliance with RFA. Agencies published, in accordance to
SBREFA, Small Entity Compliance Guides that are written in
plain language and elucidate the rights of small entities in
enforcement actions (e.g. reducing civil penalties for violations).
Furthermore, agencies, such as EPA, must provide Congress and
the General Accounting Office with copies of all final rules and
supporting analyses [2]. The act clearly recognizes the
information problem facing business, particularly small
businesses, in compliance with regulations. The Small Business
Administration (SBA) (with participation from various federal
agencies, including EPA, FDA, OSHA, etc.) launched an
initiative to build a “one-stop” portal to assist small businesses to
comply with regulations [3]. In recent years, governmental
portals (such as the FirstGov.gov and USA.gov) have emerged to
provide public to gain access to US government information and
services on the web. Government regulations are available online
(for examples, see www.gpoaccess.gov/cfr/ and
www.regulations.gov). Most of the online portals are designed
primarily for displaying the regulatory information and often
usable only by experienced users, who are familiar with the

subject and the portal. Some primitive searching capabilities may
be provided; however, it remains difficult to locate crossreferenced
information and to link the regulatory information with
useful applications. Utilization of advanced information
technologies and development of new and innovative high quality
tools are crucial to move the regulatory information available and
useful to the public.
This paper describes a research effort investigating useful
information services related to regulatory information. The paper
is organized as follows: First, a brief literature review on
applications of IT in laws and regulations is provided in the next
section. Example applications are then presented to illustrate
some of the research issues investigated in the REGNET project.
The paper is concluded with a brief summary and discussion on
current research.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
Research on information science and technology applicable to
regulations and laws has been active research area for decades.
There has been a great deal of work done on building expert
systems for law [4,5]. T. Bench-Capon provided a review on the
applications of knowledge-based systems for legal applications,
particularly the research and development efforts related to the
Alvey DHSS Demonstrator project in U.K. [6]. The reference
includes several hundreds of citations that appeared before 1990
which are related to logic and rule based approaches and their
application in legal systems. Erdelez and O’Hare also provided
an overview of the research and status of legal informatics in the
1990s [7]. Applications of case-based reasoning and information
retrieval techniques have been proposed [5,8]. Current state on
information technology and laws can also be found in a recent
book edited by Lodder and Oskamp [9]. While legal knowledge
representation and reasoning has been an active research topic, an
integrated approach covering the management of regulations,
efficient access and retrieval of regulatory and related documents
and tools for compliance assistance is missing.
Policies and public interests concerning how IT can be
appropriately and effectively applied to regulation management,
rulemaking and compliance assistance have been actively
discussed in workshops and public forums [10-12]. It has been
recognized that information technologies, including information
retrieval, text mining, knowledge representation, logic reasoning,
natural language processing and many other areas, can find
applications in legal informatics and further enhance the
development of regulatory information systems. Issues such as
what types of support are needed to go from the textual
information of the regulations to the formal models that can
support computations, to integrate and link diverse source of
related documents to regulations, and to provide means to analyze
and compare regulatory data, are fundamentally important to an
effective regulatory information system. Practical applications
require that the computer be able to interpret the situation or
circumstances, scenarios and exceptional cases. Solutions that do
emerge must support the treatment of multiple, heterogeneous
regulations and related documents from diverse sources. Modeling
regulations requires not only the understanding of individual
content within a regulation provision, but also the relationships
among and within provisions as well as mechanisms for linking
applications, supplemental documents and related information
with the regulations. Research in this field must proceed in two
176
parallel tracks: (1) representing the regulations so that they can be
accessed according to the needs of the users and the regulatory
agencies, and (2) structuring the regulations so that they can be
assessed automatically to support applications, such as
compliance assistance, business processes and others. The
research of REGNET investigates information service
infrastructure that takes textual repositories as a base and develop
methodologies and tools to locate, merge, compare, and analyze
the information. This paper describes selected examples to
illustrate some of the research issues investigated in the REGNET
project.
3. A REGULATION-CENTRIC
COMPLIANCE ASSISTANCE
FRAMEWORK
There has been a push for government agencies to put more
emphasis on compliance assistance in lieu of enforcement to
encourage companies to comply with regulations [13]. Towards
this end, specialized programs, using expert system technologies
for example, have been built to assist users in understanding
regulations and fulfilling the requirements [14]. Among the
limitations of many compliance assistance systems is that the
tools do not directly map or link to the source documents that they
represent. Our research adopts a regulation-centric approach to
structuring a compliance assistance system around the regulation
itself [15,16]. The rules together with the metadata about the
regulations are directly embedded within the provisions they
represent. This framework allows clear linkages to the regulation
text. Because all encoded regulation rules are tied to particular
regulation provisions, it is straightforward to map the compliance
process to the provisions. The following briefly describes the
structure of the document repository for the regulations and the
regulation assistance system.
3.1 A. Document Repository
The scope of our research and the document repository
demonstrative development cover Title 40 of the US Code of
Federal Regulations (40 CFR): Protection of the Environment
[17]. Besides the regulations themselves, the repository also
includes supplementary and supportive documents that are
important for the accurate interpretation of the federal
regulation(s) to which they refer [18]. 1 For the research
prototype, supplemental documents dealing with used oil, which
include the preamble to the regulation text found in 40 CFR 261
and 279, administrative decisions, guidance documents, federal
cases, letters from the general counsel and letters of interpretation
from the issuing agency. The document repository is designed not
1 Supplementary and supportive documents are important part of
regulatory information and are commonly considered in
judiciary decisions. To illustrate, for the case “Beazer East, Inc.
v. U.S. EPA, Region III” (963 F.2d 603, 3 rd Cir. 1992), Beazer
East, Inc., argued that the aeration basins were “tanks”, not
“surface impoundments”, and were therefore not subject to
RCRA’s groundwater-monitoring regulations. The court ruled
in favor of EPA by considering the so called “Weddle
memorandum”, which was issued to clarify the definitions of a
“tank” and a “surface impoundment,” as an interpretive rule,
which can be exempted from the notice and comment
requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act.

Search Terms/ Concepts
References
Definitions
only to facilitate displaying the provisions but also to support
compliance assistance by making these important documents
more accessible.
A document-centric repository is designed to structure and to
organize the regulation texts and metadata. Mirroring the
standard structure of regulations, the XML-based framework
includes tags for each level of regulation text – for example part,
subpart, section or subsection. A parsing system using basic
pattern matching according to the regulation structures is built to
transform the regulations from Portable Document Format (PDF)
or HTML into the XML-based document framework. In addition
to the regulation texts, the XML-based structure is augmented
with regulation-specific metadata, including concept tags,
reference tags and definition tags (see Figure 1).
o With existing text mining and information retrieval tools,
concepts can be generated automatically or semiautomatically
from the regulation texts. The concept tags
are introduced so that links to related supporting documents
in the document repository can be dynamically generated.
This is useful because supporting documents and regulations
may not directly reference each other even when they
address the same topic. The automatic application of concept
tags to the XML framework means that as new supporting
documents are added to the document repository, regulations
stored in the framework can automatically be linked to them
via the terms that they share.
o Regulation provisions tend to include casual references to
other provisions. Simple references (for example, “as stated
in 40 CFR section 262.14(a)(2)”) and complex references
(for example, “the requirements in subparts G through I of
this part” as in part 265) exist. Manually translating such
references would be time consuming. A parsing system was
developed using a context-free grammar and a semantic
representation/interpretation system that is capable of tagging
regulation provisions with the list of references they contain.
The references serve not only for retrieval of related
provisions, but also provide a list of provisions that may
require consideration during the compliance checking
process.
o Regulation contain many domain-specific terms and
acronyms that can make regulation text difficult for novices
Search by Concept Category
Letter of of Interpretation
(a) Definition, definition and concept tags (b) Retrieving supporting document using concepts
Figure 1: Metadata defined for regulations
177
to understand. Adding the definition tags would allow a
regulation viewing system to incorporate explicit definitions
of terms and acronyms into its user interface (for example,
by mousing over the term). Definitions can be extracted
from the regulations (and other sources) and automatically
attached to the terms identified by a parser.
3.2 Compliance Assistance
Our research of a compliance assistance infrastructure builds upon
the XML regulation framework and takes advantage of the
regulation metadata described earlier. Besides the concept,
reference and definition tags, logic and control processing
metadata are added into the XML regulation framework. The
logic metadata represents a rule or concept from a regulation. First
Order Predicate logic sentences are used to represent the rules that
must be followed for an entity to be in compliance with the
regulations. Control processing metadata provides information
about what provisions need to be checked for compliance.
Metadata are also introduced to manage the interaction between
the user and the system. Each logic or control processing
metadata is associated with a specific regulation provision and is
manually tagged with logic and control process metadata.
The compliance assistance system controls the process by taking
advantage of the metadata information. First, the system parses
the XML-structured regulation to extract the information
necessary to run a compliance check. Only those logic rules and
control processing metadata (based on the information from the
reference tags) are acquired and dynamically loaded into the
reasoning system. Logic reasoning tools, such as a theorem
prover, can then be used to perform the logic checks [19].
One essential feature of the web-based compliance assistance
system is that it helps guide the user through the regulations.
Utilizing the metadata tagged with the regulations, the system can
link to any referenced regulation provisions and display terms and
definitions. Key conceptual phrases for the provision are
displayed and linked, enabling instant access to repository
documents related to the provision. When the system completes
the check against the regulation provisions or detects a conflict
between the user’s answers and the regulation, it displays a
summary of the question-and-answer history as well as the results
of the compliance check.

One can easily build a compliance system for specific application
utilizing the regulation compliance assistance system and the
repository as a back end. To illustrate, Figure 2 shows linking the
provisions from the used oil regulations of the New York state to
the federal regulations implemented in the prototype. The online
guide is built for vehicle maintenance shops to check compliance
with the used oil based on paper-based 2002 guide developed by
the New York State department of Environmental Conservation
Prevention Unit [20]. As noted in Figure 2(b), the provision
references 40 CFR 279.23, which can be used as a link to the
regulation assistance system, as shown in Figure 2(c). Figure
2(d) shows the compliance result which shows the questions,
answers and the related provisions that contributed to the logical
conclusion.
There are many challenges in developing a compliance assistance
system. The regulation-centric approach where the document
repository includes not only the regulation documents but also the
supplemental document as well as rules and computational logic
embedded within the provisions can offer many advantages.
First, because users can see the regulation text as they interact
with the system, users may have better understanding of the
results produced by the system. Second, since users can see the
regulations during compliance process they may be able to learn
how the regulation works, and re-tracing the results easier for
validation purposes. Third, with supplementary documents
linking with the regulation, users can not only track how the
system is proceeding with its analysis, but also enquire
background information on the intents and issues of the
regulations, and directly address the questions that the regulation
is intended. Fourth, updating the system as the regulation changes
would become easier, since with the mapping between the
regulation and the rules in the system, what parts of the system
need to be changed become more obvious when the regulation is
altered. Last but not least, even though regulations are often
ambiguous, contain many exceptions, and are not written in the
(a) Vehicle maintenance shop compliance guide (b) Compliance guide for used oil
(c) Compliance guides linking to RAS (d) Results displaying questions, answers and provision
Figure 2: A regulation assistance system
178
form that is computationally sound, the regulation texts are often
well structured and organized. By implementing the compliance
assistance system according to the regulation structure can greatly
facilitate modular development of a compliance assistance system.

4. COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF
REGULATORY INFORMATION
Government regulations should ideally be understandable and
retrievable with ease by practitioners as well as the general public.
Requirements for a given situation could be different from
different regulations. Multiple sources of regulations, for
instance, from the Federal, State and local governments, amend,
complement and potentially conflict with one another.
Regulations from different agencies on similar and related issues
could differ and inconsistent with their intents. There are many
reference guides that are published independent of governing
bodies, attempting to help the public to better understand and
comply with the regulations. The regulations, amending
provisions and interpretive manuals together create a massive
volume of documents with potentially similar content but possible
differences in format, terminology and context. An information
infrastructure that can consolidate, compare and contrast different
regulatory documents will greatly enhance and aid the
understanding of regulations.
Retrieving and interpreting particular US government regulations
have become easier with the establishment of government portals
to enhance transparency to the public. For example, business.gov
(or sba.gov) is a centralized portal that contains information to
guide business owners and entrepreneurs through government
rules and regulations and to identify resources that can help them
start, grow and succeed in business. Regulations.gov provides a
forum for users to comment on existing and pending federal rules.
Government portals now provide useful information to help
citizens to access regulations and submit feedbacks. However,
what is needed is an information framework that enables
individuals and small businesses with limited resources to retrieve
related regulations from multiple copies of governing regulations
and related regulatory documents and then perform comparative
analysis. The REGNET project seeks to establish such a
framework and have initiated a number of studies focusing on US
national and regional regulations and codes in the domains of
environmental and accessibility standards.
4.1 Relatedness Analysis of Regulatory
Documents
Text document comparison, in particular similarity analysis
between documents, has been an active research area in
Information Retrieval [21,22]. Regulatory documents differ from
generic text documents in that sections are organized
hierarchically and they are heavily cross referenced. As noted
earlier, a wide variety of meaningful concepts can be extracted
and categorized using text mining and information retrieval tools.
However, terminologies used in the regulations for a specific
application, such as hazardous wastes, are better defined than free
form text documents. On the other hand, common sense or
dictionary knowledge may not substitute domain knowledge;
“lift” and “elevator”, for example, are synonymic terms in normal
English usage, but each have specific meanings in accessibility
regulations. In addition to traditional information retrieval
179
techniques, our framework exploits the structural organization of
the regulatory documents, references and their distributions, and
the “bounded” terminology set to further enhance comparative
analysis of regulations [23-25]. To illustrate, we compare
similarities between sections from different regulations. Our
attempt is to identify the most related provisions between different
regulations. The “relatedness” analysis framework takes into
consideration the structure (section hierarchy, referencing) of the
document and the features (concepts, synonyms, etc.) that are
specific to the corpus. In our current approach, a base score for
each pair of provisions is first computed by matching extracted
features (including concept phrases, synonym information,
measurements and units, etc..). The scoring scheme for each of
the features essentially reflects how much resemblance can be
inferred between the pair of sections based on that particular
feature. The score is then refined by taking into account the
hierarchical organization of regulations. Finally, we further refine
the score by considering reference distribution, which takes into
account that regulations are heavily self-referenced and crossreferenced.
Figure 3 shows an example that reveals the similarity (almost
identical texts) discovered between sections from Parts 141-143 of
40 CFR and Division 4 of 22 CCR on regulations related to
drinking water [17,26]. It is not uncommon that one agency
directly adopts provisions issued by another agency. However,
subtle differences exist and can have significant effects to the
public. As an example, Figure 4 shows the barium requirements
for drinking water by both the US EPA and the California DHS
[17,26]. While the two provisions contain identical texts (except
for the agencies), a careful reader might also note that the EPA
and the California DHS do have different barium requirements –
the EPA requires 2 parts per million while the California DHS
sets the requirement at 1 part per million. This example also
illustrates the importance of domain knowledge, where a
measurement comparison would reveal that these two provisions
are not identical, even though the wordings are almost the same.
Another interesting application for comparison analysis is to
locate similar provisions from different states [27].
In developing a regulation information management (RIM)
system that would allow searching, retrieving and comparing
regulations, domain knowledge plays a very important role in
understanding regulations and the relationships between them.
For instance, different regulations use different chemical
acronyms, such as TTHM or HAA (used in 40CFR) and “total
trihalomethanes” or “haloacetic acids” (appeared in 22CCR).
Besides typical text mining and information retrieval
methodologies, we believe a knowledge driven approach,
combining with similar analysis, is a powerful way to develop a
RIM system. In particular, distinct knowledge sources or
regulations do not have to be made completely consistent, only
the terms and the concepts that articulate their application
connections are involved. Ontological information (terms,
features and relationships) commonly used by industry experts
can be important to search and compare regulations for specific
industry sectors and regulatory domains [28,29].

Figure 3: Comparison of similar sections in 40CFR [17] and 22CCR [26] on drinking water regulations
40.cfr.141.32.e.16 Barium
The United States Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) sets drinking water standards and
has determined that barium is a health concern
at certain levels of exposure. . . .In humans,
EPA believes that effects from barium on blood
pressure should not occur below 2 parts per
million (ppm) in drinking water. EPA has set the
drinking water standard for barium at 2 parts
per million (ppm) to protect against the risk of
these adverse health effects. Drinking water
that meets the EPA standard is associated with
little to none of this risk and is considered
safe with respect to barium.
4.2 Comparing Drafted Regulations with
Public Comments
The making of government regulations involves communication
between the issuing agency and the public. During the rule-
22.ccr.64468.1(c) Barium
The California Department of Health Services
(DHS) sets drinking water standards and has
determined that barium is a health concern at
certain levels of exposure. . . In humans, DHS
believes that effects from barium on blood
pressure should not occur below 2 parts per
million (ppm) in drinking water. DHS has set the
drinking water standard for barium at 1 part per
million (ppm) to protect against the risk of
these adverse health effects. Drinking water
that meets the DHS standard is associated with
little to none of this risk and is considered
safe with respect to barium.
Figure 4: Comparison of drinking water standards for barium between US EPA [17] and CA DHS [26]
180
making process, government agencies are required to inform the
public about the drafted rules and to solicit comments and
reviews. E-rulemaking redefines the process of rule drafting and
commenting by utilizing electronic media, such as the Internet.
For example, email has become a popular communication channel
for the public to submit comments on proposed rules.

1105.4 [6]
Content of
Section 1105.4
6 Related Public Comments
The process of e-rulemaking with participation from the public
involves sorting through and organizing a massive volume of
electronically submitted comments. We extended the related
analysis framework to compare drafted regulations with
associated public comments [23,30,31]. To locate related
materials, we use regulation structures and features as well as
certain characteristics of the drafted rules to add knowledge to the
comparison. In particular, most drafted rules are domain-specific,
focusing on a narrowly-defined issue or area of interest. The
relatedness analysis takes advantage of the added knowledge to
facilitate the comparison between the drafted rules and public
comments.
To illustrate, we applied the prototype system to a 15-page drafted
chapter for the ADAAG titled, “Guidelines for Accessible Public
Right of Way,” which has received over 1400 public comments
[32,33]. Figure 5 shows the results indicating the public
comments that are related to a specific drafted rule as well as an
example that is not relevant to the proposed rules. Figure 5(b)
shows a typical pair consisting of drafted section and its identified
related comment. The draft discusses situations that “signal
timing is inadequate for full crossing of traffic lanes,” while the
commenter wrote “walk lights that are so short in duration”. The
result shows the importance of a full content comparison between
provisions and comments is necessary instead of just simple
keyword matching. Figure 5(c) shows a different type of comment
screening that a particular piece of public comment is not latched
with any drafted section. The commenter suggests how a visually
impaired person should practice blindness skills as opposed to the
drafted rule which concerns with installing electronic devices on
streets to help.
Although this experiment is performed on regulations with a
relative small set of comments, the potential of such knowledgedriven
similarity analysis approach could be quite useful for the erulemaking
process, where electronic media, such as emails and
ADAAG rights-of-way draft
1105.4.1 Length
Where signal timing is inadequate for full crossing of all
traffic lanes or where the crossing is not signalized, …
Public comment
Deborah Wood, October 29, 2002
… This often means walk lights that are so short in
duration that by the time a person who is blind realizes
they have the light, …
(b) Related draft rule and comment
ADAAG rights-of-way draft
No relevant section identified
Public Comment
Donna Ring, September 6, 2002
If you become blind, no amount of electronics on your
body or in the environment will make you safe and give
back to you your freedom of movement. You have to
learn modern blindness skills from a good teacher. …
(a) Comparison of drafted rules with public comments (c) Comment not related to drafted rules
Figure 5: Application of relatedness analysis for e-rulemaking
181
the internet, are used by the public to comment on proposed rules
and regulations.
5. SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION
This paper has demonstrated, in a small way, how information
technology can potentially be used effectively to facilitate
regulatory information management and compliance assistance.
The complexity and scale of regulations pose many challenges to
information technology research. In REGNET we have
investigated fundamental issues related to government
regulations, their features, characteristics and properties that need
to be addressed. In this paper, we have presented a regulatory
compliance assistance framework that not only focuses on
translating requirements into computational rules but also takes
into consideration the organization of regulations as well as the
supplementary information that are needed to enable better
understanding and interpretation of the regulations. We have
presented examples to illustrate how advanced IT development
can be applied to facilitate retrieval of regulatory information and
to compare related regulations issued by different agencies and
organizations. The relatedness analysis methodology has been
shown to be potentially useful for supporting the e-rulemaking
process.
Ongoing research in REGNET continues to explore how
information technology can facilitate better understanding of
regulations and public policies. For instance, regulations are
traditionally issued and managed by isolated individual state and
federal agencies. Coordination among different agencies about
what issues agencies need to collaborate and in what capacity is
not always easy. As part of the REGNET effort, Ekstrom has led
the development of a tool to gauge agency involvement in a
specific topic related to marine ecosystem management [34,35].
Utilizing information retrieval techniques and text analysis, the
tool first maps out agency’s involvement in a particular topic

ased on the laws and regulations issued by an agency, and then
analyze possible areas of overlaps and disparities among the
regulations by the different agencies on the topic. The tool has
the potential to identify objectively what agencies are involved in
the management of a topic across sectors and levels of
government. In a collaborative effort with Prof. Jay Kesan at
University of Illinois, our research has been extended to deal with
laws and regulations related to intellectual properties (IP) [36,37].
Information pertaining to IP includes not only laws and
regulations, but also patents, court cases, scientific literature, and
other related data. Our research is to develop a computational
framework that can assist in retrieving related information about a
specific topic across these diverse domains, with the objective to
mitigate and help solve many of the complicated issues involved
in patent filings and compliance.
While our research has demonstrated the potential use of
information science and technology in government regulation
domain, much research and development efforts remain. Among
the challenges include interpretation and validation of regulations,
which are often ambiguous in nature. Translating regulations in
computable rules, even manually, can be difficult. Automated
translations would require the development of formal models for
rule making and rule writing. Last but not least, technology
transfer mechanisms are needed to bridge the gap between
fundamental research demonstration and the development of tools
ready for deployment.
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research has been partially supported by the National Science
Foundation (Contract Numbers EIA-9983368, EIA-0085998, and
IIS-0811460). The authors would like to thank Professor Gio
Wiederhold of Stanford University for his mentorship in the
REGNET project. The authors would also like to thank Larry
Brandt and Valerie Gregg (former program directors of NSF’s
Digital Government Program), and Sylvia Spengler, (program
director of NSF’s Information Integration and Informatics
program) for their encouragement and supports. The
contributions by the former and current research students of the
Engineering Informatics Group at Stanford University are
gratefully acknowledged. In particular, the regulation assistance
system (RAS) was implemented by Dr. Shawn Kerrigan under the
supervision of the first author. Any opinions expressed in this
paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of the National Science Foundation and their
collaborators.
7. REFERENCES
[1] C. Skrzycki, “The regulators; compliance education goes
self-service”, The Washington Post, May 23rd, 2000.
[2] M. Romine, “Politics, the environment, and regulatory
reform at the Environmental Protection Agency,”
Environmental Lawyer, September 1999.
[3] Business Compliance One Stop Workshop, Small Business
Administration, Queenstown, MD, July 24-26th, 2002.
[4] P. Wahlgren, Automation of Legal Reasoning, Kluwer Law
and Taxation Publishers, 1992.
182
[5] J. Zeleznikow and D. Hunter, Building Intelligent Legal
Information Systems: Representation and Reasoning in Law,
Kluwer Law and Taxation Publishers, 1994.
[6] T. Bench-Capon, Knowledge Based Systems and Legal
Applications, The APIC Series 36, Academic Press, 1991.
[7] S. Erdelez and S. O’Hare, “Legal informatics: application of
information technology in law,” in Annual Review of
Information Science and Technology, M. E. Williams(ed.),
ASIS, Vol. 32, 1997.
[8] P. Wahlgren, Automation of Legal Reasoning, Kluwer Law
and Taxation Publishers, 1992.
[9] A. R. Lodder and A. Oskamp (ed.), Information Technology
and Lawyers: Advanced Technology in the Legal Domain,
from Challenges to Daily Routine, Springer, 2006.
[10] C. Coglianese, “E-rulemaking: information technology and
regulatory process,” Faculty Research Working Paper Series,
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Report
No. RWP 04-002, 2004.
[11] J.E. Fontane, “Prospects for improving the regulatory process
using E-rulemaking,” Communications of the ACM,
46(1):63-64, 2003.
[12] C. Coglianese, H. Kilmartin and E. Mendelson,
“Transparency and public participation in the federal
rulemaking P\process: recommendations for the new
administration,” George Washington Law Review, 77:924-
972, 2009.
[13] J.M. Van Wert, “Business compliance one-stop: creating a
single face of government,” presented at the National
Compliance Assistance Providers Forum, U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency and Texas Commission on
Environmental Quality San Antonio, TX. 2002.
[14] A. Botkin, “Wizards, advisors and websites, Oh My!
interactive electronic tools for compliance assistance,”
presented at the National Compliance Assistance Providers
Forum, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Texas
Commission on Environmental Quality, San Antonio, TX ,
2002.
[15] S. Kerrigan, A Software Infrastructure for Regulatory
Information Management and Compliance Assistance, Ph.D.
Thesis, Stanford University, August 2003.
[16] S. Kerrigan and K.H. Law, “A regulation-centric, logic-based
compliance assistance framework,” Journal of Computing in
Civil Engineering, ASCE, 19(1):1-15, 2005.
[17] Code of Federal Regulation, Title 40: Protection of
Environment, (Part 260-265: Hazardous Waste Management
System) 2003.
[18] F.A. Heffron and N. McFeeley, The Administrative
Regulatory Process, Longman, 1983.
[19] W.W. McCune, Otter 3.0 Reference Manual and Guide,
ANL-94/6, Mathematics and Computer Science Division,
Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL., 1993
[20] New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
Pollution Prevention Unit., Environmental Compliance And

Pollution Prevention Guide for Vehicle Maintenance Shops,
2002.
[21] R. Baeza-Yates and B. Ribeiro-Neto, Modern Information
Retrieval ACM Press, 1999.
[22] C.D. Manning, P. Raghavan and H. Schutze, H., Introduction
to Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
[23] G. T. Lau. A Comparative Analysis Framework for Semi-
Structured Documents, with Applications to Government
Regulations, Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford,
CA, August 2004.
[24] G. T. Lau, K. H. Law, and G. Wiederhold. "A relatedness
analysis of government regulations using domain knowledge
and structural organization," Information Retrieval, 9:657-
680, 2006.
[25] G. T. Lau, K. H. Law, and G. Wiederhold. "Comparative
analysis of government regulations using structural and
domain information," IEEE Computer, 38(12):70-76, 2005.
[26] California Code of Regulations, Title 22 (Social Security),
Division 4.5, Chapter 12, Standards Applicable to Generators
of Hazardous Waste, Barclays (Publisher), 1997.
[27] G. T. Lau, H. Wang, and K. H. Law. "Locating Related
Regulations Using a Comparative Analysis Approach,"
Proceedings of the National Conference on Digital
Government Research (dg.o2006), San Diego, CA, May 21-
24, 2006.
[28] C. P. Cheng, J. Pan, G. T. Lau, K. H. Law, and A. Jones,
"Relating Taxonomies with Regulations," Proceedings of the
9th Annual International Conference on Digital Government
Research (dg.o2008), Montreal, Canada, May 18-21, 2008.
183
[29] C. P. Cheng, G. T. Lau, K. H. Law, J. Pan, and A. Jones,
"Regulation retrieval using industry specific taxonomies,"
Artificial Intelligence and Law, 16(3): 277-303, 2008.
[30] G. T. Lau, K. H. Law, and G. Wiederhold. "A relatedness
analysis tool for comparing drafted regulations and the
associated public comments," Journal of Law and Policy for
the Information Society, 1(1):95-110, 2005.
[31] G. T. Lau and K. H. Law. "A prototype study on electronicrulemaking,"
Encyclopedia of Digital Government, May
2006.
[32] ADA Accessibility Guidelines for Buildings and Facilities,
The Access Board, 1998.
[33] Draft Guidelines for Accessible Public Rights-of-Way, US
Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board,
Washington, DC, 2002.
[34] J. Ekstrom, G. Lau, C.P. Cheng, D. Spiteri, and K. Law,
"Gauging agency involvement in environmental management
using text analysis of laws and regulations," I/S – A Journal
of Law and Policy for the Information Society, 6(2):189-219,
2010.
[35] J. Ekstrom, G. Lau, D. Spiteri, J.C.P. Cheng, and K. Law,
"MINOE: a software to evaluate ocean management in the
context of ecosystems,” Coastal Management, 38: 5, 457-
473, 2010.
[36] S. Taduri, H. Yu, J.P. Kesan, G.T. Lau, and K.H. Law,
“Developing a comprehensive patent related information
retrieval tool,” Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic
Commerce Research, (in press).
[37] H. Yu, S. Taduri, J.P. Kesan, G.T. Lau, and K.H. Law,
“Retrieving information across multiple related domains
based on user query and feedback: application to patent laws
and regulations,” 4th International Conference on Electronic
Governance, Beijing, China, 2010.

Session 7
Policies 2

From Information-Poor to Information-Rich: Bridging
Regional Economic Disparities in Nigeria through e-
Governance
Sanjo Faniran
International Cooperation Department
Plot 421 Constitution Avenue,
Central Business District, Abuja, Nigeria
+2348034264007
sfaniran@npc.gov.ng
ABSTRACT
Most of the recent economic advancement experienced globally
has been driven largely by information and communication
technologies (ICTs) - from Kigali to Kuala Lumpur, Nairobi to
New Delhi - bringing significant changes in development of the
human society through technological innovation and information
dissemination. The pervasive use of digital technologies has, no
doubt, improved people’s day–to–day life in different ways and to
varying extents resulting in “economically-rich” and
“economically-poor” regions of the world, and at the same time,
“information-rich” and “information-poor” societies. This broadly
reflects the differing levels of access and utilization of
information and communication technologies, a phenomenon
referred to as the digital divide. This paper examines the coincidence
between economic disparities and ICT use, both
between and within countries. We argue that just as the adoption
of focused strategies in ICTs by developing countries is bridging
the global digital divide between countries and fast-tracking
economic development in many of today’s emerging economies,
the prioritization, adaptation and rapid diffusion of ICTs through
e-governance could also help reduce economic disparities
between sub-national entities and regions within countries. We
review case studies from India and South Africa, and compare
with Nigeria which aspires to become a top 20 economy by 2020.
By examining the results of the 2010/11 surveys on ICT access
and income-poverty distribution across the country, the paper
highlights the recent efforts by sub-national administrations in
Nigeria to advance e-government, presenting key opportunities to
bridge the growing economic disparities between regions in
Nigeria.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J.4 [Computer Applications]: Social and Behavioral Sciences –
Economics
General Terms
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
184
Kayode Olaniyan
National Bureau of Statistics
Plot 721 Constitution Avenue,
Central Business District, Abuja, Nigeria
+2348038499670
kolaniyan@nigerianstat.gov.ng
Management, Economics
Keywords
Digital Divide, Economic Development, Poverty, ICT Use,
Nigeria
1. INTRODUCTION: THE DIGITAL
DIVIDE AND REGIONAL ECONOMIC
DISPARITIES
A greater number of countries, and their citizens, are gaining both
knowledge of and skills at using modern ICTs, connecting to the
internet, and interacting using multiple media channels at a
rapidly increasing rate. According to the 2012 UN E-Government
Survey, the world average on the e-government index increased
by 10 percent over the last two years led by Europe and the
Americas [6]. One important point that the survey notes, however,
is that the digital divide – the differing levels of access and usage
of ICTs between the developed and the developing world -
remains a phenomenon of growing, rather than diminishing,
importance. This is despite the array of cutting-edge technologies
and evolution of social media and networking tools, which have
re-defined inter-human relationships, government and governance
in many parts of the world. According to a 2006 report, a person
living in a high-income country is over 22 times more likely to be
an Internet user than someone in a low -income country. Secure
Internet servers, a rough indicator of electronic commerce, are
over 100 times more common in high-income countries than in
low-income countries. In spite of their rapid growth in developing
nations, mobile phones are 29 times more prevalent in highincome
countries, and mainline penetration is over 21 times that
of low-income countries [5].
The usage to which many citizens put the internet, mobile phones
and other digital devices to spread information and record (and in
some cases influence) recent events, from Japan’s tsunami to the
different dimensions of the Arab Spring, demonstrate how far the
developing world has come, and how fast it is catching up with
the rest of the world. But despite the achievements towards
bridging the digital divide, and improving its positive impacts on
the society, there are still glaring regional disparities which are
both the causes and consequences of the economic well-being of
the developed world.
With a history of high levels of functional education and
widespread telephony infrastructure, Europe and the Americas as
a whole remain far ahead of the rest of the world regions [6].

Asia, which is home to around three-fifths of the world citizens,
has only around 70 per cent of the level of e-government in
Europe while the level of services in Africa barely squares off at
40 per cent of those in Europe. Within any region, countries at the
lower percentile of e-development do not fare well either. This is
especially true of the lower income countries in both Asia and
Africa. The 10 least e-ready countries in Asia have barely 37 per
cent of the level of e-government in Europe while in Africa the
figure is little more than 20 per cent [6]. Figure 1 below shows
global trends over the last decade in regional progress towards egovernment.
Figure 1: Advances in regional e-government development
(Source: UN E-Government Survey, 2012)
However, this scenario is not entirely hopeless. Within the last
decade in particular, many developing countries especially in
Africa and Asia, have increased their web presence, clearly
utilizing the opportunity to leapfrog the development cycle
through innovative adoption and deployment of ICTs. In Eastern
Africa, for example, mobile money transfer has taken strong roots
in Kenya and Uganda, and rapidly spreading across the continent
[1]. The effects of these technologies on socio-economic
development, gender empowerment, increased schooling rates and
rising income levels have been the subject of many recent
economic literature.
In view of the important role that ICTs play in bridging the digital
divide between countries and regions of the world, can the
deployment of ICTs also bridge the digital divide within countries
to the same extent thereby reducing economic disparities within
the country? This paper addresses this question by examining the
case of Nigeria, a West African nation, which aspires to become a
top 20 economy by 2020. The telecommunications industry
remains the fastest-growing sector in the country, recording
34.38% growth in 2010 and 34.76% in 2011, rapidly transforming
the business, economic and governance landscape across the
country. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: in section
2, a brief review of the methodology employed is presented, while
section 3 discusses the country experiences of India and South
Africa as case studies. In section 4, the Nigerian case is explored
more in-depth with respect to ICT access and the nature of
economic disparities in the country. Section 5 highlights some
opportunities for e-governance to reduce the disparities, while key
challenges to realizing this are presented in section 6. Section 7
concludes the paper.
185
2. METHODOLOGY
A review of two country cases studies – India and South Africa –
is undertaken to examine what the experience of countries with
similar large populations and economic conditions have been with
respect to bridging the digital divide. This is supported by
examining the latest available official data on ICT use and poverty
distribution at sub-national level for the country to determine
whether a relationship exists between access to ICTs and
economic development. For this purpose, access to ICTs is
measured by the percentage of persons who own or have access to
personal computers, mobile phones and internet access.
Economic development, on the other hand, is indicated by the
relative poverty (percentage) rate. Given the strong correlation
between access to internet, and access to personal computers
(estimated at 0.83, or 83%), and the fact that the data series for the
latter is more complete than the former “access to personal
computers” is selected as the better indicator of ICT access, and
hence the measure of the digital divide in Nigeria.
Data is obtained from Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics
(NBS) General Household Survey (2010/11) which produced data
on ICT use in Nigeria, as well as the Harmonised Nigeria Living
Standard Survey (2009/10) which produced data on relative
poverty.
3. COMPARATIVE COUNTRY CASE
STUDIES
In this section, we discuss the cases of India and South Africa:
two countries that have undertaken considerable efforts to bridge
the digital divide among sub-national entities and regions in their
domains. India’s global leadership in the IT industry is wellacknowledged
1 . The second most populous nation in the world,
India ranked 125 th on the UN E-Government Development Index
(EGDI) in 2012. India is one of the countries where
telecommunication development activities have gained
momentum in the past decade. Efforts have been made from both
governmental and non-governmental platforms to enhance
telecommunication infrastructure, provide modern technologies to
serve all segments of India’s culturally-diverse society, and to
transform the country into a IT powerhouse. However, the digital
divide still remains significant between rural and urban India [7],
[8]. While the major cities are even at par with some developed
countries, rural areas in states like Eastern Bihar and Orissa are
worse off than several least-developed countries. With respect to
teledensity 2 for example, according to the Telecom Regulatory
Authority of India (TRAI) while States like Delhi and Chennai
have more phones than people (with >100% teledensity rate) the
teledensity in States like Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand are as low as
4.18% and 3.49% respectively. India has around half a million
software developers and is second only to the US, but 300,000
Indian villages do not have a phone connection, 26 per cent of the
population lies below the poverty line and 35 per cent illiterate.
There are only 5 PCs per 1000 people, 9 mobile lines per 1000
and 37 fixed lines per 1000 people in India, which is extremely
low when compared to China.
1 This section relies on [4]
2
Number of landline telephones in use per 100 individuals living
in an area.

To address the divide, specific government initiatives taken
include the CARD project for land administration in Andhra
Pradesh; the Bhoomi project in Karnataka covering over 6 million
farmers and as many records of land ownership; Sourkaryan
project which provides rural cyber hubs in Andhra Pradesh; the
Gyandoot project in Madya Pradesh which facilitates access to
information on crops, weather and markets; and the FRIENDS
project in Kerala for tax and utility payments. These e-governance
initiatives are a clear demonstration of improving rural
infrastructure and information access thus bridging the rural-urban
digital divide in India.
Africa’s largest economy today, South Africa ranks third among
African countries on the 2012 EGDI 3 . There are 9 provinces and
each has its own provincial legislature and Provincial
Administration with various departments responsible for various
aspects of service delivery. Provincial departments are key
agencies of service delivery. Nevertheless, there are
infrastructurally-disadvantaged areas, especially rural areas, with
limited access to electricity and telephone lines.
In summary, both case studies attest to the existence of withincountry
digital divide even in developing countries, just as the
global digital divide exists between the developed and developing
worlds. In the next section, we discuss the Nigerian experience
with respect to the nature of the digital divide and its interactions
with the level of economic disparities across the country.
4. ICT ACCESS AND ECONOMIC
DISPARITIES IN NIGERIA
Nigeria, with population of about 160million in 2012 ranked 162 nd
on the UN E-government development index (2012) and is
recognised among highly-populated (larger than 100 million)
nations that made a special effort to improve service delivery to
large swathes of their populations despite the challenges they face
[6]. Africa’s largest country by population, Nigeria has 36 (subnational)
States split almost equally into Northern and Southern
Nigeria. Development indicators have historically pointed to
better outcomes for the southern part of the country than the
northern part. Nevertheless, it may be useful to add a note of
caution that the evidence here does not warrant any conclusions
regarding the direction of causation. However, the evidence does
suggest a possible relationship between access to ICT and
measure of poverty.The telecommunications industry has
remained the fastest growing sector in the country, generating
hundreds of thousands of jobs, directly and indirectly, and
changing business processes and governance, while linking up
new areas to centres of economic activity. According to the
Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), between February
2011 and February 2012, the number of active mobile phone lines
increased by 10million to just over 92 million lines. Such has been
the phenomenal growth in Nigeria’s mobile telephone market.
Mobile phones represent the device with the highest total access
rate, with nearly 64% of the population having access to mobile
phones, according to data provided by the National Bureau of
Statistics. As shown in Table 1, Anambra, Osun, Kogi, Ogun,
Niger and Lagos (each with more than 85% total access levels)
have the highest percentages of population with mobile phone
access, while States with less than 50% access to mobile phones
3 This section draws heavily from [3]
186
include mostly the Northern States of Zamfara, Kano, Katsina,
Bauchi and Adamawa.
Table 1. Total access to ICTs and relative poverty among
States in Nigeria
State
Phones
(%)
Personal
Computers
(%)
Internet
access
(%)
Relative
poverty
(%)
Kano 36.2 0.4 0.5 72.3
Kebbi 65.0 0.5 0.3 80.5
Zamfara 36.1 0.6 0.5 80.2
Borno 54.1 0.7 N/A 61.1
Sokoto 33.1 0.8 0.3 86.4
Bauchi 42.8 1.1 0.5 83.7
Katsina 39.7 1.3 1.3 82.0
Ebonyi 82.0 1.5 0.8 80.4
Kaduna 54.8 1.9 0.5 73.0
Bayelsa 64.0 2.0 2.0 57.9
Taraba 33.1 2.1 1.7 76.3
Imo 81.9 2.5 2.3 57.3
Benue 55.0 2.6 1.7 74.1
Abia 70.6 2.9 2.6 63.4
Ondo 75.0 3.0 2.1 57.0
Enugu 71.2 3.1 4.0 72.1
Yobe 51.8 3.3 3.0 79.6
Ekiti 77.9 3.6 2.2 59.1
Gombe 62.3 3.7 1.1 79.8
Adamawa 46.5 3.7 1.8 80.7
Nasarawa 74.8 4.1 4.2 71.7
Plateau 67.2 4.5 3.6 79.7
Jigawa 75.4 4.6 2.0 79.0
Kwara 78.0 4.6 2.7 74.3
Akwa Ibom 68.1 4.7 1.5 62.8
Niger 86.2 4.7 4.4 43.6
Delta 76.8 5.2 3.4 70.1
Oyo 81.5 6.0 4.3 60.7
Cross River 54.3 6.3 3.3 59.7
Ogun 87.1 6.4 4.7 69.0
Edo 78.5 6.9 5.0 72.5
Anambra 95.1 8.6 3.4 68.0
Rivers 75.8 9.0 10.8 58.6
Osun 91.9 10.0 8.5 47.5
Lagos 85.6 15.8 27.0 59.2
FCT Abuja 71.8 15.9 14.1 59.9
Kogi 87.6 17.4 8.7 73.5
National 63.9 4.5 3.6 69.0
Sources: Nigeria National Bureau of Statistics General Household
Survey, 2010/11, Nigeria Poverty Profile, 2009/10. A coloured
row indicates a Southern State, otherwise a Northern State.
Further analysis of table 1 indicates that in terms of personal
computer access Kogi, FCT, Lagos, Osun and Rivers have the
highest rates of access to PCs, while Kano, Kebbi, Zamfara,
Borno and Sokoto have the least. Internet access rates suggest the
same trends as access to PCs. These depict, although not
absolutely, the disparity between the Northern and Southern
regions of the country: while the southern states have a generally
higher access rate to ICTs, the Northern States have generally

lower access rates. In terms of relative poverty however, Northern
States have a generally higher poverty level.
Figure 2: Scatter diagram showing the relationship between
access to personal computers and relative poverty in Nigeria
(Source: computed by authors)
The gap in PC access rates in Nigeria suggests that economic
disparities also exist between these States in Nigeria, as reflected
in the differing levels of poverty. This point is further clearly
seen in Figure 2, which shows a negative relationship between
access to personal computers (as a measure of ICT access) and
level of poverty. It can be observed that States with lower levels
of poverty have higher ICT access rates, while states with higher
poverty levels have lower ICT access rates. Overall, many states
in Nigeria have high poverty levels, hence the observations (dots)
in Figure 2 appear clustered toward the upper left corner of the
chart. Nevertheless, the downward sloping line shows clearly the
inverse relationship between ICT access rates and economic
development. Therefore, if ICTs have the potential to lower
poverty rates, as seen in the case of the Southern states, it may be
suggested that increasing ICT access rates for the Northern states
could potentially lower poverty rates so as to reduce the socioeconomic
disparities among states in Nigeria. E-governance
presents a viable opportunity to increase ICT access rates in the
country. This is discussed in the next section.
5. OPPORTUNITIES FOR E-
GOVERNANCE
E-government is about visibility and transparency of government
in the delivery of public services to the citizens, a deliberate and
conscious policy to improve access to information by citizens and
to deliver public services efficiently. In recognition of the critical
role that e-governance can play in accelerating the rate of
economic development in the country, the Federal Government in
mid-2011 created the Ministry of Communication Technology to
provide sectoral leadership and policy guidance to the government
and administering policies to enable Nigeria bridge the digital
divide. [2]. In addition, notable efforts by some state governments
to bridge the divide are on-going. For example, in Lagos, Cross
River and Ekiti, citizens are now comfortable with e-tax forms
while Osun State has announced plans to introduce e-learning in
secondary schools using the tablet device. On another level, the
deployment of electronic governance tools such as community
information centres, e-kiosks etc, offer the necessary support to
private entrepreneurs to thrive especially where such e-
187
governance platforms provide information that may be expensive
to obtain privately such as weather forecasts, educational services,
business support opportunities or agricultural markets information
and prices. By creating such platforms of information exchange,
economic activity is stimulated via private entrepreneurship,
promoting better production, encouraging trade and ultimately
impacting also on socio-economic disparities among States or
regions.
6. CONCLUSION
As Nigeria aspires towards becoming one of the largest
economies in the world by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by the
year 2020, the challenges to adopting and promoting egovernance
to bridge the digital divide and boost rapid economic
integration need to be overcome. And they are not
insurmountable; but they require political will, effective
prioritization and sufficient financial commitment.
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We wish to thank the Hon. Minister/Deputy Chairman, National
Planning Commission, Dr. S.U. Usman, for his inspirational
leadership and support for this project. Special thanks also go to
the Statistician-General of the Federation, Dr. Yemi Kale for his
unending encouragement. We also wish to thank Mr. B.O.
Akpanyung, Mr. C.E. Ezeilo, Alhaji Idris and Mr. Yukubu, all of
National Planning Commission for their technical inputs and
insightful comments on the paper.
8. REFERENCES
[1] Demombynes, G. and A. Thegeya. (2012). Kenya’s mobile
revolution and the promise of mobile savings,Policy
Research Working Paper 5988, the World Bank 2012
[2] Johnson, O. (2012) “The ICT industry in Nigeria: A
roadmap”, Federal Ministry of Communication Technology
Abuja, Nigeria (www.fmct.gov.ng)
[3] Langmia, K.(2005). The role of ICT in the economic
development of Africa: The case of South Africa,
International Journal of Education and Development using
Information and Communication Technology, (IJEDICT),
Vol. 2, Issue 4, pp. 144-156.
[4] Shah, M. (2007). E-governance in India: Dream or reality?
International Journal of Education and Development using
Information and Communication Technology (IJEDICT),
Vol. 3, Issue 2, pp. 125-137.
[5] United Nations (2006). Bridging the technology gap between
and within nations, Commission on Science and Technology,
E/CN.16/2006/2
[6] United Nations (2012). United Nations E-Government
Survey, United Nations, New York
[7] Dasgupta, S.; Lall, S. and Wheeler, D. (2002) Policy Reform,
Economic Growth, and the Digital India, Policy Review
Working Paper of the World Bank, No. WPS-2567,
Washington, DC
[8] Singh, Neena (2007) “Bridging the Digital Divide in India:
Challenges and Opportunities”, World Libraries, Vol. 17,
No. 1.

ICT for Development and the MuNet Program- Experiences
and Lessons Learnt from an Indigenous Municipality in
Guatemala
Jorge López-Bachiller
Municipality of Patzún Consultant
2ª calle, 2-75 zona 2, Patzún
Chimaltenango, Guatemala C.A.
+502 45 36 30 88
jlopezbachiller@munetguatemala.org
ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to present experiences and lessons learnt
from the use and contribution of Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT) to the development of the MuNet Program
and one of its implementation instances in Patzún (Guatemala).
With 94% indigenous population from the Maya Kaqchikel ethnic
group, Patzun economy is based on agriculture and handicraft.
Since 2005, Patzun Municipality is part of the Efficient and
Transparent Municipality (MuNet) Program of the Organization
of American States (OAS). Due to the MuNet Program, Patzun
citizens and the local government were empowered through the
use of ICT and ICT-based applications. As a result, citizens’
quality of life and governance processes were improved.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.4 [Information Systems Applications]; J [Computer
Applications] - J.1 Administrative Data Processing – Government
General Terms
Performance, Experimentation, Human Factors
Keywords
MuNet; Modernization; Local Government; Digital Divide; ICT;
Indigenous Population; Guatemala
1. INTRODUCTION
Located in the central part of Guatemala, Patzun has a population
of 52,000 - 94% of them indigenous from the Maya Kaqchikel
ethnic group. Agriculture products are the main income for 90%
of the population. Before 2005, the community had poor access to
ICT services. Informing citizens was not a priority for the local
government and citizen’s participation was restricted to
development tasks and community councils.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents
the MuNet Program; while Section 3 one of its instantiation -
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Javier Saenz-Core
MuNet II Project Coordinator
Italia 536 B- B8000DKL
Bahía Blanca, Argentina
+54 9 291 4545726
jsaenzcore@gmail.com
188
Diego Cardona
Universidad del Rosario
Calle 12 C No 4 – 80 of 1-01
Bogotá, Colombia
+57 311 2395061
diego.cardona@urosario.edu.co
Patzun Municipality. Challenges and lessons learnt from Patzun
experience are discussed in Sections 4 and 5, respectively.
Conclusions are drawn in Section 6.
2. MUNET PROGRAM
Continuous developments of ICTs have opened new opportunities
to transform governments. Electronic Government (e-
Government) refers to the ICT-based transformations of
government structures and processes aiming at improving
efficiency in government operations, enhancing interactions with
citizens and other social actors, reducing transaction costs and
incrementing users’ satisfaction on public services [14].
In Latin America, municipalities are the government level where
most social development activities take place. Therefore, actions
oriented to enhance relationships between citizens and public
administrations should start at the municipality level to guarantee
immediate perceptible changes. Following this principle, the
MuNet Program was designed as part of the cooperation activities
among the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)
[15], the “Andes Foment Corporation“ (CAF) [16] and the
Executive Secretariat for Integral Development (SEDI) [17] from
OAS. The aim of the MuNet program is to help Latin American
municipalities in the adoption of ICT, as a tool to increase
transparency, efficiency and citizen participation.
The Program was launched in Latin America in 2005. Comprising
two phases, 11 countries and 22 municipalities, including Patzún,
participated in Phase I. The Program methodology comprised
achieving political support from the mayor or local authority,
creating a MuNet team with municipality personnel and
developing e-Government strategies. In 2010, the Phase II of the
Program was started, with four participating countries - Panama,
Guatemala, Paraguay and Costa Rica, and 179 municipalities.
3. MUNET IMPLEMENTATION PATZÚN
EXPERIENCE
The execution of the MuNet Program in Patzun lasted for four
years. In such time frame, the municipal budget was USD 6M,
from which USD 32,000 were dedicated to ICT. Despite the
scarce resources, the municipality was able to achieve its ICTrelated
strategic objectives due to international cooperation and
optimal management. The implemented ICT initiatives are
explained below.

3.1 Municipality Modernization
Initially, the Municipality had five old computers. The new
municipal government purchased new hardware and software.
Currently, 25 computers are available.
3.2 Internet Installation
The Municipality used to have a non-stable 256 kbps Internet
connection. This service was only available to the Mayor, the
Treasurer, and the Secretary. To improve the service, a telephone
company (Telgua) was hired to provide a service of 1 MHz.
Wiring of all municipality offices was made and currently 30 staff
have Internet access. Due to the increase in personnel, more
installations are being made in new offices.
3.3 Employee’s Training
One feature of Patzún Municipality is the continuous renewal of
its staff. Therefore, new personnel have to be trained to acquire
the required skills. 35% of the personnel do not have email
accounts or do not use them properly. To overcome this difficulty
a corporative email platform “@patzun.gob.gt” was deployed. In
addition, personnel has to be trained in the focused use of internet
and its applications to improve the services provided to citizens,
and to work with others government departments. To promote a
correct use of ICT, a user manual has been developed and is
shared with the new staff. In addition, more communication
devices are planned to be adopted.
3.4 MuNet Team
When the MuNet Program started, a MuNet team of consultants
was assembled and trained. Over time, this team has been
restructured with the incorporation of new members. Nowadays,
the team has a Program Manager, who leads and defines the
strategy.
3.5 Free Internet Access to Community
A part of the strategy to close the digital gap, Internet access has
been provided by the Municipality to the community. Two free
access points were installed equipped with donated computers.
The time for the use of computers is restricted so more users can
benefit from the service.
3.6 Community Digital Center
To reduce the digital gap, citizens need to be educated in the use
of ICT. In order to contribute to this task, national and
international institutions helped to create a Digital Community
Center. Opened in 2010, the Center offers free ICT-basic courses
(office and communication tools) to the community and
government institutions.
3.7 Government Website
A very important element of the Municipality ICT-driven
development has been the deployment of its website -
www.patzun.gob.gt. The website provides information about the
history, culture and geography of Patzun; as well as information
about the government’s agenda and how citizens can be involved.
Some sections, particularly those dedicated to history and culture,
include multimedia materials, relying on free tools as Picasa and
YouTube.
3.8 Language Stimulation
To promote and protect the Kaqchikel language, a team is creating
a Wikipedia version of the municipal website in Kaqchikel. The
189
team members are linguistics, Kaqchikel speakers and local and
international collaborators. Social development is tightly related
to the promotion and protection of their culture. For this reason
the content of the municipal website is presented in Spanish and
Kaqchikel.
3.9 Inter-Institutional Coordination
The success of the project mainly relied on the support received
from the Municipality, various public institutions and private
companies, as well as individual contributions of collaborators
from Guatemala and other countries. Mainly, the project was
developed and coordinated by MuNet OAS, public institutions at
Patzún and the National Secretary of Science and Technology
(SENACYT) [18], Guatemala.
3.10 Other Initiatives
Some other experimental ICT-related initiatives are being
developed in Patzún in specific vertical domains: e-Health, e-
Safety, e-Learning, and e-Prevention. Results obtained so far are
positive, show the potential of ICT use.
4. CHALLENGES
After presenting the overview of the MuNet Program and concrete
examples of one implementation instance – the case of Patzún
Municipality, this section discusses some of the main challenges
faced during the project implementation and the adopted
approaches to overcome it:
o Resources – The Municipality faced difficulties to allocate
resources to the project. Resources are limited or needed for
other initiatives. Approach: To implement small actions with
great impact on the population and thus convince the authorities
about the benefit of investing on the project.
o Human capital – The community lacked qualified human
resources able to teach informatics. Approach: To foster
international cooperation and appeal to national organizations
to contribute with such resources.
o Resistance to change – Municipal staff showed resilience to
change and adopt new working practices. Approach: To
manage cultural change and show how community members
become familiar with the use of ICT.
o Adoption of new practices – The team was uncertain about the
acceptance from public employees to adopt ICT as a tool to
enhance their efficiency, and apply it for creating new
applications. Approach: To show enhanced efficiency in the
management, leading and showing by examples how staff can
innovate on their daily work.
o Changing staff - Some personnel previously trained on ICT did
not continue working at the municipality and new staff was
hired after the elections in 2011. Approach: The new
government hired younger staff that was more familiar with
ICT.
o Lack of support from central government – During the
implementation of Phase I there was lack of support from the
central government. Approach: In January 2012, the national
government created the Digital Agenda for the Change, which
is expected to generate decentralized actions. Municipal staff
participated in meetings at the national level aiming at
identifying ICT-related decision making areas or impact areas.
o Lack of strategy to bridge digital divide - Guatemala does not
have similar initiatives to reduce the digital gap. Approach: At
the local level, the two community centers provided free
internet access and delivered training on basic ICT

competencies and skills, contributing to reduce the digital
divide.
o Lack of awareness about potential benefits of ICT – Local
authorities possess limited knowledge on ICT and its potential.
Approach: Communicate in a massive and effective way to
municipal authorities the benefits achieved through the use of
ICT.
5. LESSONS LEARNED
The following two sections present some lessons learnt from
Patzún Municipality (Section 5.1) and from the MuNet Program
(Section 5.2).
5.1 Patzún Municipality
o Strategy for Digital Divide – The first important aspect to
consider is to create a strategy to reduce the digital divide. Two
mainstream topics of such strategy should be indigenous people
development and inclusion.
o Inter-disciplinarity – The project would have benefitted more
from a multidisciplinary team.
o Motivation – Part of the success of the project relied on the
highly-motivated team.
o Communication – The effective communication of both strategy
and implemented activities is crucial to raise the interest of
other institutions, creating the awareness and support that the
program requires.
o Stakeholders’ Participation – To enrich the opportunities and
benefits of the program, participation of representatives from
different areas - i.e. health, education, youth, is required.
o Continuous Training – The support of local authorities is
needed to ensure continuous efforts to building human capacity.
o Efficiency –The program proved the efficiency to change
traditional styles of working, reducing costs through the use of
ITC tools.
o Awareness – After taking the online e-Government course
delivered by the MuNet Program, the awareness raised and
competencies developed among government staff constituted a
key factor to design and implement e-Government strategies.
5.2 MuNet Program
Community development in any municipality must be
accompanied with the provision of access to ICT. Since
indigenous populations have fewer resources and opportunities,
their inclusion in the knowledge society requires the
implementation of e-Government initiatives. However,
implementing such initiatives much rely on the political will of
community leaders and national authorities.
Major qualitative impacts of the MuNet Program include:
o Identifying municipal government strategic objectives in the
short, medium and long term
o Inspiring municipalities to improve their ICT infrastructure to
enhance connectivity
o Implementing online services for citizens
o Contributing to increase citizen’s trust in the municipal
government
o Expanding team members’ perspective beyond the local
context, stressing the importance of ICT in global development.
o Deploying ICT applications to monitor the execution of projectrelated
tasks.
190
Lessons learnt from the execution of Phase I of the MuNet
Program are classified into the following perspectives:
o Program Planning – It is important to define the terms of
reference of project consultants and local stakeholders, and to
establish local teams ensuring that interdisciplinary and
multiple skills are represented.
o Training – Officials and municipal workers should have a
preparatory phase for the program implementation. Technology
Adoption – A wide gap was identified among cultural and
social diversity across teams. To overcome differences,
required and essential organizational changes were
implemented and a record of the identified technical challenges
was maintained for future improvements. Additionally, as long
as the program implementation progresses and ICT becomes
embedded in the administration, new ICT demands emerged
from specific areas – health, education, etc.
o Political Management – Top-level leadership is essential for
project success. Such leadership should manifest abilities in
management and communication to share the achievements
with project stakeholders, and maintain the e-Government
strategy according to the municipal development plan.
o Dissemination – Document all facts and events and dedicate
special efforts to internally and externally disseminate the
project progress. Moreover, awareness should be raised among
project stakeholders on the opportunities offered by ICT.
o Sustainability – It's essential to create legal, financial, and
political instruments as well as building national and
international networks to provide project sustainability.
o Collaboration - MuNet contributed to strengthen collaboration
among government authorities and officials, guaranteeing
autonomy in the long term.
Methodological Approach - MuNet offered a comprehensive
methodological framework for the municipalities to use.
6 CONCLUSIONS
This paper introduced the MuNet Program and the experience of
its implementation in Patzun Municipality. The Patzún experience
- called “Patzún, all its information in a click” has participated in
several competitions; winning a third place in the call to the best
local innovations organized by the Executive Secretariat of the
Presidency Coordination (SCEP). In addition, it has being
nominated in the category of e-Inclusion for the World Summit
Awards 2011 Guatemala.
Next steps for Patzún Municipality include presenting the
program and its progress to the Municipal Corporation and
obtaining their commitment to continue the activities under the
Modernization Commission, led by a Councilor. To raise more
visibility, there will be an official re-launch of the website and
presentation of the actions carried out by the Municipality to
reduce the digital divide. Finally, the Municipality will continue
its efforts to publicize its actions in this field, both nationally and
internationally.
Next steps for the MuNet Program include seeking allies in
government who are committed to implementing e-Government
strategies and updating and improving several methodologies.
7 REFERENCES
[1] Cardona, D, MuNet un esfuerzo de la OEA/ACDI/CAF para
llevar el gobierno electrónico a los municipios en el

hemisferio, On Line document
www.ahciet.net/comun/pags/agenda/eventos/2005/124/ponen
cias/11.00%20diego%20Colombia_Rio.ppt [February, 2012]
[2] Cardona, D, Open Knowledge, Free Society third edition of
the On Line Congress of the Observatory for CyberSociety,
On Line document
http://www.cibersociedad.net/congres2006/gts/gt.php?id=142
[February, 2012]
[3] Cardona, D, et al, MuNet. Una herramienta para lograr
municipios eficientes y transparentes, en Said, E, TIC,
Comunicación y Periodismo Digital. Reflexiones de América
Latina y Europa; Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, 2010
[4] Cardona, D, et al, MuNet, Municipios Eficientes y
Transparentes, On Line document
http://portal.oas.org/Portal/Sector/Secretar%C3%ADaGenera
l/SEDI/OESEDI/Proyectos/NPA/UsoEficientedeTICs/MuNet
FaseI/tabid/1767/language/es–CO/default.aspx
[February, 2012]
[5] Iberomunicipios, V Premio Iberoamericano de Ciudades
Digitales, On Line document
http://www.iberomunicipios.org/premio/def1.aspx?idn=1005
3&idm=10166&ids=10735 [February, 2012]
[6] Lasagna, M, 1.- Programa MuNET: Productos y Resultados,
On Line document
http://www.educoas.org/RestrictedSites/Curso1/Newsletter-
Agosto06/Paratenerencuenta17.html [February, 2012]
[7] OEA, Firman en la OEA acuerdo sobre desarrollo municipal
en países andinos y centroamericanos, On Line document
http://www.oas.org/oaspage/press_releases/press_release.asp
?sCodigo=C-171/04 [February, 2012]
[8] OEA, oeainnovacionesyalianzas.org, On Line document
http://www.oeainnovacionesyalianzas.org/ [February, 2012
[9] Porrua, M, Introducción al Programa MuNet, On Line
document
http://hasp.axesnet.com/contenido/documentos/Caracas%20e
Gobierno%202005%20-
191
%20Introducci%C3%B3n%20Programa%20MuNet.ppt
[February, 2012]
[10] Porrua, M, MuNet: municipal efficiency and transparency,
On Line document http://www.it4allbilbao.org/ponentes/Miguel_A_Porrua.pdf
[February, 2012]
[11] Saenz, J, Experiencias y perspectivas de Gobierno
Electrónico a nivel local en la región LAC, On Line
document
http://www.cofemer.gob.mx/images/stories/conferencias/XX
I_Conferencia_Nacional_de_MR/Javier_Sanz.ppt [February,
2012]
[12] Saenz, J, et al, MuNet, a new way to improve municipalities,
Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Theory
and Practice of Electronic Governance ACM International
Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 322, Pages: 240–245,
2009, On Line document
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1693042.1693090 [February,
2012]
[13] Villagrán, S, MuNet (Municipios Eficientes y
Transparentes), On Line document
http://www.protic.org/proyectos.shtml?&sh_itm=df10f42820
87ae1170cbb506cafb2fd2.
[14] Field, T., Mield, T., Muller, E. and Law, E., The e-
Government Imperative. Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development, ISBN 92-64-10117-9, Paris,
France, 2003, available at http:213.253.134.43/
oecd/pdfs/browseit/4203071E.PDF.
[15] Canadian International Development Agency, CIDA,
http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/home.
[16] Corporación Andina de Fomento,
http://www.caf.com/view/index.asp?ms=19
[17] Organization of American States (OAS), Executive
Secretariat for Integral Development (SEDI),
http://www.oas.org/en/sedi/
[18] National Secretary of Science and Technology (SENACYT),
http://www.concyt.gob.gt/

ICT Policy in Africa - A Comparative Study of Ghana and
Kenya Drawing on Lessons from Developed Countries
ABSTRACT
Kenya and Ghana realized that developing a National Information
Communication Technology Policy (NICTP) is vital for the
development of a nation. They also realized that Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) sector is a key accelerator to
development. The two countries have made progress including
liberalization of the ICT sector. The ICT sector has changed
considerably in the two countries. However, there is need to
review all stages of the policy and come up with suggestions for
improvements or gaps that need to be filled. This paper looks into
the process of reviewing Kenya and Ghana NICTP by applying
the benchmarking process as a supporting tool for policy-making
and improvement. The paper illustrates the analysis carried out
and the results from five successful countries recognized
worldwide on ICT policy formulation, policy focus areas and
policy implementation. Besides the policy process and
stakeholder‘s involvement, the ICT policy goals, objectives and
mission are discussed. The institutional arrangements for driving
the ICT policy at regional and international dimensions, as well as
the implementation processes, policy comparison and monitoring
are elaborated. The paper winds up with recommendations on how
the policy comparison processes should be conducted.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
K.4.0 General
K.4.1 Public Policy Issues (privacy, regulation, transborder data
flow).
General Terms
Legal Aspects
Keywords
ICT, NICTP, benchmarking, policy, mission, vision
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies
are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.
Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM
must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy
otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists,
requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Agnes Owuato Odongo
Kenya electricity generating company limited
P.O Box 79439.00200 Nairobi, Kenya
Mobile No. +254-722-273-589
agwuato@yahoo.com
192
1. INTRODUCTION
ICT policy is a formal statement that specifies the objectives,
goals, principles, strategies, etc intended to direct and control the
development, operation and use of ICT. ICT policies must
consider additional policies like education, trade and investment,
foreign, monetary, transport polices, etc. ICT policies have been
recognized by the African executives. The PANAFTEL network
concept was approved in 1976. The PANAFTEL coordinating
committee was established in 1973, to mobilize the resources
necessary for the establishment of the system and to implement
the network speedily. By 1982 a basic telecommunications
infrastructure had been constructed within Africa, allowing intra-
African telecom traffic, largely avoiding the previous long,
complex and very expensive transit routes through Europe. By the
end of 1982, 67 routes between African countries were available
by using Intel sat satellite circuits. African authorities and the
private sector should become more involved in the network
exploitation through the different telecommunications
restructuring processes; and to modernize the network by
judiciously combining all technologies to build the continent
telecommunications network representative. This should meet the
countries need and prepare Africa for insertion within the global
information technology infrastructure (GII).
1.1Ghana
The National Information Communication Technology Policy
(NICTP) development process for Ghana started in the year 2003
as a result of the perceived lack of guidance on ICT [8]. The lack
of ICT Policy and existence of isolated initiatives led to random
adoption of different systems and standards, resulting in
unnecessary duplication of effort hence wastage of resources.
Benefits of effective adoption of ICT are likely to result not only
in an increase in connectivity or access, but more importantly the
benefits acquired from the facilitation of new types of
development solutions and economic opportunities that the
utilization of ICT makes possible.
Ghana ICT Policy Process [8] has been touted as the most
participatory policy development process on the continent.
Extensive consultation with major stakeholders was conducted
throughout the length and breadth of the country in search for
national priorities and needs, as well as to sensitize the
community prior to the development of the ICT4AD framework
document and the eventual write-up of the policy document,
action plans and legislations.
The opportunities are envisaged in the National Strategy to
simultaneously target the development of the ICT sector and
industry as well as use ICTs as a broad-based enabler of

developmental goals, with emphasis on the development,
deployment and exploitation of ICTs, to aid the development of
all other sectors of the economy. The said NICTP was essential
and necessary to guide the ICT development in Ghana. The
NICTP development was a four step process [8] under which
these are some of the decisions made:
To create enabling environment to facilitate the deployment,
utilization and exploitation of ICTs
• To support the development of a viable knowledge-based
ICT industry
• To facilitate the modernization of the agricultural sector
• To support the development of a competitive high valueadded
services sector
• To aid the process of developing a national human resource
capacity and the nation’s R&D capabilities
• To promote an better educational system that deploys ICTs
• To facilitate a wide-spread deployment and exploitation of
ICTs within the society
• To support the modernization of civil and public service
• To facilitate the development, expansion, rehabilitation and
the continuous modernization of the national information and
communications infrastructure
• To guide development and implementation of e-government,
e-commerce and business strategies and action plans
• To facilitate development and implementation of necessary
legal, institutional and regulatory framework and structures
The policy was approved and published in 2005, this was the first
phase. The publishing of the policy followed implementation
strategy as the ICT policy development process. This first policy
implementation process was faced with various challenges that
made the phase less effective in delivering the objectives. Some of
the challenges experienced are that [8]:
• Ghana has a relatively high population growth rate
• Ghana has a youthful population; about 60% are under 25
years of age and 5% over 65 years of age
• Ghana has a high illiteracy rate with close to 40% of the
population without any form of education
• Ghana has a high primary school dropout rate close to 50%
fail to progress secondary school and senior secondary
school leavers failing to continue with their education.
• Close to 40% of Ghanaians currently lives below the poverty
line and 10 regions of the country currently have more than
40% of their people living in poverty.
Ghana recognized that the socioeconomic problems and
challenges facing it are likely to be compounded by the new
challenges posed by globalization and the information age,
namely [22]: narrow export base dominated by traditional exports;
under-developed physical infrastructure; Poor and limited
communications infrastructure, etc. And that for it to make
progress in developmental process, the nation has to take step to
address the developmental challenges and to put in place efforts to
address the additional challenges posed by globalization and the
information revolution.
From these weaknesses and challenges, Ghana saw a need of
reviewing the policy to address the observed weaknesses and
challenges, synergies and regional cooperation in ICT policies and
harmonize regional policy framework in order to achieve
economies of scale. Ghana through the formulation of a number
193
of socioeconomic development policy frameworks over the years
has identified a number of key developmental objectives to
address the developmental problems facing the country. Of these
policy frameworks, the key ones are Vision 2020 Socioeconomic
Development Framework, the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy
(2000-2004), the Ghana Science and Technology Policy and the
Coordinated Program for Economic and Social Development of
Ghana (2003-2012). Some of the key socioeconomic development
objectives of Ghana as the policy Frameworks [8]:
• The social and economic pressures of a youthful population
• Rapid population growth and declining per capita income
• An under-performing agricultural sector
• An economy dominated by the agricultural sector with weak
under-developed industrial and service sector
• The Ghana heavy debt burden
• The disproportionate informal private sector
• Low professional, technical and managerial manpower base
• Relatively high proportion of population illiteracy
• Low job creation capacity of the economy
• Narrow export base dominated by traditional exports
• Under-developed physical infrastructure
• Poor and limited communications infrastructure
Socioeconomic problems and challenges facing Ghana are likely
to be compounded by the new challenges posed by globalization
and the information age. And that for Ghana to make progress in
its developmental process, the nation in addition to taking steps to
address these developmental challenges will also need to put in
place efforts to address the additional challenges posed by
globalization and the information revolution.
1.2 Kenya
The National Information Communication Technology Policy
(NICTP) development process for Kenya started in the year 2003
as a result of the perceived lack of guidance on ICT [14]. The
Government recognizes the role of ICTs in the social and
economic development of the nation and has promulgated a
national ICT Policy based on the Economic Recovery Strategy for
Wealth and Employment Creation (2003-2007). The move to
develop a national ICT policy was triggered BY three key and
mutually reinforcing factors namely the fast and haphazard
growth of information technology that lacked direction and
regulation; the desire to develop the national ICT policy
guidelines to steer development of ICTs in order to address the
disorder; and the readiness of UNESCO to fund the process.
This policy seeks to facilitate sustained economic growth and
poverty reduction; promote social justice and equity; mainstream
gender in national development; empower the youth and
disadvantaged groups; stimulate investment and innovation in
ICT; and achieve universal access [14]. It is based on
internationally accepted standards and best practices, particularly
the COMESA Model adopted by the COMESA Council of
Ministers in March 2003.
The policy is based on four guiding principles: 1) infrastructure
development 2) human resource development 3) stakeholder
participation 4) appropriate policy and regulatory framework.
The Government recognizes that there is a growing digital divide
between the countries that are highly endowed and developed in
the field of information technology and Kenya as well as between
rural and urban areas in the country. The said NICTP was

essential and necessary to guide the ICT development in Ghana.
The NICTP development was done by four committees under the
supervision of Ministry of Information and Communication given
the mandate by the government to formulate the ICT policy.
The policy formulation process was in form of consultations that
followed a three-tier approach at the national, provincial and
district levels with stakeholders that included the Private Sector,
Civil Society, Development Partners and local communities. This
approach led to the formation of a National Steering Committee of
stakeholders charged with the responsibility of spearheading
consultations and ensuring inclusion at all levels; and chaired by
Minister for Information and Communication. Also involved in
the process were Kenya's development partners; civil society
representatives and government officials. The government has
implemented ICT policy reforms between 1999 and 2006 which
resulted in a number of structural changes in the ICT sector.
Several policy documents were released namely in January 1997,
April 1999, and Dec 2001[14].
The Kenya ICT policy was approved and published in 2006. The
publishing was followed by implementation of the strategy that
was faced by various challenges so the implementation less
effective in delivering the objectives stated in the policy
document. Some of the challenges experienced are that [14]:
• To harness the potential of ICTs for economic growth and
poverty reduction
• Lack of a comprehensive policy and regulatory framework
• Inadequate infrastructure
• Insufficient skilled human resources
Kenya recognized that the socioeconomic problems and
challenges facing it are likely to be compounded and that for it to
make progress in developmental process; the nation has to take
step to address the developmental challenges and to put in place
efforts to address the additional challenges posed by globalization
and the information revolution.
From these weaknesses and challenges, Kenya saw a need of
reviewing the policy to address the observed weaknesses and
challenges, synergies in ICT policies and harmonize regional
policy framework in order to achieve the set objectives. Kenya
through the formulation of a number of socioeconomic
development policy frameworks over the years has identified a
number of key developmental objectives to address the
developmental problems facing the country as listed below [14]:
Policy, legal and regulatory framework, ICT infrastructure, human
resource development, electronic learning, universal access,
public-private partnerships (ppp), e-government, Electronic
commerce, content development, electronic security, ICT
leadership, engendering ICT, and youth and ICT
Kenya has had a long history of economic leadership in East
Africa as one of the largest and most advanced economies in the
region. However, inconsistent efforts at structural reforms and
poor policies over the past decades have generated a prolonged
period of decline in development indicators and significantly
eroded the leadership position, at a time when other countries in
the region have made significant strides. While Kenya was a
prime choice for foreign investors seeking to establish a presence
in Eastern and Southern Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, poor
economic policies or inconsistent efforts at structural reforms,
increased problems of corruption and governance, and the
194
deterioration of public services have discourage Foreign Direct
Investment (FDI) since the 1980s.
Therefore, for Kenya, to make progress in the developmental
process, the nation in addition to taking steps to address these
developmental challenges will also need to put in place efforts to
address the additional challenges posed by globalization and the
information revolution. Some of the key investment laws are
outdated and fail to account for modern practices and principles in
conducting and regulating business. A large degree of
discretionary power is left to the civil service in administrating
and enforcing the principles laid out in the laws.
This paper underlines the need and effective process of NICTP
review suitable for Ghana and Kenya, and the analysis of the key
success factors that need to be considered during undertaking of
the review task.
2. METHODOLOGY
ICT is dynamic and therefore the processes and activities keep
changing within short time scales. The rapid changes in the ICT
sector affect key decisions made and essentially call for an up to
date environmental scan. Due to the dynamic nature of ICT,
benchmarking emerges to be the best tool for policy review. In
this paper, a review of the ICT Policy formulation of fast growing
countries in recent years namely Australia, Korea, Malaysia,
Canada and Singapore is considered effective. In the final phase,
an analysis on how the Kenya and Ghana ICT Policy was
developed and implemented is made and thus exposing the
commonalities and differences.
2.1 Source of Information
In this paper, key documents reviewed and analyzed included the
following: National ICT policies for Kenya, Ghana, Singapore [2]
[20], Korea [13] [15], Canada [10], Australia [6] [5] and Malaysia
[1] [16]. Other documents are [12] [7]:
2.2 Selecting the Five Relatively Successful
Countries for Benchmarking
The selection of countries for benchmarking was based on the
ranking of ICT Development Index (IDI) 2010 report released in
February 2012 by ITU [9] (http://inwent-iijlab.org/Weblog/2010/07/26/ict-development-index-itu-omitssierra-leone-again/).
Ghana has been touted to be the ICT hub of
West Africa was ranked 116 th and Kenya 115 th . The republic of
Korea was ranked 3 rd ; and Australia, Singapore Canada and
Malaysia was ranked 14 th , 19 th , 26 th, and 56 th respectively.
The desktop survey was used to review the policies of Australia,
Canada, Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia based on the
IDI 2010 results as indicated above. In the final stage, the
Benchmarking analysis of the ICT policy cycle (formulation,
implementation and review process) in Kenya and Ghana was
considered against experiences of five relatively successful
countries namely Singapore, Korea, Canada, Australia and
Malaysia. The research of this paper is discussed within the
context of: 1) the policy development process and stakeholders
involvement 2) the ICT policy goals, objectives and mission 3)
ICT policy focal areas 4) institutional arrangements driving the
ICT policy development and implementation 5) regional and
international dimensions 6) implementation processes 7) policy
monitoring, evaluation and review.

3. BENCHMARKING AS A POLICY
REVIEW TOOL
1. Translate obstacles into
more concrete concerns
2. Develop the basis of
specification of policy
actions
Policy Mission &Vision
Too general to measure
1. Measure output and
outcome of policy
implementation
2. Review and benchmark
the prevailing status
Policy
challenges
Policy
objectives
Policy
focus goals
Inter-regional
benchmarking
Indicators
Benchmarking:
1. Determine if goals Policy
been met
assessment
2. If no asses the reasons
Adapted from Selhofer 2003
Conclude and recommend
www.observatory.gr/files/meletes/
BISER_Benchmarking_Rep.pdf
Figure 1. Policy making roles benchmarking
Benchmarking has different meaning based on the institutional
and organization set-up in which it is applied. It can be used to
measure the success factors of a policy towards developing an
ICT society. There are several regional benchmarking options like
bottom-up, top down, horizontal approaches etc. In the bottom-up
approach, regions get together and agree among themselves on a
set of common indicators. Since the region has different policy
framework, it is not possible to apply the method initially. The
choice of indicators is a result of a compromise among different
regions without top-bottom coordination. This implies that the
same indicator can measure different parameter in different
regions for example a measure of policy output, results, and
impacts, or a simple framework of readiness indicator could be
adopted [19].
This paper considers the position of indicators into the policy
review process and benchmarking as stipulated in Figure 1. The
role of benchmarking is to determine policy challenges through
policy evaluation that have impact on the policy review process.
3.1 Policy Development, Review Process and
Stakeholders Involvement
The policy formulation of five selected countries demonstrate
several advantages of involving stakeholders like the private
sector, academia and civil society organizations such as
professional bodies in the policy processes. The process for
development of Australian, Canada, and Singapore, Malaysia and
Korea ICT policies had consultative meetings with a range of
stakeholders. Of interest is the case of Australia where the
stakeholders were approached by e-mail regarding their
discussions on effective use of ICT by citizens and consumers
across civil society [5] [5].
The government should involve key stakeholders in the policy
formulation process in order to affect its outcomes. Kenya did not
involve all key stakeholders [14]. In principle, the policy lacked
195
ownership of the majority of the stakeholders. The National ICT
Policy and Plan Development Committee of Ghana were involved
all key stakeholders and had an integrated approach to their
national ICT development process. The process became an all
inclusive venture and ensured that the policy development process
and final product is acceptable to all [8]. In principle, the policy
had ownership of the majority of the stakeholders and had clear
harmonized approach to its implementation strategies.
3.2. Benchmarking ICT Policy Vision,
Missions and Objectives of Selected Countries
Compared to the Ghana’s and Kenya’s
The policy vision, mission and objectives of Korea, Australia,
Canada, Malaysia and Singapore emphasize on addressing citizen
problems which are similar to those of Kenya and Ghana.
Furthermore, countries like Singapore [20] and Malaysia [16] [17]
have provided milestones in the policy. Malaysia’s vision is to
utilize ICT to transform progressively to information and a
knowledge society; and as the fifth economy pillar of the
economy and transforming the country to a regional ICT hub.
Ghana NICTP vision statement: “Ghana to improve the quality of
life of the people by significantly enriching their social, economic
and cultural well-being through the rapid development and
modernization of the economy and society using information and
communication technologies as the main engine for accelerated
and sustainable economic and social development; the vision
statement sets out the roadmap for developing Ghana’s
information society and economy and provides a basis for
facilitating the socioeconomic development of the country in the
emerging information, knowledge and technological age to be
dominated by information and knowledge-based economies” [8].
The Kenya policy vision is “A prosperous ICT-driven Kenyan
society” and the mission statement is “to improve the livelihoods
of Kenyans by ensuring the availability of accessible, efficient,
reliable and affordable ICT services” [14]. The policy vision,
mission and objectives of Kenya and Ghana lacks milestones of
how to achieve these compared to Singapore above. Emphasis on
universal access is lacking in the vision and mission statement as
the success of becoming the ICT hub depending on accessibility
issues; that includes the concept of digital divide between access
in urban/rural and national/international relations.
3.3. Strategic ICT Leadership
The objective of the Strategic ICT leadership involves an increase
in the use of ICT for equitable and sustainable socioeconomic and
cultural development, aiming at improving the awareness on the
role and potential of ICT. In so doing, creating an authoritative
national organization to effect, coordinate and review the ICT
policy. The role of prioritizing ICT investment in development
assistance policies and programs, enhancing synergy, economies
of scale and productivity in all ICT matters and creating a
favorable environment for cooperation and partnership in ICT
among public and private sectors, civil society became an
important ingredient to its development. This is in consistent with
best-practice in Singapore, Korea, Canada, Australia and Malaysia
picking a few supporting examples. The review process has to
follow this definitive focus. The case of Ghana and Kenya the
level of leadership is not ranked high like in Korea where ICT
policy committee is chaired by the prime minister. Ghana ICT
policy committee chair person is a university professor, while in

Kenya it is the minister for Information Communication ministry.
The political goodwill may not be achieved easing in order to
support policy implementation.
3.4 ICT Infrastructure
Infrastructure covers both national and institutional levels. At
national levels, a system to ensure usefulness of the installed
infrastructure has to be assured of. In Kenya’s and Ghana’s case
for instance, building the broadband infrastructure is an agenda.
Achievements realized in Korea, Malaysia, Canada, Australia and
Singapore is as a result of broadband deployment. All countries
based on the objectives of the respective Act, targets were set
which include:
• An increase in penetration for the whole country and rural
areas respectively. An interim target of 30 per 100 persons
had been set for Malaysia by the year 2005 and fully
developed by year 2020 for example [1].
• Quality of service at affordable costs.
• Infrastructure development, communications and multimedia
infrastructures with adequate and effective plans for
supporting overall economic development.
• Creation of a hub to serve the global hub of communications
and multimedia industry in this region.
Development of ICT infrastructure is mentioned in the policy. The
policy went further to mention need for provision of infrastructure
e.g. energy and roads, support software development, promotion
of local manufacturing among others. The policy recognizes
power of open source software. However, the policy is just
generic. The Kenya ICT policy is not providing details on how it
will promote local software development. The Ghanaian Policy
proposes no duty on computer hardware [8]. The policy for the
benchmarked five countries are explicit on how to go about by
saying that foreign owned and multinationals who will establish
such production facilities and employ the local workforce, shall be
offered special incentives. This can be part of technology transfer
to the local workforce.
The Kenya NICTP has several objectives concerning broadband
issues to hitherto disenfranchised and isolated populations in the
country and to extend the connection to the neighboring countries.
The fact finding report revealed that, the private sector especially
the mobile operators have invested substantially in developing an
efficient infrastructure [4] [11]. However, interoperability,
reliability and rural access are still a challenge in some parts of the
country based on the provider to the initiative. Infrastructure
sharing is the most sustainable and efficient way of rolling out
infrastructure, even though it is facing internal resistance from the
operators who consider their infrastructure as a business
differentiation tool.
The Ghana NICTP has several objectives concerning universal
access issues to hitherto disenfranchised and isolated populations
in the country. The fact finding report revealed that, in the private
sector especially the mobile services have grown thus increasing
the number of service providers. Spacefon, a GSM operator is the
only mobile phone operator that has deployed its services in all
the ten regional capitals and most key cities and towns across the
country [8]. However, interoperability, reliability and rural access
are still a challenge in the country to the initiative. Infrastructure
sharing is the best as the sustainable and efficient way of rolling
out infrastructure. Ghana Telecom, the national carrier that is
supposed to be at the forefront of ICT development is struggling
196
and has failed to keep up with the times. The problems of Ghana
Telecom are further compounded by the array of legal battles it
has found itself to deal with. Telekom Malaysia has been
throwing legal challenges to the national carrier and the Ghana
government.
3.5 The ICT Industry and Human Resource
The ICT industry is service or hardware manufacturing or
assembly based. Companies should be involved in all aspects of
the business. A national ICT policy could stimulate the
establishment, development and growth of ICT businesses
through incentives and support provision. In Korea for example,
several strategies to enhance productivity and efficiency across
economic sectors and SMEs through the use of ICT were set and
it worked. Furthermore, the International Cooperation Division of
Department of Information Technology has been set up to
promote international cooperation in the emerging and frontier
areas of information technology under bilateral, multilateral or
regional framework. Such interaction provides an opportunity for
sharing of knowledge and experience with countries, international
bodies, academia and institutions for forging partnerships for
mutual progress.
As far as international cooperation with Korea is concerned, it
has been envisaged to promote the investment flow from Korea
to the Indian ICT hardware sector, exploitation of
complementarities, development of technology, human resource
development, next generation ICT industry, Broadband
infrastructure, E-Governance, etc. Two major Korean companies
LG and Samsung are established brand names in Indian
households and have already acquired a major share of the Indian
market in the electronics and white goods segments. The Indian
customers are happy with the pricing and service provided [21].
NICTP was to make Ghana and Kenya a producer and not a mere
consumer of ICT products and services. It is thus clear that the
ICT Policy is expected to create conducive environment for a
vibrant and sustainable ICT industry, making the country a more
competitive developer and producer of ICT products and services.
The policy lacks support to entrepreneurship and emphasis on
small and medium enterprises (SMEs). On human resource
development, Korea, Australia, Canada, Singapore and Malaysia
defined it clearly in their ICT policies. Malaysia set several
objectives to improve the human resource capacity that stimulates
improving science and technology courses, the use of e-learning
and training teachers on ICT skills. Korea, Singapore, Canada and
Australia trained the mass so that the mass is able to use the
technology and appreciate the advantages.
Kenya and Ghana NICTP provides for the development of an ICT
ready workforce with the objective of increasing human resource
ICT skills, support ICT training for political decision-makers,
community and civil society leaders, as well as private and public
sector executives, expand and develop the teaching of ICT at all
levels of the national system of formal and informal education and
training, to foster interest among scientists and citizen at large.
However, the policy does not address how this is achieved. Korea
set up a 3rd Basic Plan for Informatization Promotion (2002-
2006) issued in April 2002, to provide every Korean with learning
opportunity by fostering an online learning environment and
training on Internet usage skill [15. Kenya and Ghana policy does
not focus on regional linkages in human capacity development,
for collaboration and knowledge sharing.

3.6 ICT Productive and Service Sectors
The inception and diffusion of ICT in the production sectors
forms an important basis for exploitation of the ICT muscles at
the full-scale. The ICT policy needs to strengthen the competitive
and comparative advantage of hardware and ICT service providers
locally, regionally and internationally. Policies of some countries
have focused on local companies over foreign-owned companies
just as is the case with Korea ICT policy‘s priority to enhance
productivity and efficiency across economic Sectors and SMEs
through [13] [15]. Kenya and Ghana NICTP focuses on local
companies to contribute to the reduction of poverty and to
improve the quality of life of Kenyans and Ghana people,
fostering enterprise, entrepreneurship and innovativeness for
sustainable socio-economic and economic development.
3.7 ICT Legal and Regulatory Framework
Many of the leading countries in ICT policy formulation and
implementation formulated regulatory and legal frameworks for
easy implementation of the ICT policy. Singapore and Korea
created several acts and regulations that provided legal
recognition of electronic contracts and electronic signatures [13]
[15]. Malaysia on the other hand, developed Digital Signature Act
1997 to give a digital signature the same legal status as an
ordinary signature, thumbprint or other binding mark in use [16]
[17]. Above all, Singapore and Malaysia enacted binding laws on
cyber crime and Korea created laws for online procurement.
Deployment of the necessary infrastructure to support secure
electronic transactions for e-business and e-government need be
implemented. Korea, Australia, Singapore, Canada and Malaysia
are well known worldwide as the leading in the implementation of
e-government. Other entailing key issues include measures to
protect the confidentiality and privacy of citizens, increase the
level of awareness on information security threats and best
practices to safeguard data. Singapore established cabinet
agencies to oversee ICT policy development. The key question is
whether there is one best institutional model for policy
development and implementation. It is critical that agency or
commission leads in ICT planning and development.
Technological development to regulate is critical. Digital
technology has enabled the use of one digital network to distribute
services that used to require different analogue networks. Thus,
broadcasting, telephony and internet can be delivered using one
network. Malaysia‘s Communications and Multimedia
Commission [16] [17] and Singapore‘s Infocomm Development
Authority [1] [21] are good examples.
The Kenya Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) is a
convergence regulator bringing the convergence concept in
communication sector to reality in Kenya [14]. The policy talks of
strengthening the mandates of CCK to ensure quality and
compatibility of IT products and services. However, the policy is
quiet about the modes of strengthening needed and seems to
ignore the importance of other standard bodies and professional
groups to assist. There is no dedicated regulator for "ICT" in
Kenya. The National Communications Secretariat has struggled
with a culture of secrecy, which has made cooperation with more
progressive entities such as the CCK and the Directorate of Egovernment
housed inside the President's office. Emphasis is
needed on confidentiality and privacy, formulation of the National
197
Information Security Strategy and promoting adoption of
Information Security Standards at national level.
The National Communication Authority (NCA) was established
by an Act of parliament in 1996, to regulate the information and
communication technologies (ICTs) industry in Ghana. Since
inception the NCA focus has been on promoting growth of the
communication sector and significant progress has been made in
meeting the objectives. However, an area that needs similar
attention is the “consumer” aspect of its mandate. Global trends in
the ICT industry make it mandatory for consumer issues to be
included in national regulatory structures. In addition, the world
ICT governing body, ITU, upholds the need for regulators to carry
the responsibility of addressing the consumer issues [17].
3.8 Public Service and Local
Many developed and developing countries focus on the use of ICT
to enhance service delivery to the public. Remarkable efforts have
been shown in many of these countries including Singapore,
Australia, Canada, Korea and Malaysia. The five have set out
goals for the use of ICT for delivering government services and
have implemented the same. This pillar (Public service) in the
Kenya and Ghana NICTP focuses on effective delivery of services
to the public [14] [8]. The specific objectives of e-government
outlined in NICTP are to increase the productivity of both the
public and private sectors, empowering the public by building and
e-Government platform that facilitates their relationship and
interactions with the Government, and enhances the range and
delivery of more effective public services at both central and local
levels, while also generating accurate and timely information to
better shape policies, strategic plans and tactical decisions for
developing and enhancing the delivery of affordable public
services. The policy has also outlined strategies for promoting
good corporate and public governance by furthering information
sharing, transparency and accountability. In Kenya and Ghana
part of this pillar has been implemented and some government
transactions are now done online.
Compared to infrastructure development, content development
has not received as much attention from governments worldwide.
Already we see that lack of local content has driven Internet
traffic in many countries to foreign sites. There are countries such
as Singapore that have initiatives to develop local content.
Singapore and Malaysia have laws and rules regarding
objectionable Internet content [1]. Singapore is unique in
combining government rules with industry self-regulation in
managing content [21]. In some countries, governments are
nervous about content, in particular one that is challenging the
political and economic interests of the State or its allies. Content
that has the potential for political mobilization also comes within
the orbit of the State‘s surveillance, which is provided for by the
laws enacted in those countries.
While other countries have developed laws governing the
management of local content, Kenya has done little in regard to
this. The government should provide support, resources, and put
laws in place. Ghana NICTP lacks local content.
Korea has strategies for harnessing ICT for Social Development
[13] [15]. These include the specific targets of increasing ICT
integration in society, by providing access to ICTs to all
communities including those isolated geographically or
economically, provide universal access through the enhancement

of existing Public Internet Access Points (PIAPs), reducing the
digital divide, by encouraging the youth to set up computer clubs
aimed at encouraging their interest in IT-related fields and provide
online access to express their needs.
A commitment to universal access is the cornerstone of efforts to
reach out to include everyone in the information economy and is a
first step in bridging the digital divide. A funding mechanism to
meet the cost of universal access has to be discussed and
negotiated by the telecoms regulator and/or the government
department/ministry responsible for this. Operators should
contribute to the cost of rolling out access as part of their
obligations under the licensing agreements they have signed with
the local regulatory authority of the government.
3.9 Institutional Arrangements for Driving the
ICT Policy
Kenya and Ghana have established CCK and NCA respectively as
the sector ICT regulator just like Comparing Korea, Canada,
Australia, Singapore and Malaysia with (. The regulator is an
independent, credible, and effective quasi-government body
whose functions are to regulate and monitor the ICT sector and
foster competition through the issuance of licenses to operators
and franchise holders. The regulator was established as part of the
Government Policy reforms in the communication sector for both
the countries with the aim of improving the availability of the
info-communications services to the public as well as to allow
new players into the market. Both CCK and NCA reports to the
line Ministry in their respective countries.
Furthermore, institutional arrangements for ICT policy
implementations should consider the participation of both public
and private sector and functional linkages between different key
institutions should feature clearly in the policy.
4. FORMULATION PROCESS OF KENYA
AND GHANA ICT POLICY
4.1 Kenya National ICT Policy Formulation
Process
Kenya developed its ICT policy as part of ICT for Economic
Growth (2006) to represent the nation’s vision in the information
age [14]. The aspirations set included Recovery Strategy for
Wealth Creation and Employment as well as Poverty Reduction.
The move to develop a national ICT policy was triggered off by
three key and mutually reinforcing factors namely the fast and
haphazard growth of information technology that lacked direction
and regulation; the desire to develop the national ICT policy
guidelines to steer development of ICTs in the country to address
the disorder; and the readiness of UNESCO to fund the process.
The development of a policy for the deployment of ICT for socialeconomic
development in Kenya began in mid nineties. The
policy is based on four guiding principles: infrastructure
development, human resource development, stakeholder
participation and appropriate policy and regulatory framework.
The challenge is to harness the potential of ICTs for economic
growth and poverty reduction [14].
4.1.1 Kenya ICT Policy Framework
In order to identify and address the critical factors for the success
of the policy formulation and plan development process, and
eventual ICT implementation process, extensive consultation with
…
198
KENYA ICT POLICY FRAMEWORK: Tiered approach to
sector management
various institutions and organizations were conducted based on a
Kenya opted for a tied framework with the policy instrument driving legal and regulatory aspects as
3 tiered approach to sector management, figure 2 [14].
Increasing level Specificity
illustrated on first diagram.
Instrument
Policy &Vision-Policy
Guidelines
Regulation Framework-
KCA 98
Regulations-KCR 2001
Operator License
Source of Authority
Stakeholder-
Minister/Citizen
Parliament
Minister
Regulator
Figure 2: Kenya’s IT Policy Framework
4.1.2 KENYA ICT Policy ICT POLICY Institutional FRAMEWORK Support Framework
Institutional Positioning
Policy
Formulation
Regulation
Service
Operation
Consumers
Ministry for Communication
Communications
Commission of Kenya
Arbitration
Advisory
Legislature-Parliamentary Committee
on Public Works, Energy and Communications
National Communications
Secretariat
Appeals Tribunal
Content oo
Universal Access
Universal Access Fund
Service Providers, Telecoms, ISP Broadcasters ,Vendors
Figure 3: Kenya’s IT Policy Institutional Framework
4.1.3 ICT policy development process
Economic Recovery Strategy for Wealth and Employment
Creation gave birth to “Investment Program for the Economic
Recovery Strategy for Wealth and Employment Creation 2003-
2007 (IP-ERS)”, released in May 2004. The consultations
followed a three-tier approach at the national, provincial and
district levels with stakeholders that included the Private Sector,
Civil Society, Development Partners and local communities. This
approach led to the formation of a National Steering Committee of
stakeholders charged with the responsibility of spearheading
consultations and ensuring inclusion at all levels; and chaired by
Minister of Information and Communication. Also involved in the
process were Kenya's development partners; civil society
representatives and government officials. The government has
implemented ICT policy reforms between 1999 and 2006 which
resulted in a number of structural changes in the ICT sector.
Several policy documents were released at intervals namely in
January 1997, April 1999, and Dec 2001.
4.1.4 ICT Cardinal Pillars
The Cardinal Pillars of the Kenya policy are: 1) education and
Training 2) new opportunities 3) marketing networking and
promotion 4) recruitment and retention 5) market intelligence and
research 6) business support and investment.
4.2 Ghana National ICT Policy Formulation
Process
Ghana developed its ICT policy [8] for Accelerated Development
(ICT4AD) process led by the Economic Commission for Africa
(ECA) within the context of the African Information Society
Initiative (AISI). To the benefactor countries, the initiative served
as a framework for a radical socioeconomic transformation of the
countries through the deployment and exploitation of ICTs within
the context of the challenges of the globalization and Information

Age. It is based on the policy framework document “An
Integrated ICT-led Socioeconomic Development Policy and Plan
Development Framework for Ghana”. The Ghana ICT4AD Policy
Statement recognizes the aspirations and provisions of key
socioeconomic development framework documents like Vision
202o Socio-Economic Development Framework, Ghana Poverty
reduction Strategy (GPRS) (2002 – 2004) and Coordinated
Program for Economic and Social Development of Ghana (2003 -
2012)
4.2.1 ICT Policy Framework
The development, deployment and exploitation of ICTs within the
economy and society can contribute to and accelerate Ghana’s
socioeconomic development process provided some critical
success factors and conditions are addressed at the: national,
organizational levels as well as at the level of individuals in the
work place and in the society at large.
4.2.2 Ghana’s ICT Policy - Institutional Support
Framework
Ghana ICT policy framework structure [22] formed four bodies to
assume responsibility of coordinating, facilitating monitoring and
subsequently ensuring the implementation of the policy:
• The National ICT Policy and Plan Development Committee,
constituted by the President, and chaired by a University
Professor.
• The Ministry of Communications as the host ministry and the
policy implementation agency
• The Ghana ICT Directory, as an implementation arm of the
Ministry of Communications
• The National Information Technology Authority, as a
Presidential Advisory body
4.2.3 Ghana’s ICT Policy Process
Ghana ICT Policy Process [22] has been touted as the most
participatory policy development process on the continent.
Extensive consultation with major stakeholders was conducted
throughout the length and breadth of the country in search for
national priorities and needs, as well as to sensitize the
community prior to the development of the ICT4AD framework
document and the eventual write-up of the policy document,
action plans and legislations. The development, deployment and
exploitation of ICTs within the economy and society can
contribute to and accelerate Ghana’s socioeconomic development
process provided some critical success factors and conditions are
addressed at the: national and organizational levels as well as at
the level of individuals in the work place and in the society at
large. It was a four step process [22] involving the development of
a framework, development of a policy, followed by development
of plans and eventually the implementation of the policy strategies
and action plans. Ghana conducted extensive consultation with the
stakeholders that was located across the length and breadth of the
country. Participatory nature of the process was referenced by the
ECA as a benchmark for its facilitated ICT Policies
4.2.4 Ghana’s ICT Policy – Cardinal Pillars
The Cardinal Pillars of Ghana ICT4AD Policy are as follows [8]:
1) accelerating Human Resource Development 2) promoting ICTs
in Education 3) facilitating Government administration and
service delivery 4) facilitating private sector development 5)
developing export-oriented ICT products and service industry 6)
199
modernizing agriculture and development of agro-business 7)
developing a globally competitive value added service industry.
4.3 Policy Priorities and Internet Regulation
Despite the broad participation of multiple stakeholders in
Ghana’s policy formulation process, and partial participation of
stakeholder Kenya’s case, the implementation in both countries
did not translate into action plans to acceptable level [8][17]. The
establishment of the Ministry of Information Communications
made it possible to update the policy framework and implements
some flagship projects. Consequently there has been a major
disconnection between communication policies that address
access issues and broad based ICT policies that focus on the
exploitation of ICTs as instrument of development. Although
access to communication was improved through cellular services,
progress with regards to fixed lines and broadband network that
underpin ICT application has remained very low. Increasing
access to affordable communication and developing human
capacity are vital for the success of ICT policy.
Although Kenya and Ghana have started internal processes of
governance over the Internet by developing their own set of
National ICT Strategies, infrastructure, technological and
regulatory frameworks, there is wide gap between national policy
and the regulation of online environment in the aspects of
international communications infrastructure, content access and
development, electronic trade and on-line applications. In
particular Ghana is not focusing on local content in its policy.
A team should be formed to address Internet issues. The policy
review shows that there is an overlap in the priority areas, a
reflection of the common social and economic challenges in the
two countries. The overlap is evident particularly in the areas of:
human resources development; broadband infrastructure
development; policy; legislative and regulatory framework; ICT
sector development; and ICT applications and content.
Main areas of focus of ICT policy Include: ICT Leadership, ICT
Infrastructure, ICT Industry, Human Capital, Legal and
Regulatory Framework, Productive Sectors, Service Sectors,
Public Service, Local Content and Universal access. Furthermore,
the vision and mission expressed in the policy documents remain
consistent, an indication of a degree of convergence in adopting
common vision to harness information and communication
technologies for development.
The review indicates that; there is under emphasis of the need for
highly skilled human resources and ICT research and
development that could have long term economic and social
benefits to the country. The smart use of ICTs in the universities,
public and private sector is critical for national and regional
competitiveness. The application of ICTs in agriculture and health
has not been given equal attention considering number of
workforce and resources devoted to these sectors in the country.
4.3 Institutional Arrangement and
Participation of Stakeholders
Institutional arrangement and the participation of various
stakeholders particularly the media, civil society, private sector
and the academia provide a good indication of the maturity of ICT
policy. The review of institutional arrangement shows that the
more the ICT function is sponsored by the highest political
leadership like the President, the better the chance of its success.
Likewise, the higher the involvement of the major stakeholders in

the policy process e.g. formulation, implementation and policy
review; the higher the ownership and the better the success in
implementing ICT programs.
Although Kenya and Ghana have relatively developed broad
consultation process in the ICT sector, the participation of civil
society in ICT policy issues has not been that consistent due to
lack of a strong ICT civil society with a national coverage. Figure
2 shows institutional framework for policy formulation and
implementation for Kenya. The ministries formed by the two
governments to administer the implementation of ICT policy
should promote strong civil society participation. As a result of
lack of limited ownership the formed ministries are expected to
alleviate coordination challenges. It is necessary to encourage
civil society participation and strong competitive private sector
facilitated by good regulatory framework.
Evaluation of the governance framework shows that various
sectors and institutions continue to compete for external resources
to meet their needs and concerns independently, rather than
creating a favorable framework applicable to all. The main lessons
drawn from the ICT policy can be summarized as follows:
streamline institutional arrangements, establish the directorate of
ICT at the Ministry of Communication Science and Technology
has a high chance of success in the implementation of ICT
programs and mobilize the resources.
Since the Ministry to champion ICT exists in Ghana and Kenya,
the established directorate will drive the policy process, develop
priority and flagship projects and implement projects through
public and private partnerships. The minister should act as key
champions and sponsors for the ICT policy process. The
separation of policy (political) and regulatory (procedural)
function has been a key governance challenge. There is no one
size fit strategy for the separation of policy and regulatory
functions; however it is essential that the regulator is insulated
from day-to-day interference of policy makers and secure its
financial autonomy. The legitimacy of the regulator can be
improved by enhancing competence and improving interaction
with the public. A good coordination among institutions needs a
champion Minister, trust and flexibility within the ICT policy.
4.4 Implementation of ICT Policy
In general terms, the ICT policy leads to an implementation plan
benchmarked by flagship projects, although the presence of an
implementation plan may not guarantee the success of policy. A
review of the situation of Kenya and Ghana show that the
implementation of the ICT policy is driven by external funding
than a well thought-out plan that addresses the key building
blocks like infrastructure, regulatory functions and human
resources development as envisaged and monitored.
Although NICTP existed, Kenya and Ghana did not develop the
implementation strategy. Various projects targeted to the policy
have been implemented with support from external donor
agencies. The national fiber backbone network, Universal Access,
and the e-government projects are among the current flagship
projects for the implementation of the national ICT policy. The
main objective of the national backbone project is to establish a
telecom backbone transmission network to satisfy domestic and
regional ICT requirements in the long term. It intends to provide
long-distance telephone networks, data backbone networks and
extend Internet bandwidth countrywide by offering sufficient
capacities, network resiliency and guaranteed quality of service
200
provision to meet the needs of voice, data, mobile, internet, leased
circuit etc.
5. KEY FACTORS ON THE
DEVELOPMENT OF NICTP
The NICTP for Kenya and Ghana were analyzed using
benchmarking principals and compared to other countries. The
emerging issues from the work and the entailing findings are
categorized in the following key elements summarized as: the
policy process and stakeholders involvement; the ICT policy
goals, objectives and mission; ICT policy focus areas; institutional
arrangements to drive ICT policy, regional and international
dimensions, implementation processes; and policy review and
monitoring
The Institutional framework for implementing the national policy
implementation and monitoring was not described adequately in
the Kenya policy; hence some roles were left hanging. Monitoring
was not covered in the Ghana policy. It is my observation and
strong feeling that the policy left a serious governance gap. Based
on the review it can be concluded that, coordination of the
implementation strategy was inadequate and resulted in
misunderstanding on the way forward and a priority on where
funds or source of funding for the proposed activities.
6. CONCLUSION
The analysis of the current NICTP development and
implementation was conducted. Weaknesses were identified
through the benchmarking analysis that compared Kenya and
Ghana NICTP from other countries of similar nature but in
different regions. The review shows that from the onset of the
initiatives, drafting and development of the policy, stakeholders
were not fully involved for Kenya’s as was the case of Ghana,
thus resulting in: 1) lack of full ownership and operational
institutional framework 2) poor participation of key stakeholders
3) poor coordination during implementation 4) lack of coherent
but integrated implementation strategies.
Kenya and Ghana NICTP is very generic. It eliminates strategy
from the vision where the policy looks at vision, principles and
guidelines, the Strategy should look at implementation plan, by
focusing on who is to do what by when, where, benefits and cost
of implementing the policy. The policy ignores implementation
and no action plan is provided in the entire document.
Therefore, in order to rectify the situation, the policy review
process has to consider changes in technology, new national and
regional developments and recognize the need to add acts and
policies to support policy implementation by creation enabling
environment. A good policy with its implementation strategies
and institutional framework has the potential of making ICT an
effective tool in achieving set goals. For an effective policy
review process the paper recommended the following:
• NICTP assessment should involve stakeholders and
ministries for a multi-stakeholder participatory approach.
Policy vision and mission to be shared by key role players to
address universal access and infrastructural developments.
• The policy should appreciate laws and regulations like cyber
usage, e-transaction, confidentiality and privacy.
• The reviewed policy has to emphasize downstream issues
like ICT Incubator to promote local entrepreneurial culture.

• In regard to vision and strategy the national ICT policy
should be specific and should include strategy in the vision.
• It should be noted that many a nation develop ICT policies
but few realize the widely acclaimed benefits of ICT in terms
of socio-economic development, because it takes more than
policy development to realize those benefits.
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks go to ICEGOV sponsoring organizations and
conference organizers for the financial support given to attend the
ICEGOV 2012 conference and to present a paper.
8. REFERENCES
[1] BALRAJ-AMBIGAPATHY, S, GOONASEKERA, A AND
LEE CHUN, W. 2001. Asian Communication Handbook
―Malaysiaǁ‖ in (eds). Singapore: AMIC.
[2] Cheryl Marie Cordeiro and Suliman Al-Hawamdeh, “National
Information Infrastructure and the realization of Singapore
IT2000 initiative,” Division of Information Studies,
Information Research, Vol. 6 No. 2, 2001.
[3] David A. Wolfe and Allison Bramwell, “Growing the ICT
Industry in Canada: A Knowledge Synthesis Paper”, 2010.
[4] David Gichoya, “Factors Affecting the Successful
Implementation of ICT Projects in Government”, 2005.
[5] Delivering Australian Government Services: Access and
Distribution Strategy (http://www.finance.gov.au), 2006.
[6] Delivering Australian Government Services: Managing
Multiple Channels (http://www.finance.gov.au), 2006.
[7] Ewen Le Borgne and Jaap Pels, “Knowledge management
and Communication strategy West Africa Water Initiative
Knowledge Management project, October 2010
[8] Ghana’s ICT4AD Policy Document (http://www.ict.gov.gh),
2003
[9] ICT Development Index (IDI) 2010 report February 2012 by
the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
(http://inwent-iij-lab.org/Weblog/2010/07/26/ictdevelopment-index-itu-omits-sierra-leone-again/)
[10] ICT Policy Development: the Case of Canada, 2012 IPCSIT
vol. 36 (2012) © (2012) IACSIT Press, Singapore,
(http://www.ipcsit.com)
[11] Investment Policy Review Kenya, 2005 by United Nations
(http://mirror.undo.org).
[12] Investment Policy Review of Kenya, 2005 (http://unctad.org)
[13] IT839 Strategy Document (http://www.vus.sk)
[14] Kenya ICT Policy Document (http://www.ist-africa.org)
[15] Korea’s Informatization Policy to Deliver ICT Use in
Everyday Life (http://unpan1.un.org), 2007 Edition
[16] Malaysia draft national IT policy (revised) 2007-2013,
(http://www.eeas.europa.eu)
[17] Malaysia National ICT Policy; Malaysia‘s Vision 2020,
which foresees Malaysia becoming an industrialized country
(http://www.epu.gov.my)
201
[18] Margaret Abba-Donkor, “Effective regulation: The
importance of addressing consumer issues in an Era of
digitization and convergence”, 2007.
[19] OSIMO, D., AND GAREIS, K. 2005. The role of interregional
benchmarking in the policy-making process:
experiences in the field of information society, in
proceedings of the Regional Studies Association conference,
Aalborg, Denmark.
[20] Singapore National ICT Policy, Transform Singapore into a
vibrant global ICT capital with a thriving and prosperous Net
Economy by year 2010, (http://www.unapcict)
[21] Sudhir Kumar Marwaha, International Cooperation in the
ICT Field: Bridging the Digital Divide, 2009.
[22] The Ghana ICT for Accelerated Development (ICT4AD)
Policy, 2003 (http://www.ict.gov.gh/).

Laggards or Victims of Socioeconomic Conditions?
Findings from Ongoing Survey of Female Slum-dwellers
Without Cell Phone Ownership
ABSTRACT
This paper presents the following details from an ongoing survey
of 334 poor female slum-dwellers who don’t own cell phones:
demographic features including socioeconomic status, sources of
income, barriers to adopt cell phones, and perceived incentives for
and consequences of using cell phones in India. The findings
differ from three key characteristics of laggards identified by the
diffusion of innovation literature. The findings based on responses
from 334 poor laggards suggest hypotheses for predicting the cell
phone adoption by the remaining poor laggards in India.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.1.1 [Systems and Information Theory]: Value of Information
H.1.2 [User/Machine Systems]: Human Factors
General Terms
Economics and Human Factors
Keywords
Diffusion of Innovation, Laggards, Poor Slum-Dwellers,
Adoption of Cell Phones
1. INTRODUCTION
Cell phones are the most widely adopted information and
communication technology (ICT) innovation in the world with
more than five billion subscribers as of December 2010, and the
customer-base was expected to exceed six billion by the end of
2011[1]. Since 2000, coverage of mobile telephony has expanded,
and cell phone subscriptions in developing countries like India
and China have increased by over 500%. Intense competition and
innovation within the telecommunications sector in the last decade
has catapulted India into the largest and fastest-growing cell
phone market in the world. Inexpensive cell phone handsets ($15
Devendra Potnis and Kanchan Deosthali
University of Tennessee
01-865-974-2148, 01-518-322-6693
dpotnis@utk.edu, kdeostha@utk.edu
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not
made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear
this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of
this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with
credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to
redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
202
per piece and above), fierce competition in the Indian cell phone
industry (five out of 15 service providers sharing the market
almost equally), and very cheap tariff rates (less than two cents
per minute) have made cell phones affordable even to poor.
Further, collective ownership models (sharing cell phones through
SIM cards and payments for air-time) and flexible payment
options such as micro-payments (up to a dollar) make cell phones
an attractive communication medium [3].
In India, thirty percent of the nation’s 1.3 billion people are under
18[5], which is the legal age for buying cell phones in the country.
Out of 910 million potential cell phone owners, 907 million had
adopted the ICT innovation as of September 2011 [4]. Thus,
according to the diffusion of innovation literature, the citizens
above 18 who do not own cell phones can be labeled as
innovation laggards. The diffusion of innovation theory [2]
proposes five categories for innovation adopters: innovators, early
adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards (see Figure
1).
Figure 1. Adopter Categories [2]
Adopter categories are the classifications of members of a social
system on the basis of innovativeness, or the degree to which an
individual or other unit of adoption accepts new ideas when
compared to other members of a system.
1.1 Research Objective
Despite the cheapest cell phone prices in the world and a host of
affordable services and products offered over the cell phones,
more than 3 million Indian adults – categorized as innovation
laggards – do not own and/or use cell phones. To learn more
about these innovation laggards, this study focused on poor
female slum-dwellers who don’t own cell phones. These female
slum-dwellers earn less than two dollars a day and represent one
of the most disadvantaged populations in the male-dominant
Indian society. The following research questions were explored as
part of this ongoing study:

1) What are the demographic characteristics, including
socioeconomic status, of female slum-dwellers who do not
own cell phones?
a) Is there a correlation between respondents’ income,
education, age, family characteristics, and facilities at
home and their lack of cell phone ownership?
2) What are the key barriers to cell phone adoption by
respondents?
3) What are the perceived consequences of and incentives for
cell phone adoption?
The second section describes the relevant theory from diffusion of
innovation literature. The third section presents the research
methodology used to collect responses from slum-dwellers in
urban and rural India. The fourth section presents the study
findings, and the final section concludes with hypotheses and
suggestions for future research, and practical implications of study
findings.
2. DIFFUSION OF INNOVATION
Diffusion is a special type of communication in which messages
are new ideas. It is a social change, defined as the “process by
which alteration occurs in the structure and function of a social
system” [2, p.6]. Social changes occur when new ideas are
invented, diffused, and are adopted or rejected. Although the cell
phone is not a new technology, it is definitely a new idea for
millions of poor in India to start using cell phones for everyday
life. The following sub-sections portray characteristics of laggards
and consequences for and incentives of innovation as described by
the diffusion of innovation theory [2].
2.1 Characteristics of Laggards
Laggards are the last in a social system to adopt an innovation.
They are conservative and “localite” in their outlook. They often
interact with those who have traditional values. They are not part
of any social network and live in their own worlds with very
limited exposure to the outside world. There are no leaders among
laggards, and they are rarely associated with any opinion leaders.
The point of reference for the laggard is always the past. They do
not believe in innovations and, hence, tend to be suspicious of
new innovations. Laggards adopt an innovation only when they
are sure about its success, since they cannot afford to lose the
investment made in any innovation.
2.2 Perceived Consequences of and Incentives
for Innovation
Consequences are the changes that occur to an individual or to a
social system as a result of the adoption or rejection of an
innovation. There are three types of consequences of diffusion of
innovation: (i) desirable versus undesirable consequences,
depending on whether the effects of an innovation in a social
system are functional or dysfunctional; (ii) direct versus indirect
consequences, depending on whether the changes to an individual
or to a social system occur in immediate response to an innovation
or as a second-order result of the direct consequences of an
innovation; and (iii) anticipated versus unanticipated
consequences, depending on whether the changes are recognized
and intended by the members of a social system or not.
There are a variety of incentives observed with the diffusion of
innovation. The incentives are as follows. Either the individual
adopter or the system associated with that adopter is benefitted
203
due to the individual’s adoption of innovation. Positive incentives
like awards and rewards or negative incentives like penalties and
fines increase the rate of adoption. Monetary or social incentives
trigger the act of adoption. Immediate incentives, which are
incentives that are paid at the time of the adoption, increase
adoption rate; in contrast, delayed incentives could benefit
adopter(s) days, weeks, months, or even years after adoption.
3. RESEARCH METHODS
The current study focused on poor females living in urban and
rural slums who did not own cell phones. Two female assistants in
their 40s from the lowest socioeconomic stratum were recruited
for data collection. The assistants were literate enough to write
down responses on the survey questionnaire. The assistants were
paid 60 cents for each respondent they surveyed. The assistants
randomly distributed surveys and collected data from selected 386
slum-dwellers. Out of 386 responses, 334 responses were usable.
The data collection is still going on in rural and urban areas of
Maharashtra, one of the western states in India. The convenient
sampling of respondents limits the generalizability of study
findings.
4. FINDINGS
This section provides answers to the three research questions.
4.1 Demographic Characteristics Including
Socioeconomic Status
Out of 334 female respondents, 79 belong to rural slums and 255
live in urban slums. The average age of respondents was close to
37 years (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. Age Distribution for % of Respondents
Approximately 37% of respondents were illiterate. Out of the
remaining 63% of respondents, (a) 29% of respondents dropped
out of school before 10 th grade, (b) 21% of respondents attended
school until 10 th grade, and (c) 13% of respondents attended
college. Fifty seven percent of respondents earned less than a
dollar a day, 36% of respondents earned more than a dollar a day
and less than two dollars a day, and 7% of respondents earned
more than two dollars a day. Television, in-house bathrooms, and
tap water connections were the three topmost facilities and
services enjoyed by the respondents (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Facilities & Services Enjoyed by Respondents
There was no correlation found between respondents’ education,
age, marital status, family characteristics, and facilities at home
and their lack of cell phone ownership.
4.1.1 Sources of Income
The survey sought primary, secondary, and tertiary sources of
income from each respondent. Table 1 lists the income sources
into the following categories: (i) business of selling services, (ii)
business of selling products, (iii) employment, (iv) helper in nonemployee
role for someone else’s business, (v) unemployed, (vi)
retired, and (vii) miscellaneous.
Table 1. Source of Income
# Types of Income Primary Secondary Tertiary
Sources N= 312 N= 181 N =84
1 Business of
selling services
44% 44% 35%
2 Business of
selling products
24% 27% 43%
3 Employee 14% 13% 13%
4 Helper in Nonemployee
Role
2% 4% 5%
5 Unemployed 13% 12% 4%
6 Retired 2% 0% 0%
7 Miscellaneous 1% 0% 0%
The business of selling services emerged as the topmost income
source in primary and secondary category, whereas the business
of selling products was the topmost tertiary source of income for
respondents. Respondents offered the following services: house
cleaning, dishwashing, cloth washing, cooking and catering, babysitting,
dropping children to schools, massaging, teaching,
tailoring, singing, training women for handicraft, renting photo
frames to hospitals, singing, match-making, portering, and
nursing. The business of selling products included a variety of
products, such as vegetables, fruits, sweetmeats, traditional
snacks, spices, dry fish, tea, meals, fish, bangles, pearl ornaments,
hair-bands, dress material/clothing, flowers, fabric paintings,
birthday party decorations, ribbons for typewriters, calendars,
rubber stamps, brooms, and sticks for ice-cream candies.
The different forms of employment for the women were as
follows: compounder at a dispensary, care-taker of mentally
retarded children, assistant in a photo studio, sales-girl, student
assistant, office staff in placement office, nurse, assistant in
transportation business, assistant at telephone booth, hotel staff,
204
construction worker, government employee, bottle company
worker, delivery girl by a courier company, assistant to an
accountant, assistant to caterers, farm workers, server in
weddings, floor mill operator, and assistant at a computer
institute. Another type of income source for women was serving
as helpers in others’ businesses. This included helping in
husbands’ businesses, fathers’ businesses, uncles’ businesses, and
sons’ businesses. The unemployed women were: students, job
seekers, housewives whose husbands did not allow them to work,
physically handicapped women, caretakers of their big families,
daughter-in-laws refrained by their in-laws to work, illiterate, and
less educated women.
4.2 Key Barriers to Cell Phone Adoption
Respondents reported three key barriers that kept them away from
owning cell phones. Table 2 shows low income or insufficient
income as the most significant barrier and second most significant
barrier to adopting cell phones. Miscellaneous financial reasons
were reported as the third most significant barrier that prevented
respondents from owning cell phones. The miscellaneous
financial reasons were as follows: scarce money to eat food on a
daily basis, insufficient money to repair a leaking roof, low
savings for children’s schooling, uncertainty and unpredictability
of daily wages, no raise in income and salary, seasonal
employment, unemployment, lack of permanent job, remittance of
money to relatives in native places, insufficient savings to buy a
cell phone, lack of guidance for operating cell phones, loss in
business, very small profit margin in business, meager pension,
savings lost in son’s accident, medical expenses, and a lot of
accrued debt due to mother’s sickness and daughter’s wedding.
The miscellaneous non-financial reasons that served as barriers to
cell phones included government policies, socio-cultural
backwardness, illiteracy, less education, dependency on relatives,
retirement, disabled husband, resistance by husband and in-laws
to use cell phones, lack of freedom to make decisions, availability
of office phones to make personal calls, lack of electricity to
charge cell phones, lack of knowledge for operating cell phones,
ease of access to public phone booths, old age, husband’s
addiction to alcohol, possible mishandling and misuse of cell
phones by children, and extreme difference of opinions among
family members for using cell phones.
Table 2. Barriers to Cell Phone Adoption
# Types of Barriers First
Key
Barrier
N=325
1 Entire Financial Burden
on Respondent Alone
2%
2 Low/Insufficient Income 30%
Second
Key
Barrier
N=304
Third
Key
Barrier
N=208
2% 0%
27% 10%
3 Inflation 14% 14% 14%
4 a. Large Family b. More
# of Dependents than
Bread-winners
5 Lack of Need for Using
6
Cell Phones
Borrow Cell Phones
from Others
4% 8% 10%
4%
3%
4% 3%
4% 2%

7
Unaffordable Cell Phone
Prices and Maintenance
7%
6% 8%
8 Miscellaneous Financial
Reasons
13% 16% 32%
9 Poverty 12% 5% 1%
10 Costly
Upbringing and
Education of Children
11 Miscellaneous Nonfinancial
Reasons
3%
9% 6%
8% 5% 14%
4.3 Perceived Consequences of and Incentives
for Cell Phone Adoption
Anticipated and desirable consequences of adopting cell phones
were as follows. Ninety-five percent of respondents think that
their status in the family would improve if they started using cell
phones. Ninety eight percent of respondents believe that cell
phone usage will lead to personal development. Table 3 presents
respondents’ top perceived incentives for cell phone adoption.
Social networking with family, relatives, friends, and neighbors
emerged as the most important incentive for cell phone adoption.
Table 3. Perceived Incentives for Cell Phone Adoption
# Incentives for First Second Third
Cell Phone Adoption N = 334 N = 327 N = 271
1 Easy to make calls to
anybody any time
3% 3% 1%
2 For expanding business 25% 28% 17%
3 To maintain social contact
with family, relatives,
friends, and neighbors
55% 51% 62%
4 To seek out help in
emergency situations
17% 17% 19%
5 Entertainment 0% 1% 1%
5. CONCLUSION
The lack of cell phone ownership among female slum-dwellers
was largely based on unfavorable socioeconomic and financial
conditions and not driven by choice as is the case with laggards.
Poor female slum-dwellers are the victims of socioeconomic
conditions in rural and urban India, discouraging them from
adopting cell phones. Table 4 lists the differences between three
key characteristics of laggards identified by the diffusion of
innovation theory and the current study findings.
Table 4. Differences in Theory and Study Findings
# Theoretical Views
for Laggards
1 Laggards are
conservative
their outlook.
in
Current Study Findings
In the male-dominant Indian
society, business of selling services
and products forms the topmost
source of income for poor female
slum-dwellers. Respondents are
financially independent microentrepreneurs
with modern
205
2 Laggards are not
part of any social
network with very
limited exposure to
the outside world.
3 Laggards do not
believe in
innovations, hence
are suspicious of
innovations.
outlook.
Social networking with friends and
family members emerged as the
topmost incentive for slumdwellers
to adopt cell phones.
100% of respondents expressed
their confidence in the utility of
cell phones. They were not
suspicious about the value created
by adopting cell phones.
Findings based on responses from 334 poor laggards suggest
hypotheses for predicting cell phone adoption by the remaining
poor laggards in India, who do not own and use cell phones. The
hypotheses are as follows.
H1: Demographic variables (e.g., education, age, marital status,
family characteristics, and facilities at home) do not influence cell
phone adoption.
H2: Low or insufficient income is the main barrier for cell phone
adoption.
H3: Improvement in social status is the most evident perceived
consequence of cell phone adoption.
H4: Social networking is the major perceived incentive for cell
phone adoption. Hence, H4a: Respondents are more likely to
adopt cell phones, if they have family, friends, relatives, or
neighbors who own and use cell phones.
In addition, future research focusing on personal characteristics
and communication patterns of laggards without cell phone
ownership would equip us better for predicting cell phone
adoption by laggards in India.
Practical implications for cell phone manufacturers are as follows.
Cell phone features supporting the “business of selling services
and products” could increase the cell phone adoption by
microentrepreneurs in India. In addition, mobile applications
facilitating social networking with appropriate user interfaces
designed for illiterate and semi-literate cell phone users would be
an additional incentive for poor laggards to adopt cell phones.
6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We would like to thank the University of Tennessee at Knoxville
for funding this study.
REFERENCES
[1] ITU. International Telecommunications Union
Retrieved from www.itu.int/ on December 21, 2011.
[2] Rogers, E. Diffusion of Innovations (4th ed.).
New York: Free Press. 1995.
[3] Sinha, C. Effect of Mobile Telephony on Empowering Rural
Communities in Developing Countries, Conference on Digital
Divide, Global Development and the Information Society
(Tunis, Tunisia, 2005), 2005.
[4] TRAI. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India
Retrieved from http://www.trai.gov.in/ on October 23, 2011.
[5] US Census Bureau. US Census Bureau’s Intl. Database,
Retrieved from http://www.census.gov on May 1, 2010.

Promoting user uptake of e-government in Colombia
Diana Parra Silva
International Consultant
Orinoco 5006
Montevideo, Uruguay
+598 97305822
dianaparra@hotmail.com
ABSTRACT
This paper describes the key factors for the development of a
successful strategy for the e-government uptake in Colombia.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
A.0 [General]: Conference proceedings.
General Terms
Management, Measurement, Performance.
Keywords
E-government, "Gobierno en linea", Uptake, Marketing.
1. INTRODUCTION
In 2005, the OECD identified that having a strong brand, as well
as developing a solid marketing strategy, was a key factor in egovernment
successful cases. In 2009, some years later, the same
organization dedicated a publication to highlight the importance
of public awareness on e-government.
Raising awareness about the importance of user uptake has
become a pressing matter in the last years, to such an extent that
the UN E-Government Survey 2012 recognized it as a highpriority
aspect, when it points: "availability of online public
services ('supply-side') has been the primary focus of egovernment
studies and policymaking, but over the past years
citizens' usage of e-government services ('demand-side') has also
become a priority issue".
The fundamentals behind this fact have triggered a discussion on
two aspects: if citizens are not aware of the government's online
services and do not use them, are the efforts made by public
administrations valuable for the citizens? And, will the benefits
commonly associated to e-government and the social return of
investments be achieved without a critical mass of users?
"Gobierno en linea" is the Colombian strategy, led by a
Programme with the same name, that contributes on developing a
more efficient, transparent and participative government, which
provides better services by means of ICT. This strategy guides the
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
206
Johanna Pimiento Quintero
Manager of "Gobierno en linea"
CR 8 12-00
Bogota, Colombia
+571 3442270
johanna.pimiento@gobiernoenlinea.gov.co
delivery of online services by public agencies, at both national
and local levels.
The Programme, taking into consideration the discussion
mentioned before has impelled the awareness of e-government
services in the country through the diagnosis, design, development
and follow-up of a marketing and outreach strategy in Colombia
from 2008 to 2010. Below you will find the most relevant aspects
concerning such experience, which gave Colombia the basis to
promote the citizens' awareness up to the present days.
2. BASELINE
In 2007, a study carried out in 21 municipalities allowed gathering
information about knowledge, use, needs and expectations. The
study consisted of face-to-face surveys conducted in 2,500
households which represented the total of individuals residing at
urban areas, selected according to age, socioeconomic strata and
education of the country's population. The following are some
highlights of the study's findings:
o Only 23% of Colombians had visited a website of the
government, which meant that there were nearly 4
million of Internet users at that time that had never
visited any public agency website.
o Only 4% had used a government online service.
o 77% had not used government online services because
they didn't know how they worked, they were
considered to be unsafe or unreliable.
o 54% of nonusers were willing to use them, representing
19 million of potential users.
These findings motivated the decision to develop the marketing
and outreach strategy for enhancing awareness and use of egovernment
services.
3. DIAGNOSTIC
In 2008, the work began by analyzing the desired positioning for
"Gobierno en linea": being efficient, participatory and transparent,
as well as a provider of high quality services, which was
transformed into the strategy's specific objectives:
o To increase the government's efficiency by optimizing
processes and sharing resources, as well as exchanging
accurate and quality information.
o To promote transparency and participation, by
increasing the visibility of public matters and enabling
new channels for participation and social control.

o To provide better services fulfilling the citizen's needs,
with high quality, and reduced costs and time; making
them simpler and accessible through multiple channels.
A diagnosis was made with the intention of gathering more
information in order to design the marketing and outreach
strategy, using: 4,700 surveys in households, SMEs and large
companies, associative organizations and public agencies; a
positioning study with 6,003 surveys; 104 focus groups with
citizens, entrepreneurs and public servants; 369 interviews with
ICT companies, SMEs, Colombians living abroad and
international organisms.
In addition, the main characteristics of the communicational
approach of the leading countries on e-government were
researched, along with the best international practices regarding
incentives to citizens and companies for online services usage.
Likewise, macro and micro characteristics were analyzed
(economical, political, social and cultural factors; consumer, client
and competition profiles, among others), as well as domestic and
international audiences and potential users. Moreover, a study was
carried out in order to determine the positioning of the brand and
the organization and how they were perceived.
Equally important was to know the acceptance, motivations and
habits of use, possible advantages and disadvantages, main
benefits and problems, and usage intention for each target
audience. Also, a study to evaluate opportunities and risks of
repositioning or renovating the Programme denomination (called
"Agenda de Conectividad" at the moment) was made.
The following are some highlights about how the target audiences
perceived the positioning values:
o What is EFFICIENCY? "To not keep people wandering
around, from one government office to another". "Equal
treatment for everyone".
o What is TRANSPARENCY? "It is a government with
clear rules". "It implies the right of citizens to review
the government's performance".
o What is PARTICIPATION? "To be able to have a free
opinion and to express my ideas". "That every opinion
is taken into account".
o What is TO PROVIDE A GOOD SERVICE? "To make
the client feel well". "That the human being comes
first".
When people used Gobiernoenlinea.gov.co, they said things like:
o "There is no discrimination; it shows us that
opportunities are equal for everybody because it is open
to the public".
o "It no longer depends on the shift of public servant's
opinion; it is not open to interpretations".
o "With this type of portals one can make things easily
and it is not incited to pay somebody to speed up an
administrative formality".
o "It is serious because it avoids external middlemen".
4. DESIGN
From world experiences on e-government, it was concluded that
the communication objective for these services is mainly oriented
towards raising awareness on online services and promoting its
use by target audiences.
207
Therefore, it was decided to develop the marketing and outreach
strategy on "awareness and use", focusing on building a closer
relationship between people and the government.
The strategy focused on the following target audiences:
o Citizens: Although they do not always know how to use
it and they are not very aware of the administrative
formalities, it is the main target audience because it is
the most massive and most of the online services are
provided for them.
o Citizens living abroad: For this target audience,
Gobiernoenlinea.gov.co is an optimal channel offering
information and services, given that through this portal
they will always have access to the government from
any part of the world.
o Enterprises: It refers to large companies with a closer
contact to the government because they must regularly
comply with mandatory formalities. They support
initiatives that make them save time and money in their
interactions with the government.
o SMEs: It refers to small and medium enterprises, which
should be considered as a specific target audience since
they have different habits than large companies in their
interaction with the government. SMEs require more
support from the government because they do not have
the same resources or the same expertise as large
companies.
o Public servants: They are especially important, as they
are the human assets that assure e-government's good
operation. They may have certain fears, resistance to
change and may also think that technology might come
in to take their place.
o International community: The interaction with this
target audience is a window to global advocacy of
success and achievements. They provide the possibility
of learning from other experiences and it is also a way
of sharing what has been accomplished.
It was decided that the message was to be clear, outstanding and
inspiring; solid enough to be used in every media communication.
Such communications should have a pertinent tone according to
the target audience to be reached taking into account its specific
characteristics.
Similarly, it was decided that the denomination of the Programme
("Agenda de Conectividad") should be changed, using the same
name of the strategy ("Gobierno en linea") and therefore unifying
its image. A new logo was designed to be present throughout the
communication actions; the logo had to be simple and close to the
citizen and it should also convey credibility and the government's
identity (see Table 1). Using focus groups the whole process was
tested by citizens, businessmen and public servants.
Table 1. Changes in name and image
Before After

It was also decided that it was necessary to have a slogan, a short
phrase, easy to remember, which would link the functional matter
to the emotional one; something that would linger in time and that
will reflect the identity and the characteristics of the brand.
Consequently it should communicate change, easiness, and
proximity in such a way that each target audience could feel
identified with it: "Making your relationship with the government
easier" was chosen as the appropriate one.
To influence target audiences' perception, a five stages strategy
was designed, as detailed below:
o Stage of Preparation - its purpose was to advance in
research and strategic planning, prepare schedules and
budgets, and negotiate with the media, producing and
pre-testing campaigns, among others actions. It lasted
for 7 months.
o Stage of Sensitization - oriented specifically to public
servants. Communication objective: to raise their brand
awareness for the launching. Key message: We are all
"Gobierno en linea". It lasted for 2 months.
o Stage of Awareness - oriented to all target audiences.
Communication objective: to generate positive
perceptions for a better brand positioning, that would
raise its awareness and impact. Key message: We are
working to make your relationship with the government
progressively easy. It lasted for 3 months.
o Stage of Experience - oriented to all target audiences.
Communication objective: to generate satisfactory
experiences in all the audiences. Key message:
"Gobierno en linea" works; check it out. It lasted for 12
months.
o Stage of Habit - oriented to all target audiences.
Communication objective: to set habit's groundwork to
use "Gobierno en linea" when interacting with the
government. Key message: You can always find
something new on "Gobierno en linea". It lasted for 12
months.
5. IMPLEMENTATION
For the stage of awareness, which started in late 2008, a campaign
focusing on massive media and brand activation was carried out,
under the premise: "Questions about administrative formalities are
easier to answer than questions about life" (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Sample of the Awareness Stage
208
For example, it is more difficult to answer a question about life
such as "What should I study?" than getting information to answer
a question about an administrative formality such as "How can I
get an educational loan?".
For the stage of experience, implemented in 2009, the objective
was to produce satisfactory experiences for the target audiences,
with the aim of allowing people to verify that "Gobierno en linea"
actually works.
In order to achieve such goal, workshops inside an itinerant
classroom with a circus tent shape were carried out. The tent
traveled more than 7,500 kilometers visiting 16 departments
(states) across the country. It allowed more than 71,500 people
(students, adults, social groups, communal leaders, elderly people,
handicapped people, single mothers, indigenous, afro-
Colombians, street vendors, teachers, public servants, among
others), to have a direct contact with online services. The
campaign was called "Vive Gobierno en linea" (Livin' "Gobierno
en linea") and advertising material was used in local media,
inviting people to participate in the workshops (see Figure 2).
This campaign was granted the 2010 FRIDA Award for Best
Initiative of Public Administration in the region.
Figure 2. Sample of the Experience Stage
Finally for the stage of habit, executed in 2010, the objective was
to motivate people to try not one but several online services,
demonstrating through good experiences some of the new
available services for the different target audiences, under the
premise: "a good experience makes a good history".
The fact that Colombians should be the ones communicating the
benefits and kindness of "Gobierno en linea" was found to be a
good opportunity, because people would use real life, human and
inclusive stories. Thus, a contest was launched so that people
could share their experiences through testimonies recorded on
video. The best ones were turned into TV spots for the campaign
under the name "Experiences that make history" (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Sample of the Habit Stage
The starting point for the development of each campaign was the
media mix that was determined for each target audience:
o Citizens: ATL - Ads on national and regional press,
magazines, television and radio, as well as free PR press
(political speech of regional and national important
authorities). TTL - Social media such as Facebook,
Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, links on websites of the
government and online ads. BTL - Events, banners,
merchandising and text messages.
o Citizens living abroad: ATL - Ads on international TV
channels. TTL - To make contact with this segment
digital and social media were crucial.
o SMEs: ATL - Specialized magazines, professional
guilds, radio stations and news channels. BTL -
Specialized events, direct email with information about
the different uses and benefits, as well as brand presence
at fairs and congresses.
o Enterprises: ATL - Ads in specialized magazines
oriented to different sectors and professional
associations. Also, ads on TV and radio news shows.
BTL - Presence at fairs and specialized congresses for
large companies, as well as through speakers
discoursing about different trends with the purpose of
catching companies’ attention.
o International Community: ATL - Articles in specialized
magazines. An annual magazine was created divulging
successful cases and advances. BTL - Brand presence in
events and congresses. TTL - Online networks related to
e-government, for posting a variety of successful cases.
Others - To follow international rankings and other
types of publications.
o Public servants: BTL: to carry out events, seminars,
chats, direct email, presence at fairs and congresses.
Others: production of training materials (using familyfriendly
language and situations applicable to their
realities).
6. RESULTS AND FOLLOWING ACTIONS
During the first three years of the strategy a follow-up was made
analyzing the raise of awareness and use of electronic means in
the interaction between people and the government.
209
A raise of 309% of awareness (increasing from 22% up to 90%)
and a raise of 550% in use (increasing from 6% up to 39%) were
achieved. One fact that is worth highlighting, is the one referring
to "re-use" (do it again): among people who had actually used
"Gobierno en linea", 99% asserted that they would be willing to
use it again.
These results, together with an analysis of usage evolution,
allowed inferring that next steps for the marketing and outreach
strategy should be focused on promoting "the first time use". Once
people experience online services, they would be willing to
continue to use them due to the benefits perceived.
The main lesson learnt was that a communication strategy should
not be approached as a series of isolated actions but as a whole
strategy (as its name indicates) with clear challenges, objectives,
key messages, concepts, stages and indicators, and should also be
projected within a definite timeline.
Furthermore, users need to be analyzed in depth in order to
understand how they think and how they interact with the
government, as well as the kind of messages they might consider
interesting; plus examine how their perceptions are changing in
order to set the service value promise according to their
expectations.
From that starting point on, a strategic plan was designed and
piloted during 2011: an accompaniment outline was implemented,
to help agencies to design their marketing and outreach strategies
so as to enhance the use of online services, by transferring the
knowledge gained by the Programme in such area.
During the last years (between 2010 and 2011), through the
maintenance of the strategy initially designed, awareness suffered
a slight fall from 90% to 88% (that is within the margin of error in
measurements), while use rose from 39% to 55% over the same
period, which showed that the strategy was being successful and
should continue this way (see Table 2).
Table 2. Increase of awareness and use
Aspect 2008 2009 2010 2011
Awareness 22% 66% 90% 88%
Use 6% 30% 39% 55%
For Colombia the necessity to define sustained actions towards
user uptake of e-government has been a priority. As a
consequence of these actions, future strategies should leverage the
lessons learnt in recent years.
7. REFERENCES
[1] OECD. e-Government for Better Government, 2005.
[2] OECD. Rethinking e-Government Services, 2009.
[3] UN. E-Government Survey 2012: E-Government for the
People, 2012.
[4] Gobierno en linea Programme. Study of knowledge, use,
needs and expectations, 2007.
[5] Gobierno en linea Programme. Results of application of the
methodology for monitoring and evaluation, 2008, 2009,
2010 and 2011.

Session 8
Measurement 1

From Failure to Success: Using Design-Reality Gap
Analysis as a Mid-implementation Assessment Tool for
e-Government
Lemma Lessa
School of Information Sciences
Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia
(+251) 911683805
lemma.lessa@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
e-Government implementation failure in low-income countries is
reported to be as high as 85% where 35% being classified as total
failures - the project never started or was started but immediately
abandoned, and 50% are partial failures - major project goals are
not attained or there were undesirable outcomes [5]. Given this
rate of failure we wanted to investigate a project with partial
failure and draw lessons learned that can be replicated in other
projects. This paper looks at a Land Management Information
System (LMIS) in Ethiopia that facilitates citizen’s request for
land information. The project is credited for reducing the delay in
retrieving land information, simplifying the process, and reducing
the potential for corruption.
We use Design-Reality gap model [5] as a theoretical framework
to assess the project status. Primary data were collected from four
different groups involved in the project including agency
representatives from the Federal Government of Ethiopia, officials
from the capacity building office of Diredawa City
Administration, municipality representatives, and IT
professionals. Our analysis revealed the main contributors for the
success of the e-Government project and also show the
implementation gaps which need due attention in the future to
maximize the success of the project. Based on the implementation
experiences of this project, list of recommendations are provided
for successful execution of possible related initiatives in the
future.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J. [Computer Applications] J.1 [Administrative Data Processing]
- Government; H.4 [Information systems Applications] H.4.m
[Miscellaneous]
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Solomon Negash
Department of Information Systems
Michael J. Coles College of Business
Kennesaw State University, USA
770-420-4312
snegash@yahoo.com
210
Mesfin Belachew
Ministry of Communications and
Information Technology, Ethiopia
(+251) 911791462
mesfinbelachew@gmail.com
General Terms
Management, Measurement, Performance
Keywords
e-Government, implementation success, Design-Reality gap
model, ITPOSMO model, developing countries, low-income
countries
1. INTRODUCTION
It has been said a lot about the tremendous role of e-Government
to improve and more importantly transform the public sector
especially in developing countries context. Although there are
significant investments on e-Government initiatives in spite of
limited budget, there are only few success stories recorded
whereas majorities of those efforts end up in a failure. It is of the
interest of all respective governments if those e-Government
initiatives can be ideally successful as well as sustainable. In line
with this there is also emerging keen interest to evaluate the
contributions of such initiatives on the effectiveness and
efficiency of their public services as it is natural to evaluate
whether benefits out weight costs or not and as they ideally expect
very much positive impacts in this regard.
An e-Government project is said to be successful if most
stakeholders attain their major goals and do not experience
significant undesirable outcomes. Considerable amount of
research has been carried out on the use and positive role of ICTs
in low-income countries in areas such as health, public
administration, and education [9]. And some studies have pointed
out information systems project failure in low-income countries
([7]; [4]). Researchers have also argued that most of these projects
fail either totally or partially due to ‘design-actuality’ [4] or
‘design-reality’ gaps [5], long-term sustainability problems [1], or
lack of commitment on the part of political leadership and public
managers [2].
According to a study curried out by Heeks (in [4, p.2]) who has
done substantial research in the subject area, most
implementations of e-Government in low-income countries fail,
with 35% being classified as total failures (project was never
started or was started but immediately abandoned), and 50% are
partial failures (major goals are not attained and/or there were
undesirable outcomes). Similarly, in a study by [6], it was
estimated that US$3 trillion will be spent on information

technology (IT) projects by governments during the ten year
between 2000 and 2010; with the overall estimated failure rate of
60%, much of this investment will go to waste. This is a
disturbing fact, especially as developing countries have limited
resources at their disposal.
One way to avoid failure is to learn from successful projects
within the developing countries. If we find such a project that is
successful, then we should analyze why it was a success in order
to learn lessons for other Developing Country e-Gov projects.
Especially lessons learned from other low-income countries are
more relevant for this group and encourage South-to-South best
practice sharing. The e-Government system under consideration is
a partial failure. What we are actually asking in this paper is how
we can seek to steer projects that are partial failures from failure
to success just by assessing progress to date, and identifying
future action priorities to enable greater success.
The rationale for the study is, thus, to promote local best practices
while learning from strengths and mistakes of those initiatives so
far. Hence, the main objectives of this study are exploring the
factors critical to the success of the e-Government initiative;
identify the extent of success, and forward recommendations for
future action. In addition, we present the application of the
Design-Reality Gap model, a theoretical model that explains
success/failure of IT project implementation in low-income
countries, vis-à-vis e-Government project.
2. A CASE STUDY OF LAND
MANAGEMENT INFORMATION
SYSTEM (LMIS)
The Ethiopian ICT Development Agency (EICTDA) is a
government body responsible to promote integration and
utilization of ICT in Ethiopia. The deputy director of the Agency
related to us one of an e-Government project in a city
municipality in one of the regional governments. This piece of
work is aimed at analyzing the project which is known as Land
Management Information System (LMIS). This system is
considered as a successful both by EICTDA and the Diredawa
city administration.
The Land Management Information System (LMIS) under
consideration was launched mid 2009 at Diredawa city
administration. Diredawa is located in eastern part of Ethiopia and
is one of the two city administrations directly reporting to the
Federal government of Ethiopia. The LMIS was initiated by the
ICT development bureau of the administration and outsourced in
an open bid to a local software developing company. The
application is aimed at managing the land-related information of
the city. It has taken about a year to implement the system. The
key stakeholders involved in the process of implementation were
the top management, the Capacity Building Bureau, and the ICT
staff in the city administration.
The new system manages and provides information related to
land(s) owned by residents. More specifically, it manages and
provides basic information about the land(s) including size (area
in sq. meter), zoning (such as commercial, residential, school, or
church), plan number, and file number (container number). It also
manages information on personal details (such as family
information – spouse, children), documents (scanned softcopy of
211
each piece of paper that indicate different historical information in
the land owner’s file/container), and address (address for the
owner).
Current
Reality
Information
Technology
Processes
Objectives
and values
Staffing and
skills
Management systems
and structures
Other resources time
and money
Design proposal for
New eGov project
Information
Technology
Processes
Objectives
and values
Staffing and
skills
Management systems
and structures
Other resources time
and money
Figure 1. The ITPOSMO dimensions of e-
Government project design-reality gaps [5]
o Information - indicates the information used in the e-
Government application (comparing the information
o
requirements contained within the design of the e-
Government application vs. the information currently really
being used in the organization);
Technology – indicates the technology used in the agency
(comparing the requirements contained within the design of
the e-Government application vs. the real situation now);
o Process – indicates the work processes undertaken in the
agency (comparing the processes needed for successful
implementation of the e-Government application vs. the real
situation now);
o Objectives – indicates the objectives and values that key
stakeholders need for successful implementation of the e-
Government application vs. their current real objectives and
values;
o Staffing and Skill - indicate the staffing numbers and skill
levels/types required in/by the agency (comparing the
requirements for successful implementation of the e-
Government application vs. the real situation now);
o Management and Structure – indicate the management
systems and structures required in the agency (comparing the

equirements for successful implementation of the e-
Government application vs. the real situation now);
o Others – indicate such issues as the time and money required
to successfully implement and operate the new application
compared with the time and money really available now.
3. COLLECTION OF DATA
All the Primary data were collected from the supply side of the
system as citizens have no direct interaction with the system yet.
Thus, those involved in the project were considered. Accordingly,
interview was made with the Deputy administrator of the city
administration; head of the Capacity Building and ICT Sector
Bureaus; head of the ICT sector in the capacity building bureau;
seven top level managers in the city administration whose duties
are highly related to the Land Management practice, and the
system administrator of the new system. In addition, group
discussion was made with the four IT staff (data encoders) in the
city administration. The questions for the structured interview
were prepared based on the constructs of the Design-Reality gap
model and a copy of the interview questions were given to each
study subject at least two days in advance. But, some more
clarifications were obtained through telephone conversation from
two of the interviewees among the top level managers in the city
administration during our discussion while rating the numerical
values for each of the constructs in the Design-Reality Gap model.
3.1 Presentation and analysis of data
Thematic analysis [8] of the organizational reality and
requirements within the design of the e-Government application
was made based on the qualitative data collected from the field as
per the seven ITPOSMO dimensions. Next, the rating of each
dimension as well as the interpretation of the sum of the
numerical values of the dimensions is made by adopting a detailed
guideline available for same (See at
http://www.egov4dev.org/success/techniques/risk_drg.shtml).
The rating of each dimension was made in a coconscious among
the three researchers based on the data at hand and
recommendations made by interviewees during the group
discussion. Accordingly, each dimension is numerically rated in a
scale from zero to ten where zero is to mean no change between
the design proposal and current reality; ten means complete
change between the design and current reality; and five would
indicate some degree of change. Finally, all the rating numbers for
each dimension were added up and interpreted as depicted in
Table 1.The original table is for use with predictive – i.e. pre-hoc
design-reality gap analysis before implementation. As this system
has already been implemented, we were interested in doing a midimplementation
assessment in order to see what has been achieved
so far, and where the project may go in future. Thus, rewordings
were done on the items in the table accordingly.
Table 1: Interpretation of total gap score
Total Gap
Score
Interpretation
0-14 The e-Government project well
succeeded.
15-28 There is partial failure in the e-
Government project as actions are not
212
taken to close design-reality gaps.
29-42 The e-Government project might fail
totally, or might well be a partial
failure unless action is taken to close
design-reality gaps.
43-56 The e-Government project may well
fail unless action is taken to close
design-reality gaps.
57-70 The e-Government project certainly
failed as actions are not taken to close
design-reality gaps.
4. DESIGN-REALITY GAP ANALYSIS
AND DISCUSSIONS
In this section we will use the seven dimensions from the Design-
Reality Gap model to analyze the case study gaps. We will
describe the design goals and the current reality followed by gap
assessment between the two.
4.1 Information
The Land Management Information System (LMIS) was designed
manage data on the basic land information and owner profile. It
provides information on land purpose/zoning (commercial vs.
residential), lot size, land location, land identification number,
other legal information in relation to that piece of land, the land
owner name and address, spouse name, children names, and
household number. The system design requires all supporting and
related documents to be scanned and available online.
In reality majority of the land and user profile information are
made ready by the new system except few documents to be
scanned in incorporated.
Gap = 3; a significant portion of the design goals are
implemented. But supporting documents of few land owners were
not scanned and incorporated yet.
4.2 Technology
The design called for technologies including scanners, server
computer and local area network, Internet connection, and
personal computers. Scanners needed to digitize the current paper
based documents, new court decisions, and tax receipts. Server
computer and network needed for storing information in a
centralized location for access by decision makers including
engineers, finance officers, land administrators, and city
managers. Internet connection needed for off-site access mostly
by field personnel. About fifteen personal computers with
Pentium IV processor and at least 40GB hard disk space were
needed for decision makers and data entry personnel.
The implemented reality has all technology requirements except
scanners and some concerns regarding the processing as well as
storage capacity of the Personal Computers as their capacity is
lesser than the required capacity.

Gap = 5; The weak and unreliable Internet connection provided by
the Ethiopian Telecommunications and also the shortage of
scanners weakens the Land Management Information System
(LMIS) system ability to function in its full capacity.
4.3 Processes
A business process re-design project has preceded the Land
Management Information System (LMIS) project. Therefore the
business process for the Land Management Information System
(LMIS) was already defined and in place in the manual system.
The major top-level processes that the system is involved in
include the following among others: Land information registration
sub-process – aimed at registering and documenting all required
information regarding the land management; Land ownership
licensing sub-process – aimed at providing and approving
ownership license to owners of plot of land for a given purpose
(business; residence; public service; or other); and Information
provision service – aimed at providing any information regarding
a plot occupied for an owner or any other concerned body within
and outside the city administration such as the court and others.
The new system design followed the business process already
implemented; hence the reality was the same as the design, except
in few cases the workers are required to follow the old process in
those cases where there is no scanned copies of any document
about a land owner.
Gap = 2; the design was intended to incorporate scanned
documents. Although a small portion of the process it still poses
minimal gap.
4.4 Objectives and Values
Two primary objectives and values of the design were efficient
and transparent system. As to efficiency, the manual system took
3-4 months to process land administration inquiries, reducing this
long processing time was one of the design objectives. Regarding
transparency also the manual system has introduced many
loopholes that are prone to corruption; hence the design calls for a
transparent system. The design in terms of transparency assumes
that this objective is also shared by all the public servants.
In relation to efficiency, the current reality shows a significant
improvement in land administration processing both in time,
effort, and resource consumption. The current system takes less
than a day to complete land administration queries, a significant
improvement that reduced the time from months to hours. The
intended transparency, however, is compromised because decision
makers find loopholes to revert to the manual system. Although
the design requires buy-in to the goals of efficiency and
transparency, and that this buy-in – while absent among some
(corrupt) staff in the middle and lower levels of the decision
making ladder – was present for few senior decision makers and
the volunteers.
Gap = 7; Lack of scanned document is used as a primary reason
for reverting to the manual system, but also decision makers resist
using the new system and find excuses to revert to the manual
system. The intent to overcome corruption is minimized but not
eliminated.
213
4.5 Staffing and Skills
The design calls for personnel including one system administrator,
one network administrator, one database administrator, four data
encoders, and two computer maintenance crew. The design called
for all personnel to have experience and the administrators to have
at least a bachelor degree.
In reality only five people were hired (the system administrator
and the four data encoders), none had experience; they were all
fresh graduates from ICT diploma program. Of course, they have
stayed in the job for about a year on average and they have built
up skills by learning on the job.
Gap = 7; Five of the staffing positions were filled, skill level fall
short of the design.
4.6 Management Systems and Structures
The design called for a new structure with an ICT department that
manages the Land Management Information System (LMIS). The
design also called for salary structure with clearly defined
promotion levels. In reality the intended department was not
created and the reporting structure falls under the existing land
administration department. No permanent employees were hired;
all ICT hires have temporary status.
Gap = 8 failed to create the intended department and management
structure.
4.7 Other Resources
In other resources we looked at cost and time overrun. The design
was loosely defined to take a year. The city administration
allocated the required one-time budget for the project. The project
was completed in the projected time period. However there is
acute shortage of budget to cover the running cost required just
following the system implementation.
Gap = 3; project time was as expected. Although money was spent
to complete the project the city administration did not consider the
running costs of the new system.
5. CONCLUSIONS
Summary of the Design-Reality gap is shown in Table 2.
Table 2: Summary of Design-Reality gap
SN Dimension Gap
1 Information 3
2 Technology 5
3 Process 2
4 Objectives and values 7
5 Staffing and Skills 7

6 Management system and structure 8
7 Other resources 3
Total 35
The total gap of 35 indicates that there is a partial failure in the e-
Government project and the project may fail totally unless action
is taken to close design-reality gaps; see Table 1 for reference.
The largest gap is ‘management system and structure’ which is 8
followed by significant gaps in ‘staff and skill’ & ‘Objectives and
values’, both showing 7. The main reason for the large gaps in
these three dimensions was the lack of awareness about the
priority of such systems among the decision makers except the
champions. The transparency objective is also lacking because the
documents not scanned still require manual intervention, this in
turn has created a loophole for corruption. Installing scanners to
digitize the all process flows will further reduce the Design-
Reality and increase the project success. These are clear
indications for the fact that the project may still continue to be a
partial failure unless those gaps are closed. However, in our
discussion with the management they too have lately recognized
this gap. In relation to the ‘management system and structure’
dimension, we are also informed that a new ICT department has
been proposed and getting ready to implement. We were also
informed additional staff with appropriate skills will soon be
hired. A permanent position with clearly defined promotion scale
is also in the works. Reducing the gaps in these two areas will
significantly increases the project success rate.
The dimensions with the least Design-Reality gap are ‘process’
and ‘other resources’. The business process changes made prior to
the project launch became an opportunity and has made the
process gap low. The typical resistance often experienced during
business process change has already been done and implemented.
‘Other resources (cost and time)’ gap was low because of the
commitment from the project champion. Funding issues were not
constrained by bureaucratic red tape; instead the champion had
funded the project. The time commitment was also managed and
accomplished by the project champion. The role of the champion
played a critical role in materializing this project.
Given the overall rating of 35, the e-Government project may well
fail unless action is taken to close design-reality gaps. The main
actions needed are to reduce the largest design-reality gaps (i.e.
working on key issues such as Management system and structure,
objectives and values, and staffing and skill, and also availing
financial resources to cover the recurrent costs which resulted in
large design reality gap). The Diredawa city administration should
try to identify ways in each case to make design more like reality
and/or to make reality more like design.
Finally, the value of Design-Reality gap analysis model as a midimplementation
assessment tool for e-government projects is
worth mentioning. In this piece of work, we have found Design-
Reality gap analysis model as valuable tool in that it has
capability to show possible gaps during implementation which
actually need proper intervention from stakeholders and we have
noticed that the model can also serve as a mid-implementation
assessment tool for e-government projects as it can be
214
longitudinally used at different points to see the progress in
closing identified gaps in the process of implementation as well as
post-implementation periods.
The current research concludes with highlighting the following
key findings and recommendations:
o Project champions: As revealed in the study, the most
critical factors that contributed to the success of the e-
Government implementation are exceptional
o
commitment from few influential decision makers to
overcome the barriers and challenges for change, the
alignment of the new systems with the Business Process
Reengineering initiative, and unreserved effort from
volunteers to support the change effort by the
government.
The e-Government project was not initially planned as a
solution in the overall reform effort by the city
administration. Rather it came to being at the end of the
comprehensive business process reengineering effort
when the administration noticed that the new business
processes cannot be put in place unless automation in
undertaken. This in turn shows that unless short term
and long term measures are taken in order to bridge the
observed gaps in all the ITPOSMO dimensions and
specifically the gaps in objectives and values; staffing
and skill as well as financial resource constraint; the
success and sustainability of these e-Government
applications will definitely be in trouble.
o Collaboration: Although not institutionalized, the effort
made by few top management members and IT
professionals in the capacity building bureau brought
difference and hence credited for the success. Hence,
the top management commitment takes the lion’s share
of the achievement attained at the end of the day.
o Staffing, Skills and structure: The IT professionals are
not recognized as permanent in the current
o
organizational structure and as a result they are working
in a temporary basis. This may disappoint the
professionals and force them look for better job and
salary elsewhere which in turn endanger the day to day
operation of the application put in place. It should be
underlined that the success of such initiatives depends
largely on human skills and capabilities. Hence,
education and training initiatives must be considered as
priority actions. Staff need to be trained to handle new
processes and activities; they have to be given
incentives to prevent the brain drain of skilled people;
and they need to feel part of the organization by
engaging in the decision making process. Planned and
continuous awareness creation effort through series of
workshops, events, seminars, and conferences is
required in the future to better create clear impression
about the benefits of the new system among all
stakeholders.
Continuous improvement: Evaluating such an effort
should not be one time activity rather it should be done
periodically in order to assure long term success of the
new system.

6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We are grateful to the management of Ethiopian Information &
Communication Technology Agency (EICTDA) of the Federal
Democratic Government of Ethiopia for partially sponsoring the
case study.
7. REFERENCES
[1] Aichholzer, G., Scenarios of eGovernment in 2010 and
implications for strategy design, Electronic Journal of
eGovernment, 2(1), 2004, 1–10.
[2] Bhatnagar, S., Social implications of information and
communication technology in developing countries: Lessons
from Asian success stories, The Electronic Journal of
Information Systems in Developing Countries, 1(4), 2000, 1–
9.
[3] Dada, D., The Failure of EGovernment in Developing
Countries: A Literature Review, The Electronic Journal on
Information Systems in Developing Countries, 26, 7 (2006)
215
[4] Heeks, R., Information systems and developing countries:
Failure, success, and local improvisations, The Information
Society, 18(2), 2002, 101–112.
[5] Heeks, R., Most eGovernment-for-development projects fail:
How can risks be reduced? iGovernment Working Paper
Series, paper no. 14, 2003.
[6] Heeks, R. and Stanforth, C., Understanding eGovernment
project trajectories from an actor-network perspective,
European Journal of Information Systems, 16, 2007,165-177.
[7] Ndou, V., E-Government for Developing Countries:
Opportunities and Challenges, The Electronic Journal on
Information Systems in Developing Countries, 18(1), 2004,
1-24 http://www.ejisdc.org (2004)
[8] Orodho, A. J. and Kombo, D.K., Research Methods.
Nairobi:Kenyatta University, Institute of Open Learning,
2002.
[9] Walsham and Shahy, Information Systems Research
Landscape in Developing countries, Information Technology
for Development, 2005, Published online in Wiley
InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com), Wiley
Periodicals, Inc.

Measuring Organizational Interoperability in Practice: The
case study of Population Welfare Department of
Government of Sindh, Pakistan
ABSTRACT
Devender Maheshwari
Technical University Delft
2628 BX DELFT
The Netherlands
Tel. 0031152783284
D.Maheshwari@tudelft.nl
Government organizations use technology to interoperate with
each other in order to provide effective and efficient services to
the citizens. Interoperation between these organizations is
challenging due to the organizational differences among different
types of public organizations. Measuring organizational
interoperability of government organizations using technological
advancements is difficult and often remains at the technical level
and do not measure the organizational level. Existing
interoperability models and frameworks focus on different aspects
of organizational and technical interoperability independently; but
there is hardly any single measurement instrument addressing
both. Though the interoperability models and frameworks
describe the layers, levels, and stages; they do not identify any
assessment constructs for measuring and benchmarking the
organizational interoperability. This paper investigates
interoperability maturity models to identify assessment layers for
measuring and benchmarking the interoperability, and propose the
measurement instrument that will allows government
organizations to effectively measure organizational
interoperability. We develop a list of measurement constructs for
the sub-layers of organizational interoperability layer to assess the
maturity of organizational interoperability. Finally, we conduct a
case study at Population Welfare Department Government of
Sindh, Pakistan to investigate the applicability and usefulness of
the organizational layer and its measurement constructs in the
proposed interoperability measurement instrument for assessing
the maturity of organizational interoperability.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
D.2.12 [Interoperability]: Distributed objects; H.1.1. [Information
Systems]: Models and Principles –Systems and Information
Theory; H.4 [Information Systems Applications]: Miscellaneous;
J.1 [Administrative Data Processing]: Government
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
216
Marijn Janssen
Technical University Delft
2628 BX DELFT
The Netherlands
Tel. 0031152781140
M.F.W.H.A.Janssen@tudelft.nl
General Terms
Measurement, Documentation, Design, and Theory
Keywords
E-government, Interoperability, Measurement, Benchmarking,
Public Service Organizations.
1. INTRODUCTION
Interoperability is described to have significant impact on public
organizations to advance the processes, procedures, operations,
and effective service provision to the citizens [30-31, 37-38].
Maturity of public organizations is often characterized by the
interoperability as a key element for e-government integration,
new connectivity creation among networks, information sharing,
and collaboration [13, 21, 27]. Measuring interoperability is not
only a technological challenge, but a sociotechnical matter since
both technical as well organizational capabilities reflect the
maturity of public organizations [16, 38, 48]. This means that the
aspects of organizational interoperability are equally important for
interoperability measurement. Hjort-Madsen [21] describes that
the complexity of organizational aspects of interoperability may
surpass the technical as the public organizations move toward
inter-organizational governance. Van der Veer and Wiles [50, p-6]
describe the organizational interoperability as “the ability of
organisations to effectively communicate and transfer
(meaningful) data [7] even though they may be using a variety of
different information systems over widely different
infrastructures, possibly across different geographic regions and
cultures”, whereas the European Interoperability Framework (EIF)
IDABC [23, p-16] describes it as "defining business processes and
bringing about the collaboration of administrations that wish to
exchange information and may have different internal structures
as well as aspects related to requirements of the user community”.
Recently, this bias has been criticized by many as the public
organizations interoperate more and more with each other for
information sharing to provide effective and efficient services.
Hence, the need of disparate back-office systems to interoperate
and collaborate with each other requires enhanced interoperability
among different back-offices. Interoperability in literature is
mostly described from technical viewpoint as a capability of
different systems to exchange and share information in useful
manner [2, 24, 33, 41]. Many definitions of interoperability can be
found in literature [10, 24-25, 33, 41].
It is easily ascertained from the literature that several authors and
organizations discuss technical aspects of interoperability
standards e.g. [3, 9, 11, 34, 46, 49]; whereas the organizational

aspects are hardly discussed as they are messy. Goldkuhl [16]
describes that the interoperability is not only a technical subject,
but there is a need to conceptualize the organizational aspects as
well. He further explains that the interoperability is also about
what people do for information systems to interoperate. Scholl
and Klischewski [41] describe that the assessment of
interoperability is still unclear and faces many challenges, the
evaluation and measurement methods need to be investigated
properly. They also identify nine major constraints that affect the
interoperability: 1) constitutional, 2) jurisdictional, 3)
collaborative, 4) organizational, 5) informational, 6) managerial,
7) technological, 8) cost, and 9) performance. Some of these
constraints also reflect the organizational aspects of
interoperability and need to be included in interoperability
measurement process. Aspects of organizational Interoperability
can be measured within an organization between two or more
information systems as well as between different organizations
with multiple information systems.
This paper presents a measurement instrument and a set of
measurement constructs to assess and benchmark organizational
aspects of interoperability. Section 2 discusses the interoperability
maturity models and frameworks to investigate the organizational
aspects of interoperability. Section 3 proposes the interoperability
measurement instrument and derives the measurement constructs
for each sub-layer of the organizational interoperability layer. In
section 4, a case study is conducted at the population welfare
department government of Sindh, Pakistan using the developed
organizational layer and its measurement constructs for assessing
the organizational interoperability. Finally, section 5 discusses the
results of the outcome of case study.
2. BACKGROUND
Interoperability maturity models described in literature mostly
focus on the technical aspects of public organizations [3, 9, 11, 22,
28, 34, 46]; whereas the organizational aspects are parsley
discussed with little emphasis on the measuring and
benchmarking perspective. Measures to assess organizational
interoperability are hardly indicated in these interoperability
maturity models. Maheshwari et al. [32, p-2] discuss ten different
interoperability maturity models and related measurement
approaches to investigate the interoperability measurement issues
and challenges in public service organizations. Only a handful of
maturity models [16, 22-23, 28] discuss the aspects of
organizational interoperability, whereas the majority remains
centrally focused on technical interoperability. Furthermore, they
argue that the measuring and benchmarking the interoperability of
public organizations is challenging as it encompasses a
widespread array of diverse areas and dimensions. In a similar
vein, Shahkooh et al. [43] investigated some generic (e.g.
INTEROP NoP, NEHTA, and IDEAS) and country specific (e.g.
Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, and United Kingdom) egovernment
interoperability frameworks. They, after investigating
different frameworks describe interoperability as:
“a set of policies, strategies, standards, guidelines, and
instructions to connect different governmental organizations in
order to facilitate fast and easy information exchange to deliver
services to the citizens, businesses, and employees” [43, p-65]
Thus, the interoperability on the whole is a combination of
technical as well organizational aspects that affect the information
exchange and sharing between any two or more entities. Though
the existing interoperability models and frameworks sparsely
217
address these issues in different layers, levels, and steps; there are
hardly any guidelines to incorporate these aspects into a single
measurement instrument. This paper proposes the measurement
instrument that incorporates both technical and organizational
aspects of interoperability. In order better understand the
interoperability measurement layers, we investigate the selected
interoperability maturity models and frameworks that are
commonly discussed literature and utilized by national and
international organizations:
Levels of Information Systems Interoperability (LISI): The
LISI model developed by the US Department of Defense (DoD)
comprises of five levels i.e. isolated systems, connected systems,
functional distributed, domain integrated, and enterprise universal.
These levels of LISI are centrally focused on the technical
interoperation of the systems [18, 35, 43, 46].
NC3TA Reference Model for Interoperability (NMI): The
NMI model also mainly focuses on the technical aspects of
interoperability while including the interoperability degrees i.e.
unstructured data, structured data, seamless data sharing, and
seamless information sharing to classify the content type of the
exchanged data and information flows. The model aims to
improve the functional efficiency by introducing the structured
data interpretation and exchange [35, 46].
Organizational Interoperability Model (OIM): The IOM model
is an extension of LISI model that includes the organizational
aspects of interoperability. Although the model only focuses on
the organizational interoperability, the levels of OIM i.e.
independent, ad-hoc, collaborated, integrated, and unified are
closely aligned with the environmental description of levels of the
LISI model. OIM model provides some information in each level
for shared value systems, shared goals, and common structures but
does not provide any guideline to achieve the desired
organizational interoperability [9, 18, 35].
Levels of Conceptual Interoperability Model (LCIM): The
LCIM model in [18, 35, 46] describes five levels of conceptual
interoperability i.e. system specific data, documented data, aligned
static data, aligned dynamic data, and harmonized data. The
model shows that the interoperability is not only subjective to the
technical capability of the systems but also the composability on
the conceptual levels. The levels of LCIM conceptual model were
later extended and reproduced [47, 49] as i.e. no-interoperability,
technical interoperability, syntactic interoperability, pragmatic
interoperability, dynamic interoperability, and conceptual
interoperability. The LCIM conceptual models also centrally
focus on the technical interoperability of the systems [18, 35, 46-
47].
European Interoperability Framework (EIF): The EIF 1.0
framework by Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment
Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens
(IDABC) was first introduced in 2004 [23]; which was later
upgraded to EIF 2.0 in 2008 [22]. The version EIF 1.0 comprised
of three layers i.e. organizational, semantics, and technical; which
were extended to five layers in EIF 2.0 i.e. organizational,
semantics, technical, political, and legal interoperability. Unlike
other models and frameworks (LISI, NMI, OIM, LCIM), the EIF
focused not only on technical interoperability but also other
organizational aspects of the interoperability [15-16, 22-23, 30,
43].
European Interoperability Maturity Model (EIMM): The
EIMM by Advanced Technologies for interoperability of

Heterogeneous Enterprise Networks and their Applications
(ATHENA) comprises of five levels i.e. performed, modeled,
integrated, interoperable, and optimizing. ATHENA intended to
assess the interoperability in enterprise domain using EIMM. The
model specifically focuses on both organizational as well
technical aspects of interoperability in enterprise domain [3, 18].
Though the maturity models are developed by different individual
researchers [9, 46], national [11], and international [22, 34]
organizations; none of these models or frameworks discuss
measures to assess the organizational aspects of interoperability.
The stages, levels, and layers are sequentially numbered without
any further guideline about the measurements method or the
measures themselves. Literature reviews of interoperability
maturity models and frameworks suggests that the maturity of
technical interoperability is somewhat achievable due the
established standards and policies, but the aspects of
organizational interoperability e.g. policies, business processes,
financial, and governance are important and need to be addresses
carefully. In other words, some of the organizational aspects are
often described as the barrier of interoperability adoption and
implementation [1, 12, 41].
3. MEASUREMENT APPROACH
Literature review of maturity models and frameworks discussed in
Section 2 gives insight about the importance of organizational
aspects of interoperability, but does not provide sufficient
guideline to measure organizational interoperability. The maturity
models describe interoperability levels in a linear fashion, whereas
these levels are implemented on top of each other in practice.
Although some authors [e.g. 50] argue that the successful
implementation of technical, syntactical, and semantic
interoperability is necessary for organizational interoperability,
whereas others [e.g. 28, 32] suggest that both organizational as
well technical interoperability can be implemented on top of each
other. This paper proposes a two layered measurement instrument
where each layer can be implemented on top of each other.
Organization Layer
• Policy
• Enterprise architecture
• Business process
• Judicial
• Governance
• Economical
Technical Layer
• Syntactic
• Semantic
• Physical infrastructure
Figure 1 Interoperability Measurement Instrument.
Proposed measurement instrument as shown in Figure 1 is based
on the methodology of architecture layers of interoperability by
[28], whereas the selection of layers based on the socio-technical
design approach. Bostrom and Heinen [6] argue that the success
of the organizations depend socio-technical system (STS), where
social system represents people and structure and technical system
218
represents technology and tasks. Measurement aspects of the
technical and organizational interoperability as shown in Figure 1
are derived based on the literature review interoperability maturity
models and frameworks. Janssen and Scholl [28] describe that the
settlements should be reached among various involved partners to
avoid unwanted situations regarding the quality, compatibility,
and extent of information collaboration and interoperation. The
arrows shown in the Figure 1 from top to bottom and bottom to
top of each layer shows that implementation of interoperability
layers is non-linear, which means that each layer can be
implemented independent of each other. Hence, the
interoperability measurement aspects of each layer are relative,
but can be measured independently.
The explanation of technical sub-layers is already clear and well
defined by many organizations as well as individual authors [e.g.
22-23, 28, 32, 49], whereas the organizational interoperability and
the measurement aspects of its sub-layers are hardly discussed in
literature. Therefore, this paper briefly discusses the measurement
aspects of organizational layer and derives the adequate
measuring and benchmarking constructs for each sub-layer.
3.1 Organizational Layer
Organizational factors (e.g. technology adaption, economic
constraints, openness, and back-office cooperation) and
organizational issues (e.g. collaboration, business process, and
coordination) that impact the performance of information systems
are used to describe interoperability [14, 16-17]. Organizational
layer places the foundation for functional infrastructure of public
organizations for collaboration, exchange, and sharing of
information. Table 1 gives short description of each organizational
sub-layer as depicted in Figure1. Interoperability sub-layers
explained in Table 1 are sparsely described in literature, but there
is hardly any discussion about the measures to assess them.
Tolk, Turnitsa et al. [47] describe that the pragmatic
interoperability can reflect the maximum maturity if the
information sharing by the sender as well receiver is translucent,
clear, and truthfully interpretable. Policy sub-layer analyzes the
maturity of organizational aspects and helps to avoid the adverse
effects by identify the limitations. This layer also envisages
personal, environmental, standardization, and policy aspects to
distinguish the types of communication, and embraces the
information exchange intention of sender [28, 39].
For the public organizations aiming to facilitate citizens and
businesses with seamless service delivery, the enterprise
architecture can perform the essential role and provide guidance to
address organizational issues [19]. Enterprise architecture of a
public organization provides systematic understanding of basic
elements describing existing and anticipated environment [5].
Thus, enterprise architecture is useful to measure the basic
information about organizational elements. Tough enterprise
architecture encapsulates majority of organizational aspects, we
only focus on interoperability related measures. Thus, the sublayer
enterprise architecture is used to measure the basic
information about human resource and formal communication.
Interoperability in public organizations aims to improve the
service provision by advancing the business processes and
procedures for citizens, business, employees [32]. The business
process sub-layer in this context measures the processes and
procedures alignment, whereas the processes and procedures for
information exchange and sharing between the collaborating and
interoperating information systems are often reflected by the

service level agreements. The interoperating information systems
desire comprehensive, understandable, and coherent re-adaptation
of business processes.
Judicial aspects of interoperability are sparsely described by many
[3, 8, 22-23, 28, 41, 49] as an important factor affecting the
Sub-layers Description Constructs
Policy
Enterprise
Architecture
Business
Process
Judicial
Governance
Economical
This layer deals with
back-office procedures
and processes between
the interoperating
systems from policy
perspectives for clear,
transparent, and truly
interpretable exchange
of information by
sender as well as
receiver [41, 47].
Enterprise architecture
represents wide-spread
areas of public
organizations that can
be effective to resolve
interoperability
conflicts [40] as a mean
to measure the basic
information.
Business process deals
with the alignment of
business processes and
procedures, valuecreation,
monitoring,
controlling, and long
and short term
agreements.
Judicial layer reflects
the organizational laws
and regulations,
constitutional and legal
restraints, and
organizational safety
and security issues that
affect the interaction of
information systems.
Governance
mechanisms determine
how communication,
responsibilities, and
decision-making
structures are
formalized [26, p.2307].
Economic layer
concerns the issues that
limit the overarching
scope of
interoperability.
1. Context and
demarcation
s
2. Collaboratio
n
3. Policies
4. Standards
5. Formal
communicat
ion
6. Human
resource
Formal
7. Processes
and
procedures
alignment
8. Service level
agreements
9. Laws and
regulations
10. Constitution
al restrains
11. Political
commitment
12. Jurisdictiona
l regulations
13. Change
management
14. Environmen
t and ethics
15. Financial
constraints
overall maturity of interoperability. This sub-layer discusses the
219
law and regulation and constitutional restrains that affect the
maturity of interoperability. Goldkuhl [16, p-4] describes the
judicial interoperability as “congruence between different laws
and regulations”. According to Janssen and Scholl [28] the
governance in public organizations is differentiated by the wellorganized
and cogent interoperation among organizational
mechanisms, as long as these mechanisms guide in the correct
direction.
Table 1 Organizational sub-layers and measurement constructs
Janssen and Joha [26, p-2307] explain that the “governance
mechanisms determine how communication, responsibilities, and
decision-making structures are formalized”. Measures to assess
the maturity of judicial sub-layer of organizational interoperability
include political commitment, jurisdictional regulations, and
change management. Finally, we define the economical sub-layer
of interoperability, which is discussed quite often in literature but
rarely incorporated in maturity models and frameworks. This sublayer
describes the financial issues of organization interoperability
that restricts the overarching purview and affects the maturity e.g.
return on investment. Based on the literature review of
organizational interoperability and interoperability maturity
models and frameworks in Section 2 we derived the sub-layers of
organizational interoperability as discussed in Section 3. In order
to briefly understand the importance and classification of these
sub-layers of organizational interoperability, we will discuss each
measurement construct shown in Table 1 in details.
3.2 Measurement Constructs Organizational
Interoperability
In this subsection the constructs are further detailed and refined to
enable the assessment in real-life situations.
1. Context and demarcation. Interoperability requires clear and
distinctive interoperation between information systems, processes,
organizations, and employees. According to Strang, Linnhoff-
Popien et al. [44, 45], clear and distinctive contextual
interrelationship and specifics help to assess the interoperability
compatibility and substitutability. Although there is an informal
consensus about the context and demarcations of technical
interoperability, the contextual definitions, goals, objectives,
ontologies, and demarcations of organizational interoperability is
hardly discussed in literature. This measure gives a reflection of
the level of to-the-point clearness and distinctiveness of
organizational interoperability [32].
2. Collaboration. Inter and intra-organizational interactive and
willing full working relationship in public organizations [32],
where the shared goals, and roles and responsibilities are
recognized to support organizational interoperability [9].
Although the organizational framework can be distinct in nature,
the collaboration is essential for organizational interoperability.
This measure determines the level of organizational collaboration.
3. Standards. Although policies and standard are two separate
measures, their description and implications are somewhat interrelated.
Standards are necessary for organizational interoperability
as majority of maturity models and frameworks are still
conceptual. In our view, standards are essential to advance
organizational interoperability. They can describe the conceptual
settlements between the concerned interacting quarters in subtle
agreed documented format in consultation with recognized
standardization bodies [52].

4. Policies. This is also a necessity of pubic organizations to
ensure the effective implementation of the organizational
interoperability as per the standards. Depending on the size,
scope, and type of organization (local, regional, or national), the
policies for organizational interoperability is required for business
process alignment among the interoperating quarters with regional
and national policies and regulations [52].
5. Formal communication. Communication of information in
public organizations using pre-defined proper channels is
important for interoperability. Weedman [51] describes the formal
communication as a core for any established field as it offers
opinions, discoveries, suggestions, improvements, experiences,
and ideas. For example regular meetings between the responsible
authorities and employees will help both to resolve issues with
mutual cooperation and understanding. The measure determines
the frequency of formal meetings and communication channels for
information exchange and sharing at the organizational
interoperability level.
6. Human resources. Unlike other layers, the interoperability at
organizational layer is also subject to the capability of the
effective human resources. Adaption of new technological
advancements, policies, agreements, procedures, and processes
not only requires willingness but also skills and knowledge. This
measure determines the maturity of human resources for
implementation of organizational interoperability.
7. Processes and procedures alignment. Interoperability is often
related to business processes and procedures, IDABC [22-23]
refer to organizational interoperability as describing business
processes and procedures. Janssen and Scholl [28] state that
business process layer derives the attention to process-driven
integration. Alignment of processes and procedures helps public
organizations with business transitions, integration, control and
monitor, value-creation, and management of interoperability
related issues.
8. Service level agreement. Interoperability at organizational
level is subject to agreements, negotiations, and compliance of
service related terms and conditions for effective information
sharing and exchange. Thus, the quality of service (QoS)
requirements is agreed between the concerned stakeholders to
ensure the minimum service delivery. Service level agreements
are strictly bound for implementation and incompliance is
rewarded with heavy penalties. European interoperability
framework [23] discusses that several service level agreements
can be made for organizational interoperability based on the
demand and business process connections [29].
9. Laws and regulations. Organizational interoperability is still at
the conceptual level [38, 41, 48]. There is a desire for new laws
and regulations for effective and efficient information sharing and
exchange at organizational level. This measure illustrates the need
for new laws and regulations for organizational interoperability on
top of the existing laws and regulations.
10. Constitutional restrains. Scholl and Klischewski [41] explain
that the interoperability objectives are not aligned with the
democratic government’s constitutional power distribution at
national, regional, and local levels etc. Though the constitutions
limit the organizational interoperability objectives to certain
boundaries, the objectives have not yet reached the desired
maturity within those boundaries. This measure determines the
maturity of organizational interoperability objectives within the
constitutional boundaries in public organizations.
220
11. Political commitment. Pardo and Burke [37] describe that
political commitment is necessary for public organizations to
continue with their objectives for implementation of long-term
projects in case of the changes in political administration. Political
commitment is a need for consistency to ensure the success of
organizational interoperability. This measure evaluates the
political commitment for organizational interoperability.
12. Jurisdictional regulations. Public organizations at different
levels (national, regional, and local) follow distinct patterns of
business processes and information handling. They operate
independent of each other [42] and have the liberty to interoperate
or share the information only if they volunteer [20]. To avoid illuse
of this liberty, jurisdictional regulations are essential to
engage public organizations for information sharing and
interoperation. This measure determines the implementation of
jurisdictional regulations for organizational interoperability.
13. Change management. Organizational leadership and
management are responsible for execution different task and
assignments. Leaders are responsible guidance, motivation,
creativity, innovation, and resource mobilization to achieve the
organizational objectives [36]. In the context of organizational
interoperability, Maheshwari, Veenstra et al. [32] describe the
leadership responsibilities as “smooth execution of tasks by
assigning right-job-for-right-person”. Hence, the organizational
interoperability requires effective change management.
14. Environment and ethics. Organizational culture and ethics
has direct influence on the interoperability. Working environment
free of rivalries and inimical behavior allows employees to
interoperate easily for information exchange and sharing among
different stakeholders. Though hardly discussed in literature, this
aspect of organizational interoperability can be useful for assess
the internal working environment.
15. Financial constraints. Financial aspects have greater
importance in practice over others concerning the quality and
maturity of interoperability. Dos Santos and Reinhard [12] infer
that financial barriers limit organizations to procure resources
based on lower price than better quality. Interoperability
initiatives by public organizations face challenges of major
resistance for change acceptance, which can also result in
financial turmoil. Therefore, the overarching return on
interoperability investments not only reflects the financial success,
but also the level of change acceptance.
4. A CASE STUDY OF POPULATION
WELFARE DEPARTMENT
GOVERNMENT OF SINDH
As an illustrative case study research case, the proposed
measurement instrument and constructs were applied to assess the
organizational interoperability of Population Welfare Department
(PWD) Government of Sindh, Pakistan in January, 2012. The
research method was based on open-ended interviews with the top
management followed by a survey session with the experts from
different sub-departments to test the applicability and usefulness
of organizational measurement constructs. The purpose of
conducting the open-ended interviews with the top managmenet
was to refine the proposed measruement model before conducting
the structured survey session. Furthermore, a survey session not
only allowed selected participants to fill-in the questionnaire but
also inteactive discussions, reflections, suggestions, and feedbacks
about the survey itself and measurement instrument. With

concensus of all participants, the technical interoperability was
pusposefully excluded from the survey session as the maturity of
the technical interoperability was already available and
documented.
The case study was designed specifically based on the relationship
among the open-ended interviews and the sturctured survey
session from the measuring and benchmarking pespectives. The
open-ended interviews allowed us to not only ask the indepth
questions but also the opportunity to have better understanding of
the back-office infromation sharing, handling, and gathering.
Which in result helped us to recrusively update and improve the
structured survey questionnaire. Though the management was
well aware of the overall processes and procedures; a participative
session was necessary to confirm the findings from the interviews
of the top management to the findings of the operational
employees from the different departments. Furthermore, the
session allowed us for immediate reflections and discussion about
the applicability and usefulness of measruement constructs and
the instrument.
Population welfare program Sindh is an integral part of Federal
Population Welfare program Pakistan. In 2010 the Ministry of
Population Welfare Pakistan was devolved and the functions were
completely transferred to the province creating Ministry of
Population Welfare, Government of Sindh. PWD Sindh has
approximately 24,00 employees, most of them operate in small
villages and remote areas where the literacy ratio is very low.
PWD aims to provide family planning services ensuring high
quality service delivery at the doorstep of people. PWD facilitates
its services at District, Town, and Tehsil level through Family
Welfare Centers (FWCs), Mobile Service Units (MSUs),
Provincial Line Departments (PLDs), Registered Medical
Practitioners (RMPs), Labour, Local Government, and Non-
Governmental Organizations (NGOs).
Figure 2 Outcome of illustrative case study
221
The interviews were conducted with the top management that
included the director general PWD Sindh and four assistant
directors; who are responsible for the respective functional wings
i.e. Admin & Finance (A & F), Monitoring Evaluation and
Planning (ME & P), Communication, Training, Logistic and
Supplies (CTL & S), and Medical wing of PWD Sindh. Each
interview lasted for approximately an hour and half (90 minutes),
in which a total of sixty selected questions were asked from each
interviewee. The questions were put together to measure the
organziational interoperability as per the list of measruement
constructs described in Section 3.2. Though the number of
questions per construct were uniformly distrubuted, it was
understood from the discussion with interviewees that some
constructs i.e. Service Level Agreement, Laws and Regulations,
and Juristictional regulation required less questions than the others
i.e. Collaboration, Change Management, and Human Resources.
Although the management is responsbile for provincial
administrative setup; they had clear vision and knowledge about
the processes, procedures, and services as they were quite flexible
while answering the questions. The management was fully aware
of the importance of organizational interoperability as the major
objectives of PWD focus on coordination and collaboration
among local and district back-offices; integrated services;
enhanced interaction with businesses, citizens, NGOs, and
government organzitions; ensuring maximum public participation;
and improving quality of family planning services delivery. The
interviews of the top management provided further insight and
understanding of the PWD Sindh to ask more relevant, precise,
and in-depth questions about the organizational interoperability.
To be able to compare and benchmark the current marutiy levels,
each interviewee was also asked to rate the desired maturity for
each described construct from level-0 to level-9. The dotted-line
in Figure 2 shows the desired maturity level for each oncstruct.
Following the knowledge gained from the interviews, a
comprehensice list of 75 structured questions was prepared for the
survey session comprising on 25 technical and non-technical
employees lower down the hierarchy at PWD Sindh. Participants
of the survey session were also briefed about the measurement
approach and constructs before providing them the questionnaire.
Therefore, along with the survey questionnaire, a separate
evaluation form was also provided to the participants for
discussion at the end to reflect upon the applicability and
usefulnes of the proposed measurement approach.

Table 2 Measurement outcomes of interoperabiltiy constructs
There were 25 participants in the survey session, who filled in the
structured questionnaire about organziational interoperability by
categorically specifying the maturity value for each of the related
questions per construct from level 0 (lowest) to the level 9
(highest). For the participants lacking the knowledge about
particular measruement construct, an option of ‘don’t know’ was
also added to each question. As the participants were from
different sub-sections of the functional wings; some participants
did not answer the particular set of questions, of which they were
least knowledgeable. Approximately 20 percent values per
question (5 out of 25) were asnwered with the option ‘don’t
know’. The average value of the total number of answers per each
question was assigned to the ‘don’t know’ answers. Furthermore,
the mean of the average values of questions for each construct was
calculated as maturity level. Figure 2 shows the outcome of
survey session where the dotted line represents the desired
maturity level and the plane line represents the measured maturiy
level.
For better understanding of the case study findings, we further
investigated and analyzed the outcomes of the measurement
values from the survey questionnaire; the values of standard
deviation and mean for each construct were derived as shown in
Table 2. The lowest and highest standard deviation values of the
measurement constructs in Table 2 explain that though the
average calculated maturity levels for some contructs shown in
Figure 2 are close to the desired maturity levels, the low and high
standard deviation values determine that some participants had
different opinions than others.
The case study of PWD shows that the measurement of
organizational interoperability can help policy makers in design
and development of interoperability maturity models. The
differences in the desired and measured maturity levels clearly
indicate that moer focus is needed on the organizational aspects of
interoperability. We also conclude from the case study that the
selection of measurement constructs for organziational
interoperability is difficult and depend on the complexity, size,
and scople of the back-office information gathering, sharing, and
handling. Finally, the case study using the proposed measurement
instrument shows that the mearuement constructs for
organizational interoperability can be implemented on top of each
other.
5. DISCUSSION
Interpretation of the organizational measurement constructs and
maturity levels is quite difficult and complex as there is hardly
any existing literature, but we realize that this can be dealt to a
greater extend by extensive discussions with concerned experts.
The discussion with the participants in the case study shows that
the total numbers of questions designed for the measurement were
relevant, but there was consensus among all the experts that
measurement of organizational interoperability is complex and
requires large amount of questions. It is, however, questionable if
it is desired or feasible to have hundreds of questions for
measuring all the details about the measures. The challenge is to
measure with a limited number of questions that can be filled in
within a short time frame.
Though our structured survey questionnaire included 75 selected
questions, the focus was to better assess the level of abstraction
that is required to measure interoperability at a satisfactory level.
The participatory discussions with the participants, after they
222
No.
Measurement
Constructs
SD-
Low
Mean SD-High
1 Context and demarcations 6,22 7,04 7,86
2 Collaboration 6,11 7 7,89
3 Policies 5,32 6,04 6,76
4 Standards 6,11 7 7,89
5 Formal communication 6,08 6,92 7,76
6 Human resource 5,21 6,12 7,03
7
Processes and
procedures alignment
6,08 6,92 7,76
8 Service level agreements 5,21 6,12 7,03
9 Laws and regulations 6,11 7 7,89
10 Constitutional restrains 6,47 7,12 7,77
11 Political commitment 7,03 7,92 8,81
12 Jurisdictional regulations 5,34 6,08 6,82
13 Change management 6,25 7 7,75
14 Environment and ethics 5,18 5,92 6,66
15 Financial constraints 6,09 7,12 8,15
filled the questionnaire, provided positive feedbacks about the
applicability and usefulness of the measurement instrument and
constructs. Participants suggested that although some of the
constructs e.g. human resources, change management, and
financial constraints are very important for organizational
maturity; they were hardly included in the measurement process.
Some participants quoted in the feedback form that the policy sublayer
is very important for organizational interoperability and
must be part of measurement process. Another major finding of
this case study is the outcome of the architecture layer constructs
i.e. human resources and formal communication. Majority of
participants highly recommended these constructs as they
constitute the basis for enhanced interaction, collaboration, and
training programs for the back-office employees. Participants also
highlighted that technology alone cannot resolve organizational
interoperability problems if the human resources in the backoffice
are not skilled and trained. Participants discussed the
example of old age employees who hardly speak English and use
ICT enabled software and systems.
The outcome of the case study as shown in Figure 2 and Table 2
reveals that the measurement of organizational interoperability
layers is possible, but for some measurement constructs mixed
reviews were found by the participants about the maturity levels.
For example, the interpretation of measured maturity levels is
difficult as it partly depends on the type, complexity, and scope of
organizational functions, operations, and processes. Some experts
had the consensus about the understanding of measures, whereas
others had different views. This can be observed by looking at the
variations in values of standard deviation compared to their
averages. For example two constructs of policy and economic
measures i.e. collaboration and financial constraints have an
average of 7 and 7.12 but standard deviation values (6.11 - 7.89)
and (6.09 – 8.15) respectively, which means that some
participants partially disagree with the average maturity level
assigned by others.

Furthermore, it is understood from the highest standard deviation
values for political commitment (8.81) and financial constraints
(8.15) that though some participants were extremely positive
about the consistent political will and funds, whereas others were
not satisfied and had ambiguities. They believe that political
commitment and financial constraints need further improvement.
The discussions with experts revealed that the highest average
(7.92) of political commitment does not necessarily represent the
successful organizational interoperability as some commitments
did not produce fruitful outcomes. Hence, despite of effective
measurements outcomes, the benchmarking can be a disguise if
the interpretation is not correct [4]. Furthermore, they argue that
the policy makers should coordinate directly with back-office for
feedback about these constructs. Selecting interoperability
measures for benchmarking is difficult as the organizations vary
in scope, objectives, and complexity. The measurement
instrument and the constructs described in this paper are the first
step towards advancement of organizational interoperability.
Satisfaction shown from Population Welfare Department, The
case of Sindh is a positive indication that the instrument is
applicable and useful, but there is a need of further extension of
this research to generalize the usefulness of in different types of
public organizations.
Finally, the participants were asked to discuss the applicability of
the proposed measurement instrument and the measurement
constructs for organizational interoperability. The overall
feedback from the participants during participative discussions
about the measurement instrument and constructs was quite
satisfactory, whereas some participants had different views about
some measurement constructs e.g. constitutional restrains and
financial constraints. Though they agree upon the importance of
including these constructs in assessment of organizational
interoperability for the reasons of creating awareness that they’re
important, the measuring and benchmarking of these constructs at
the provincial, district, and local level requires further
investigation. The discussion also concluded that more focus is
required on the aspects of organziational interoperability as it is
equally important to the technical interoperability.
6. CONCLUSIONS
Measurement of organizational interoperability is still a major
challenge for public organizations as there is hardly any
promising, tested, and validated measurement instruments.
Although the organizational aspects of interoperability have
recently proven themselves equally important as technical aspects,
they are still sparsely described in conceptual maturity models and
frameworks. There is hardly any available literature describing
measurement methods and measures to assess organizational
interoperability. There is a definite need of improvement in
organizational interoperability as there are no existing benchmarks
due to the lack of adequate measurement methods and measures.
This paper proposes a measurement instrument focusing both
organizational and technical interoperability. Based on the
literature reviews of existing interoperability maturity models and
frameworks, we developed a list of 15 organizational
measurement constructs in 6 sub-layers of the organizational
layer. Though the proposed measurement instrument includes
both organizational and technical interoperability measurement
layers, our focus was to assess organizational interoperability. The
sub-layers of organizational interoperability provide the guideline
for assessment, whereas the selection of relevant measures or
measurement constraints can vary from organization or
223
organization. Furthermore, we conducted a case study of the
population welfare organization government of Sindh to illustrate
the operationalization of developed measurement instrument and
test the applicability and usefulness of selected constructs. The
case study shows that the measurement constructs and the
instrument provides considerable insight into organizational
aspects of interoperability. The case study entails that the
measurement constructs can be implemented on top of each other.
We found that our approach using measurement layers and
constructs is seen as helpful, but further research is recommended
to investigate the applicability of the measurement instrument
while selecting and applying the measurement constructs to the
different types of public organizations. Finally, we conclude that
the target group of this case study was limited, whereas more
respondents should be included for further evaluation of proposed
measurement instrument and measures.
7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to director general Population Department, Government of
Sindh for granting us permission to conduct interviews and survey
session for case study. We specially thank the participants of
PWD Sindh for interactively participating in questionnaire based
survey on measuring and benchmarking the organizational
interoperability.
8. REFERENCES
[1] Andersen, D.F. and S.S. Dawes, Government information
management: A primer and casebook. 1991: Prentice Hall.
[2] Archmann, S. and I. Kudlacek, Interoperability and the
exchange of good practice cases. European Journal of
ePractice, 2008. 2(1): p. 3-12.
[3] ATHENA, C., Enterprise interoperability maturity model
(EIMM) ATHENA IP (Advanced Technologies for
interoperability of Heterogeneous Enterprise Networks and
their Applications Integrated Project) IST-507849 accessed
from: modelbased.net/aif/methodology/eimm.htm, 2004.
[4] Bannister, F., The curse of the benchmark: an assessment of
the validity and value of e-government comparisons.
International Review of Administrative Sciences, 2007.
73(2): p. 171.
[5] Bellman, B. and F. Rausch, Enterprise Architecture for e-
Government, in Electronic Government: Third International
Conference, EGOV 2004, R. Traunmüller, Editor. 2004,
Springer: Berlin / Heidelberg. p. 48-56.
[6] Bostrom, R.P., and Heinen, J.S., "Mis Problems and Failures:
A Sociotechnical Perspective Part I: The Cause", MIS
quarterly, 1(3), 1977, pp. 17-32.
[7] Caffrey, L., et al., Government secure intranets. Information
technology & globalisation series. 1999, London:
Commonwealth Secretariat.
[8] Cimander, R. and H. Kubicek, Organizational
interoperability and organizing for interoperability in egovernment.
Second European Summit on Interoperability in
the iGovernment held in Rome, 2009: p. 109–122.
[9] Clark, T. and R. Jones. Organizational interoperability
maturity model for C2. 1999.
[10] Commission, S.S., A New Zealand E-Government
Interoperability Framework (e-GIF). Retrieved from

http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcit
y/unpan006368.pdf, 2002.
[11] DoD, W., DC., C4ISR Architectures Working Group report.
Levels of Information Systems Interoperability (LISI)
February ,1998 1998.
[12] Dos Santos, E.M. and N. Reinhard, Electronic Government
Interoperability: Identifying the Barriers for Frameworks
Adoption. Social Science Computer Review, 2011.
[13] Estermann, B., R. Riedl, and A.C. Neuroni. Integrated and
transcendent e-government: keys for analyzing
organizational structure and governance. 2009: Digital
Government Society of North America.
[14] Feenstra, R.W., M. Janssen, and R.W. Wagenaar, Designing
a Service Composition Framework to Support Multi Actor
Network, in Proceedings of Euro mGov 2006: The Second
European Conference on Mobile Government, I. Kushchu, C.
Borucki, and G. Fitzpatrick, Editors. 2006, Mobile
Government Consortium International LLC: Brighton, UK.
p. 103-112.
[15] Gatautis, R., E. Vitkauskaitė, et al. (2009). Lithuanian
eGovernment interoperability model.
[16] Goldkuhl, G. The challenges of Interoperability in Egovernment:
Towards a conceptual refinement. 2008.
[17] Gottschalk, P. and H. Solli-Saether, Stages of e-government
interoperability. Electronic Government, an International
Journal, 2008. 5(3): p. 310-320.
[18] Guédria, W., Y. Naudet, et al. (2008). Interoperability
Maturity Models–Survey and Comparison–, Springer.
[19] Guijarro, L., Interoperability frameworks and enterprise
architectures in e-government initiatives in Europe and the
United States. Government Information Quarterly, 2007.
24(1): p. 89-101.
[20] Hamilton, A., et al., The federalist papers. 2008: Oxford
University Press, USA.
[21] Hjort-Madsen, K., Enterprise architecture implementation
and management: A case study on interoperability. 2006.
[22] IDABC, E., Draft document as basic of EIF version 2.0.
European Communities: accessed on 02-01-2011 at
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/servlets/Docb0db.pdf?id=31597,
2008.
[23] IDABC, E., European Interoperability Framework for Pan-
European E-Government Services. European Communities,
2004.
[24] IEEE, IEEE Standard Computer Dictionary: A Compilation
of IEEE Standard Computer Glossaries. 1990: New York:
IEEE, 1990.
[25] IEEE, Standards Information Network IEEE 100—The
authoritative dictionary of IEEE standards terms (7th ed.).
New York, NY: IEEE., 2000.
[26] Janssen, M. and A. Joha, Understanding IT governance for
the operation of shared services in public service networks.
International Journal of Networking and Virtual
Organizations, 2007. 4(1): p. 20-34.
[27] Janssen, M. and A.M. Cresswell, An enterprise application
integration methodology for e-government. Journal of
224
Enterprise Information Management, 2005. 18(5): p. 531-
547.
[28] Janssen, M. and H. Scholl. Interoperability for electronic
governance. 2007: ACM.
[29] Klischewski, R., Information integration or process
integration? How to achieve interoperability in
administration. Electronic Government, 2004: p. 57-65.
[30] Kubicek, H. and R. Cimander, Three dimensions of
organizational interoperability. European Journal of
ePractice, 2009.
[31] Lueders, H. Interoperability and Open Standards for
eGovernment Services. 2005.
[32] Maheshwari, D., A.F.v. Veenstra, and M. Janssen,
Developing Measures for Benchmarking the Interoperability
of Public Organizations. 16-17 June, ECEG Ljubljani,
Slovenia. 2011.
[33] Moen, W., Interoperability for Information Access:
Technical Standards and Policy Considerations. Journal of
Academic Librarianship, 2000. 26(2): p. 129-32.
[34] NATO, NATO C3 Technical Architecture (NC3TA). 34
(ADatP-34) March 2003, NATO standard website:
http://www.nato.int/docu/standard.htm, 2003.
[35] Panetto, H. and A. Molina (2008). "Enterprise integration
and interoperability in manufacturing systems: Trends and
issues." Computers in industry 59(7): 641-646.
[36] Pardo, T.A. and G.B. Burke, Improving Government
Interoperability: A capability framework for government
managers. Center for Technology in Government, Albany,
2008.
[37] Pardo, T.A. and G.B. Burke, IT Governance Capability:
Laying the foundation for government interoperability.
Center for Technology in Government Technical Report,
2009.
[38] Pardo, T.A., T. Nam, and G.B. Burke, E-Government
Interoperability: Interaction of Policy, Management, and
Technology Dimensions. Social Science Computer Review,
2011.
[39] Picot, A., R. Reichwald, et al. (2008). Information,
organization and management, Springer Verlag.
[40] Schekkerman, J., Extended Enterprise Architecture Maturity
Model (E2AMM) Version 2.0. 2006.
[41] Scholl, H. and R. Klischewski, E-government integration and
interoperability: framing the research agenda. International
Journal of Public Administration, 2007. 30(8): p. 889-920.
[42] Seifert, J.W. A primer on e-government: Sectors, stages,
opportunities, and challenges of online governance. 2003:
DTIC Document.
[43] Shahkooh, K. A., M. Sadeghi, et al. (2011). "Interoperability
Evaluation of Iranian Organizations through Proposed
National E-government Interoperability Framework (Case
Study of Tehran Municipality)." Journal of AISS: Advances
in Information Sciences and Service Sciences 3(1): 62-77.
[44] Strang, T. and C. Linnhoff-Popien. Service interoperability
on context level in ubiquitous computing environments. in
International Conference on Advances in Infrastructure for
Electronic Business, Education, Science, Medicine, and

Mobile Technologies on the Internet (SSGRR2003w),
L'Aquila/Italy (2003). 2003b: Citeseer.
[45] Strang, T., C. Linnhoff-Popien, and K. Frank. CoOL: A
context ontology language to enable contextual
interoperability. 2003a: Springer, page(s) 236-247.
[46] Tolk, A. and J. Muguira. The levels of conceptual
interoperability model. 2003: Citeseer.
[47] Tolk, A., et al., Composable M&S web services for netcentric
applications. The Journal of Defense Modeling and
Simulation: Applications, Methodology, Technology, 2006.
[48] Traunmüller, R. and M. Wimmer, E-government: the
challenges ahead. Electronic Government, 2004: p. 1-6.
[49] Turnitsa, C. Extending the levels of conceptual
interoperability model. 2005.
[50] van der Veer, H. and A. Wiles, Achieving Technical
Interoperability. European Telecommunications Standards
Institute, 2008.
[51] Weedman, J., Informal and formal channels in boundaryspanning
communication. Journal of the American Society
for Information Science, 1992. 43(3): p. 257-267.
[52] Widergren, S.E., et al., Interoperability Context-Setting
Framework. 2007, GWAC Interoperability Workshop, April
11-12, 2007. Dallas, Texas. Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (US).
225

Ranking and Hotspot Detection Methods on Infant Health for
Districts in Java, Indonesia: E-Governance Micro Tools
Yekti Widyaningsih
Department of Mathematics
Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences
University of Indonesia
yekti@ui.ac.id
ABSTRACT
As the Academia stakeholder, this paper shares the method and
theory which extend the understanding of Electronic Governance.
The purpose of this research is to obtain the ranking of infant
health in Java based on five indicators and three indicators. These
indicators or variables are number of infant deaths (infd), number
of people in poverty (pov), number of infants with low birth
weight (lbw), number of deliveries in absence of health personnel
(abhp), and average education shortfall of women (avedsf). All
variables are district level aggregates. Besides ranking, hotspots
based on those indicators are also detected by ULS hotspot
detection method, while rankings are computed based on ORDIT,
implemented in R software. Rankings of the districts based on 5
(all) indicators and 3 indicators (infd, pov, lbw) are obtained. Also,
ranking is obtained based on salient scaling of 5 indicators and
salient scaling of 3 indicators. According to those results, the most
severe districts are districts 87 and 90, while the least severe
districts are districts 73, 31, and 35. There are many districts in
the hotspot area as the results of the ULS hotspot detection.
Districts 87, 90, 47, 58, 83, 44, and 45 are the worst areas of
infant health. This result is important information for the
government, especially the Health Department to make decisions
for the improvement of health programs. The methods can be used
as a micro tool to extend the function and understanding of egovernance.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
D.2.4 [Software/Program Verification - Statistical method]; G.3
[Probability and Statistics – Correlation];J.2 [Physical Sciences
and Engineering - Mathematics and statistics]; J.4 [Social and
Behavioral Sciences – Sociology]; K.6 [Management of
Computing and Information Systems]
General Terms
Measurement, Performance, Theory, Legal Aspects, Verification
Keywords
Ranking, Infant Health Indicators, ORDIT, R Software,
Computational Complexity, Hotspot, Upper Level Set Scan
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
226
Wayne L. Myers
Penn State Institutes of Energy and Environment
Penn State University, University Park,
PA 16802 USA
wlm@psu.edu
Statistics
1. INTRODUCTION
Governments around the world wrestle with a wide range of social
and political challenges and look for innovations in technology,
not only in the government institutions of, but also in the
interactions between the government and citizens to help them
meet these challenges. Serving citizens efficiently and effectively,
engaging interested parties in decision making, and creating
sustainable economies, are among the many ways innovations in
policy and practice can directly impact the public value created by
any Electronic Governance investment. To justify continued or
new investments in Electronic Governance, decision makers must
increasingly provide evidence that the innovations they are
supporting create public value. Decision-makers play a very
important role in the management of a country. The decisions
made will have an impact, both at present and in the future. As the
Academia stakeholder, this paper shares the methods and theories
which extend the understanding of Electronic Governance.
Hopefully, this paper can contribute concrete solutions for
specific challenges faced by governments, especially in making a
decision about infant health improvement. To achieve effective
decision making, it is important to know the areas or districts most
in need of improvement. For a problem like this, ranking methods
are necessary.
To meet these social challenges, it is important for the
government to plan and arrange budgets at the districts level that
are appropriate to its need for improvement in particular matters.
This paper focuses on districts ranking based on infant health
indicators. Many researches about infant health have been done.
Some of them are as follows. A research has shown that
persistence of poverty and continuing unequal distribution of
health care resources to pregnant women and young mothers
render relative risks of neonatal and post-neonatal mortality 1.5
times greater than that experienced by infants not born in poverty
[1]. In addition, ‘poverty is infant health risk’ is a theoretical
proposition according to Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention [2]. OECD reported that the correlation between
percentage of low birth weight infants and infant mortality rates is
stronger in emerging countries [3]. Other research showed that
adding a maternity clinic to a village decreases the odds of infant
mortality by almost 15 per cent, in comparison to the risk before
the clinic was added. An additional doctor reduces the odds by
about 1.7 per cent [4]. Furthermore, the final model of Desai and
Alva, shows that maternal education has a statistically significant
impact on infant mortality and height-for-age in only a handful of
countries [5]. According to those findings, an abstract concept,
infant health relates to the six measurable indicators: poverty,
infant mortality, low birth weight, health personnel, and education
1

of mothers. Based on this reason, we decided to use these
indicators to obtain the ranking of districts. The objective of the
current research is to find which districts are the worst districts for
infant health. Infant health is an important factor to be discussed
because this factor is the result of many other factors related to
socio economic components [6]. This research focused on five
indicators to be investigated.
Ranking methods based on multiple indicators using R open
source software and hotspot detection using ULS software are
introduced here as tools to support the Ministry of Health. This
concept can be used as a micro tool in e-governance and is
available to support e-health governance in implementing the full
range of government activities, internal processes, the
development of policy and services for citizens. The possible
systematic process is as the following: idea -- algorithm –
(implementation on R software) -- subroutine on C ++ (program
language) – online user friendly interface display.
The study area of this research is Java, one of the five biggest
islands in Indonesia. The Capital city of Indonesia is located in the
west area of Java. The percentage of population on this island is
about 60% of the total population of Indonesia [7]. This is one
reason why this island is interesting to be studied.
The method of this research is prioritization based on partial order
theory. Through this method, a ranking of the districts based on
five and three indicators will be found. The present purpose is to
provide convenient computational capability and visualizations
for progressive or partial prioritization based largely on concepts
of partial order theory and implemented in R [8] as illustrated in a
context of infant health as a complex multidimensional domain
that must be placed in public and private perspectives in pursuit of
public health management. One of the practical perspectives in
the health status of a district is concerned with infant health which
has multiple indicators [9]. Here the focus is on placing the
multiple dimensions of infant health in a professional and public
perspective to support district improvement policy. Furthermore, a
hotspot of these indicators is detected using ULS method.
2. DATA
As an abstract measure of a district, infant health is supported by
five indicators as mentioned in section 1. Table 1 shows the data
for this purpose consisting of five indicators of infant health
[7][10]. They are the number of infant deaths (infd), the number
of people in poverty (pov) in thousands, the number of infants
with low birth weight (lbw), the percentage of deliveries in
absence of health personnel (abhp), and average education
shortfall of women (avedsf) in years. All variables are aggregates
of district. The value of avedsf is computed by subtracting average
duration of education in a district from maximum in all districts.
The district column is the id for districts, infd is the number of
infant deaths, pov is the number of people in poverty (in
thousands), lbw is the number of infants with birth weight less
than 2500grams, abhp is the percentage of deliveries (births)
without health personnel presence, and avedsf is average of
women education shortfall as explained earlier.
The study area of this research is Java in Indonesia but omitting
Banten province and Kepulauan Seribu districts because of
incomplete data in those areas. Figure 1a is the map of Java
(without Banten province and Kepulauan Seribu district) with
district id, mapped by the R sp package [11][12].
227
Latitude
10°�S
Table 1. Leading lines of the dataset with infant health
indicators as column criteria and districts as cases
4°�S
6°�S
8°�S
district infd pov lbw abhp avedsf
1 61 125.6 145 20.02 4.4
2 112 157.9 187 14.63 4.6
3 78 149.1 130 16.19 3.7
4 97 170.5 252 2.95 3.4
5 83 171.2 250 0.51 3.6
6 298 267.4 401 11.56 3.5
... ... ... ... ... ...
107 106 94
104 105 99 93
100
79 95
91
92
90
63
96
80
81
87 98
61
89 88
62 60
101
78
97
77
64
82
86
23
29
72 71 70 69 68 67 76
26 27
58 59
28
24 25
66 65
22
46 37
83 102 103
47
75
44 45
50
52 57
84
85
73
21
35 15
51 74
18 17 16
48
56
20 3619
34
49 42 53 54
14
39 43
33
306
38
12
40 55
13
2
32
11
41
1 3
4 315
7 8
9
10
108
106°�E 108°�E 110°�E 112°�E 114°�E 116°�E
Longitude
Figure 1a. Map of Java (without Banten Province and
Kepulauan Seribu District) with district id as mapped by the
R sp package [11],[12].
Some districts have a capital city located in the centre with its
own data. As an example, district 73 is in the middle of district 51,
district 31 is in the middle of district 5, district 35 is in the middle
of district 16, and there are 19 other city-type districts as well.
3. DATA COLLECTION
The data used in this study is secondary data derived from Data
and Information Centers, Health Department of Indonesia [10].
This secondary data is obtained from the reports of public health
centers and hospitals in every district. The data are indicators of
infant health in every district, i.e. the number of infant deaths, the
number of babies with weight below normal, the number of births
without any medical personnel present, and maternal education,
while the number of people in poverty was obtained from
Indonesian Statistics [7].
The number of people in poverty is the population that is under
the poverty line. The poverty line is used as a boundary to
determine whether or not a person is poor. In 2007, the definition
for the poor are the people who have an average per capita
expenditure per month below the poverty line of Rp 211.726
(about U.S. $ 20) [7].
4. DATA PROCESSING
The steps of data processing in this research are (1) preparing the
data set for ORDIT into k+1 columns as shown in Table 1, where
k is the number of indicators, first column is the case id, (2)
obtaining the scatter plot and correlation coefficients of the
indicators, (3) transforming the values of indicators to the ranks,
(4) obtaining the ranking of the districts based on 5 indicators, 3
indicators, and 2 indicators (salient5 and salient3, the ranking
results of 5 indicators and 3 indicators, respectively) using ORDIT
2

method, (5) preparing the data set for ULS process (hotspot
detection) into 4 columns: id, number of cases, population size,
and adjacent districts (6) detecting the hotspot area for each
indicator, (7) comparing and summarising the results.
In step (4), ranking is carried out for 5 and 3 indicators because
those 3 indicators, i.e. infd, pov, and lbw have stronger
correlations than the others. These results will be compared.
Computations for steps (2), (3), and (4) use R open source
software and computation for step (6) using ULS software. Figure
1b presents the flowchart of data processing.
Figure 1b. Flowchart of data processing
5. METHOD
The methods used in this research are ordering dually in triangles
for ranking, and upper level set scan statistics for hotspot
detection.
5.1 Ordering Dually in Triangles
Ordering Dually in Triangles (ORDIT) is a method for ranking
purposes based on several indicators. Many objects can be ranked,
such as persons, districts, schools, universities, and many others.
ORDIT method in this research is used to rank the districts based
on 5 and 3 infant health indicators.
To obtain the ranking of the objects, this method uses
mathematical concepts related to the partial order set (poset). The
following subsubsections describe the ORDIT theory.
In mathematics, especially order theory, a partially ordered
set (or poset) formalizes and generalizes the intuitive concept of
an ordering, sequencing, or arrangement of the elements of a set.
A poset consists of a set together with a binary relation that
indicates that, for certain pairs of elements in the set, one of the
elements precedes the other. Such a relation is called a partial
order to reflect the fact that not every pair of elements need be
related: for some pairs, it may be that neither element precedes the
other in the poset. Thus, partial orders generalize the more
familiar total orders, in which every pair is related.
5.1.1 Rating Relations/Rules for Ascribing Advantage
This subsubsection describes the protocols for comparing cases or
collectives of cases via ratings, rules and relations that ascribe
advantage to some cases over some others or fail to do so for
228
particular pairs [7]. There are three possibilities in comparing
pairs of cases, where one case is denoted by Г and the other by θ.
“Г aa θ” wherein Г has ascribed advantage over θ. Г has
subordinate status to θ which implies “θ aa Г”. “Г ii θ” whereby
these are indefinite instances without ascribed advantage and
without subordinate status, which implies “θ ii Г”. Thus the
protocol either designates one member of a pair as having
ascribed advantage and the other subordinate status, or that
pairing as being indefinite. ff(aa) is the frequency of number of
occurrences for the ascribed advantage. ff(ss) is the frequency of
number of occurrences for the subordinate status. ff(ii) is the
frequency of number of occurrences for being indefinite. Each of
the N cases can be compared on this basis to all others in the
deleted domain DD=N–1 of competing cases with the percent
occurrence of these relations being tabulated as follows, AA =
100 × ff(aa)/DD, SS = 100 × ff(ss)/DD, II = 100 × ff(ii)/DD.
Clearly, AA + SS + II = 100%; and for later use let us define
CCC = 100 – AA as the complement of case condition relative to
ascribed advantage (AA) [8].
5.1.2 Subordination Schematic and Ordering Dually in Triangles
(ORDIT)
Subordination can be symbolized diagrammatically [8] in a
triangle depiction, where the point representing a district makes a
triangle divided into two parts, ‘trapezoidal triplet’ (of AA, SS,
and II) and a topping triangle (of CCC and II). The combination
of these two parts forms a right triangle with the ‘tip’ at AA =
100% in the upper-left and the toe at SS = 100% in the lower-right
(see Figure 5). The hypotenuse is a right-hand ‘limiting line’ of
plotting positions because AA+SS+II=100%. Topping triangle
provides the basis for an ‘ORDIT ordering’ of the districts or
instances.
An idealized district has AA = 100% of the deleted domain (DD)
of other districts, that is the frequency of ascribed advantage being
equal to the number of competing districts, so if the ideal actually
occurs, then the trapezoidal triplet becomes a triangle.
The numbers for ORDIT can be coupled as a decimal value
ccc.bbb. The ccc component is obtained by rounding CCC to two
decimal places and then multiplying by 100. The bbb component
is obtained by dividing SS by CCC, and imposing 0.999 as an
upper limit. Then add these two values as ccc.bbb. This ordering
is assigned the acronym ORDIT for ORdering Dually In
Triangles. It preserves all aspects of AA, SS and II except for the
actual number of districts. Simple rank ordering of ORDIT values
becomes salient scaling of the district [8].
5.1.3 Product-order Rating Regime
A general relational rule for ascribing advantage is product-order
whereby advantage is gained by having all criteria at least as good
and at least one better. Conversely, subordinate status lies with
having all criteria at least as poor and at least one poorer. This
relational rule is applicable to all kinds of criteria as long as they
have the same polarity (sense of better and worse). Scheme 2 in
[8] Function Facilities gives an R function called ProdOrdr that
determines ORDITs and salient scaling according to productorder.
This function takes as its inputs a vector of IDs for
instances and a data frame of same-sense criteria. All indicators
are either positive sense or negative sense. Indicators in this
research are negative indicators which means that the larger
the value of the indicators, the more severe the district. The output
is a data frame of ORDITs and salient scaling values
3

5.1.4 Precedence Plots
Based on computation of AA and SS for a particular district, the
structure in the lower part of the subordination schematic can be
used to prepare a ‘precedence plot’ for visualization (Figure 5).
The precedence plot is a plot for AA (ascribed advantage) as Yaxis
and SS (subordinate status) as the X-axis. The prominent
position declines from top (upper-left) to toe (lower-right).
Primary prominence varies vertically showing that there is a
larger percentage of ascribed advantage (greater severity) with
increasing height. Horizontal variation on a given level shows
clarity of comparison. Farther to the right is greater clarity as
more definite (less severe) with a larger percentage of subordinate
status versus indefinite instances among the couplets where
ascribed advantage (greater severity) is lacking. In other words,
more indefinite instances constitute increased lack of clarity
(incomparability in the usual parlance of partial ordering).
Scheme 3 in [8] Function Facilities gives an R function named
PrecPlot which accepts the output of the ProdOrdr function and
produces a precedence plot.
5.1.5 Representative Ranks
Representative ranks show descriptive order statistics of indicator
rankings for each district. Representative ranks are concerned
with the rank distribution for any particular district. The rank
numbers received by a given district across all criteria can be
placed in a single array and sorted in ascending order. The
minimum, median, and maximum ranks for the district are
conveniently informative.
5.2 Upper Level Set (ULS) Scan statistics
By definition, a hotspot is a zone characterized by a high response
rate, it makes intuitive sense that ULS method search for a hotspot
begin with a cell with the highest response rate and annex to it
other cells with high response rates. The need to bring a definite
order for the search leads one to the concept of the ULS scan tree
or just the ULS tree. Denoting for cell a the response rate ga =
ya/na, a ∈ T over the connected region R, we define the ULS tree
as follows:
Let G = {ga | a ∈ T}
Suppose r1 > r2 > … > rm are all distinct members of G.
Define for i = 1, 2, …, m,
Ti = { a ∈ T | ga = ri },
and the upper level sets as unions of Ti’s,
Ui = T1 ∪ T2 ∪ … ∪ Ti
= { a ∈ T | ga ≥ ri }.
Let Ci = set of connected components of Ui, i = 1, 2, …, m, and
the reduced parameter space ΩULS = C1 ∪ … ∪ Cm.
The ULS tree = (ΩULS) is a tree whose nodes are members
of Ω ULS. The root of the ULS tree is Um = R. Let Z be a node
belonging to the ULS tree. If all cells belonging to Z have the
same response rate, then Z is a leaf node. Thus, members of C1 are
leaf nodes. If not all cells in Z have the same rates then let e =
min{ ga | a ∈ Z} and connected components of Z – {a ∈ Z: ga =
e} are members of Z. [13]
Since our search for a hotspot is based on cellular response rates,
we assign a unique level to each node of the ULS tree in terms of
its response rate and then scan the tree by level starting with nodes
level 1 down. Members of C1 are level 1 nodes. The root is the
level m node. In general, for 1 ≤ i ≤ m, the level of a zone Z is i if
and only if min{ ga | a ∈ Z } = ri. Since each cell is introduced in
229
a unique node in the ULS tree, the ULS tree has at most N nodes.
Hence |ΩULS| ≤ N, the equality holding if and only if m = N. [13]
Several geometric properties should be satisfied by a collection of
cells from tessellation of study area before it could be considered
as a candidate for a hotspot cluster
1) the union of the cells should comprise a geographically
connected subset of the region R. Such collections of cells
will be referred to as zones and the set of all zones is denoted
by Ω. A zone Z∈Ω is a collection of cells that are connected.
2) the zone should not be excessively large. This restriction is
generally achieved by limiting the search for hotspot to zones
that do not comprise more than fifty percent of the region.
[14]
6. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
6.1 Correlation Analysis and Descriptive
Statistics
Paired scatter plots make a simple way to see and get information
about the strength of the relationship between two indicators.
Scatter plots of pairs of infant health indicators are shown in
Figure 2. If the observation points tend to be in a straight line,
there is a correlation (relationship) between two variables
(indicators). Table 2 shows the correlation coefficient between
two indicators. Through this table it can be seen how strong the
relationship between the two indicators is. According to Figure 2,
there are tendencies of linear relationship between indicators infd
and pov, infd and lbw, and pov and lbw. Table 2 shows that the
correlation between infant death and poverty is 0.567. It can be
said that there is a positive statistical association between those
two indicators because it has p-value of 1.621e-10 (less than
0.05). In statistics, if a parameter estimation (in this case is the
coefficient correlation) has p-value of less than 0.05, it means the
error probability of making conclusion is less than 5 percent. This
is also true regarding infant death and low birth weight (r =
0.4163; p-value = 7.425e-06); and for poverty and low birth
weight (r = 0.399; p-value < 0.0001). There are positive
relationships between infant death (infd) and absence of health
personnel (abhp) and also between infd and average education
shortfall (avedsf), even though both relationships are weaker. The
relationship between infant death and births without health
personnel (abhp) is stronger (r = 0.319; p-value = 0.0007531)
than the relationship between infant death and average education
shortfall (r = 0.290; p-value = 0.002375).
Variability of the infant health indicators is shown by Figure 3a
and 3b. Figure 3a shows boxplots of infm, pov (in thousands), and
lbw. Thus, lbw is more variable than the other two indicators and
contains outliers. Figure 3b shows boxplots of births without
health personnel (%) and education shortfall.
4

0 200 600
0 10 30 50
infd
0 200 600 0 10 30 50
pov
lbw
abhp
0 200 400 600 0 1000 2000 0 2 4 6
Figure 2. Scatter plots of five indicators of infant health
Table 2. Correlation matrix of five indicators of infant health
infd pov lbw abhp avedsf
infd 1.000 0.567 0.416 0.319 0.290
pov 0.567 1.000 0.399 0.317 0.559
lbw 0.416 0.399 1.000 0.304 -0.005
abhp 0.319 0.317 0.304 1.000 0.299
avedsf 0.290 0.559 -0.005 0.299 1.000
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500
infd pov lbw
avedsf
Figure 3a. Parallel Boxplots of infant health data (Infant
deaths, poverty, low birth weight) in Java, 2007
0 200 400 600
0 1000 2000
0 2 4 6
230
0 10 20 30 40 50
abhp avedsf
Figure 3b. Parallel Boxplots of infant health data (births
without health personnel, average education shortfall) in Java,
2007
6.2 Ranking Process
Better results of the ORDIT method will be obtained if the
correlations between indicators are sufficiently strong. Based on
Table 2, correlations between infd, pov, and lbw are higher with
each other than the correlation between abhp and avedsf. For this
reason, ranking of districts will be carried out based on 5 (all)
indicators and 3 indicators (infd, pov, lbw). A comparison of the
results will give a broader view of the ranking. Theoretically, rank
results will be more representative, if the variables (indicators)
have stronger relationship or higher coefficient correlation where
infant health is an abstract concept and unable to be measured.
Table 3 shows the place rank of each infant health indicator for
the leading lines of the data sets by Function Facilities of R [8]
function called PlacRank in Schema 1. The first column of the
data frame to be ranked is assumed to contain case identifiers, and
this column remains unaltered.
Table 3. Head (first 6 lines) of the data frame in ranking
obtained by applying the PlacRank function to place ranks of
infant health indicators via the R commands [8]
No. district infd pov lbw abhp avedsf
1 1 85.5 77 82.0 30 28.5
2 2 53.0 71 71.0 44 22.5
3 3 75.5 72 86.5 41 54.0
4 4 62.0 67 55.0 92 65.0
5 5 72.0 66 56.5 98 57.5
6 6 12.0 40 38.0 59 61.0
Tables 4a and 4b show the head (first six lines) of the data frame
obtained by applying the ProdOrdr function to the place ranks of
infant health measurement. In the current content, the idea of
‘better’ from reference [4] is replaced by ‘more severe’. Table 4a
and 4b are the results of ProdOrdr for 5 indicators and 3 indicators
respectively. Figure 4 is a scatter plot of these two salient scaling
(rankings) based on 5 and 3 indicators. It shows that there is a
linear tendency between those two ranking results with correlation
0.82 (p-value < 2.2e-16). This means the rankings based on 5 and
5

3 indicators are similar but not the same. In this case, the ranking
process may use only 3 indicators, especially if the principle of
parsimony is applied.
Table 4a. Head (first 6 lines) of data frame obtained by
applying the ProdOrdr function to place ranks of infant
health measurement for 5 indicators via the R commands [4]
CaseIDs AA SS ORDIT Salient
1 13.08 7.48 8692.086 46.5
2 13.08 7.48 8692.086 46.5
3 12.15 19.63 8785.223 52
4 5.61 30.84 9439.327 71.5
5 3.74 28.97 9626.301 80
6 21.5 6.54 7850.083 28.5
Table 4b. Head (first 6 lines) of data frame obtained by
applying the ProdOrdr function to place ranks of infant
health measurement for 3 indicators via the R commands [8]
CaseIDs AA SS ORDIT Salient
salient3
1 13.08 57.94 8692.667 79
2 19.63 38.32 8037.477 58
3 14.02 53.27 8598.62 76
4 24.3 35.51 7570.469 51
5 20.56 37.38 7944.471 57
6 46.73 7.48 5327.14 22
0 20 40 60 80 100
45
0 20 40 60 80 100
salient5
Figure 4. Scatter Plot of salient with 5 indicators and 3
indicators as generated by R [8]
Precedence plot of districts by product-order is shown in Figure
5a and 5b. The labels on plotted points in Figure 5 are district
numbers in the data file. These lines must be retrieved to
determine identities of the respective districts. Table 6a shows the
five most severe districts based on 5 indicators and Figure 6a
shows the map of these districts. Location of the 3 districts (90,
64
61
15
93
231
87, 81) is in West Java, while one district (47) is in Central Java
and district 58 is at the border of Central Java and East Java.
Table 6b shows the 5 least severe districts based on 5 indicators
and Figure 6b shows the map of these districts. Location of the 5
least severe districts (city type) is in the central of its main district
and almost cannot be seen from the map on Figure 6b; district 73
is in the middle of district 51 in Central Java; district 31 is in the
middle of district 5; district 106 is a small area in the west area of
the island; district 35 is in the middle of district 16; district 36 is
in the middle of district 19. The three districts (31, 35, 36) are in
East Java area.
AA as %DD
AA as %DD
0 20 40 60
0 20 40 60 80
90
87
47
58 84
0 20 40 60 80
4758
72
44
83
45
90
61
79
81
9
SS as %DD (Deleted Domain)
(a)
77 30
34
31
43 73
0 20 40 60 80
SS as %DD (Deleted Domain)
35 36 75
106
95 77 30
101 34 7536
106 96
103 78
43 31
7338
(b)
Figure 5. Precedence plot (based on place ranks) of districts
labeled with district numbers for 5 indicators (a) and 3
indicators (b), from R commands [8]
6

Table 6a. Five most severe districts based on 5 indicators
according to ORDIT ordering and salient scaling, as retrieved
by R commands [8]
Latitude
10°�S 9°�S 8°�S 7°�S 6°�S 5°�S
CaseIDs AA SS ORDIT Salient
90 74.77 0 2523 1
87 58.88 0 4112 2
47 51.4 0 4860 3
58 45.79 0 5421 5
81 45.79 0 5421 5
107 106 94
104 10599
93
100
79 95
91
92
90
63
96
80
81
10197
82
87 98
89 88
86
61
62
78 77
64
72 71 70 69 68 67 76
58
60
59
23
24 25
26
29
27 28
83
66 65
22
37
102 46 47
75
85
103
44 45
50
52 57
21
35 15
84
73 51
74
18 17 16
48 56 20 3619
49
34
42 53 54
14
39 43
33
306
38
40
13
55 2
41
32
12
11
1 3 4 315
7 8
9
10
108
106°�E 108°�E 110°�E 112°�E 114°�E 116°�E
Longitude
Figure 6a. Five most severe districts based on 5 indicators,
mapped by the sp package of R [11],[12]
Table 6b. Five least severe districts with 5 indicators
according to ORDIT ordering and salient scaling, as retrieved
by R commands [8]
Latitude
10°�S 9°�S 8°�S 7°�S 6°�S 5°�S
CaseIDs AA SS ORDIT Salient
73 0 63.55 10000.6 104
31 0 71.03 10000.7 105
106 0 71.96 10000.7 106
35 0 81.31 10000.8 107
36 0 82.24 10000.8 108
107 106 94
104105
99 93
100
79 95
91
92
90
63
96
80
81
101 97
82
87 98
89 88
86
61
62
78 77
64
72 71 70 69 68 67 76
58
60
59
23
24 25
26
29
27 28
83
66
22
46 65
37
102 103
47
75
44 45
50
52 57
84
85
73
21
35 15
51
74
17 16
48
56
19 18
20 36
34
49 42 53 54
14
39 43
33
306
38
40
13
55 2
41
32
1 3
4 31
5 7 8
12
11
9
10
108
106°�E 108°�E 110°�E 112°�E 114°�E 116°�E
Longitude
232
Figure 6b. Five least severe districts based on 5 indicators,
mapped by the sp package of R [11],[12].
Table 7a and 7b present the 5 most severe districts and the 5 least
severe districts, respectively, based on 3 indicators. Five most
severe districts are shown in Figure 7a. Two districts (83 and 87)
are located in West Java, and 2 districts (44 and 90) are located in
the border area between West Java and Central Java, and district
45 locates in Central Java, this district adjacent to district 44.
Figure 7b shows five least severe districts. District 43 is a city in
the south area of Central Java, district 73 is in the center of district
51 as mentioned before, district 38, district 31, and district 35 are
districts in East Java. All these districts are city type districts.
Table 7a. Five most severe districts with 3 indicators
according to ORDIT ordering and salient scaling, as retrieved
by R commands [8]
CaseIDs AA SS ORDIT Salient
44 90.65 0 935 1
83 87.85 0 1215 2.5
87 87.85 0 1215 2.5
45 84.11 0 1589 4
90 76.64 1.87 2336.08 5
Table 7b. Five least severe districts with 3 indicators
according to ORDIT ordering and salient scaling, as retrieved
by R commands [8]
Latitude
10°�S 9°�S 8°�S 7°�S 6°�S 5°�S
CaseIDs AA SS ORDIT Salient
43 0 79.44 10000.794 104
73 0 88.79 10000.888 105
38 0 91.59 10000.916 106
31 0 93.46 10000.935 107.5
35 0 93.46 10000.935 107.5
107 106 94
104105
99 93
100
91 90
79 95
92
63
87 98
61 60
89 88
62
78
96
101 97
77
64
82
86
23
26
29
72 71 70 69 68 67 76
80
59
27 28
81
58
24 25
66
22
46 65
37
83 102 103
47
75
44 45
50
52 57
84
85
73
21
35 15
51
74
17 16
48
56
19 18
20 36
34
49 42 53 54
14
39 43
33
306
38
12
40
13
55 2
32
11
41
1 3
4 31
5 7 8
9
10
108
106°�E 108°�E 110°�E 112°�E 114°�E 116°�E
Longitude
Figure 7a. Five most severe districts based on 3 indicators,
mapped by the sp package of R [11],[12].
7

Latitude
10°�S 9°�S 8°�S 7°�S 6°�S 5°�S
107 106 94
104105
99 93
100
91 90
79 95
92
63
87 98
61 60
89 88
62
78
96
101 97
77
64
82
86
23
26
29
72 71 70 69 68 67 76
80
59
27 28
81
58
24 25
66
22
46 65
37
83 102 103
47
75
44 45
50
52 57
84
85
73
21
35 15
51
74
17 16
48
56
19 18
20 36
34
49 42 53 54
14
39 43
33
306
38
12
40
13
55 2
32
11
41
1 3
4 31
5 7 8
9
10
108
106°�E 108°�E 110°�E 112°�E 114°�E 116°�E
Longitude
Figure 7b. Five least severe districts based on 3 indicators,
mapped by the sp package of R [11],[12]
Ranking of districts is continued based on salient scaling of 5
indicators (salient5) and salient scaling based on 3 indicators
(salient3) as indicators for new ranks.
Table 8a shows the five least severe districts; and Table 8b shows
the five most severe districts. Here sal5 and sal3 (salient result of
5 and 3 indicators) used as indicators to obtain ranking of the
districts. It has positive sense, so smaller number of the salient
result means least severe of districts.
Table 8a. Five least severe districts with salient5 and salient3
as indicators according to ORDIT ordering and salient
scaling, as retrieved by R commands [8]
CaseIDs AA SS ORDIT Salient
35 99.07 0.00 93 1
31 97.2 0.93 280.332 2
36 95.33 0.00 467 3
73 95.33 1.87 467.4 4
43 94.39 2.80 561.499 6
Table 8b. Five most severe districts with salient5 and salient3
as indicators according to ORDIT ordering and salient
scaling, as retrieved by R commands [8]
CaseIDs AA SS ORDIT Salient
47 1.87 91.59 9813.933 104
83 0.93 96.26 9907.972 105
44 0 92.52 10000.925 106
90 0 96.26 10000.963 107
87 0 98.13 10000.981 108
Figure 8a and 8b shows the districts of Table 8a and 8b,
respectively. Table 9 is a resume of all results of ORDIT rankings.
The first column is the ids of districts, second, third, and fourth
columns indicate whether the district is a member of 5 least or 5
worst severe districts based on 5 indicators, 3 indicators, and 2
233
indicators (salient5 and salient3), respectively. The fifth column is
a mark for a district as a member of all results.
Latitude
10°�S 9°�S 8°�S 7°�S 6°�S 5°�S
107 106 94
104105
99 93
100
91 90
79 95
92
63
87 98
61 60
89 88
62
78
96
101 97
77
64
82
86
23
26
29
72 71 70 69 68 67 76
80
59
27 28
81
58
24 25
66
22
46 65
37
83 102 103
47
75
44 45
50
52 57
84
85
73
21
35 15
51
74
17 16
48
56
19 18
20 36
34
49 42 53 54
14
39 43
33
306
38
12
40
13
55 2
32
11
41
1 3
4 31
5 7 8
9
10
108
106°�E 108°�E 110°�E 112°�E 114°�E 116°�E
Longitude
Figure 8a. Five best districts based on salient 5 and salient 3
as indicators, mapped by the sp package of R[11],[12]
Latitude
10°�S 9°�S 8°�S 7°�S 6°�S 5°�S
107 106 94
104105
99 93
100
91 90
79 95
92
63
87 98
61 60
89 88
62
78
96
101 97
77
64
82
86
23
26
29
72 71 70 69 68 67 76
80
59
27 28
81
58
24 25
66
22
46 65
37
83 102 103
47
75
44 45
50
52 57
84
85
73
21
35 15
51
74
17 16
48
56
19 18
20 36
34
49 42 53 54
14
39 43
33
306
38
12
40
13
55 2
32
11
41
1 3
4 31
5 7 8
9
10
108
106°�E 108°�E 110°�E 112°�E 114°�E 116°�E
Longitude
Figure 8b. Five most severe districts based on salient 5 and
salient 3 as indicators, mapped by the sp package of R
[11],[12].
Table 9. Five worst and five best districts as the result of
ORDIT rankings
Worst District salient5 salient3 salient53 Mark
90 Yes Yes Yes √
87 Yes Yes Yes √
47 Yes No Yes
58 Yes No No
81 Yes No No
44 No Yes Yes
83 No Yes Yes
45 No Yes No
Best District
73 Yes Yes Yes √
31 Yes Yes Yes √
106 Yes No No
35 Yes Yes Yes √
36 Yes No Yes
43 No Yes Yes
38 No Yes No
6.3 THE RESULTS OF ULS HOTSPOT
DETECTION
The districts in the hotspot area as the result of ULS hotspot
detection based on each indicator are shown in Figure 9. It shows
that for the first three indicators hotspot area (a,b,c) is dominant in
Central Java, but for the forth indicator (d), the hotspot area is
8

dominant in West Java, while for the fifth indicator (e) the hotspot
area comprises some districts of East Java
Latitude
Latitude
9°�S 8°�S 7°�S 6°�S 5°�S
Latitude
9°�S 8°�S 7°�S 6°�S 5°�S
10°�S 9°�S 8°�S 7°�S 6°�S 5°�S
The Hotspot of Number of Infants Death in Java Island, 2007
190
266 89 196
115
174 28
170
86
328
244
39
109
189
413 85
134 345
60134
114
107
392
173 178
10 44
145
169 78 170 210 83 208
96
329 125
162
83 223
31
56
72 117
115 177
147
186 69
312 104 69
663
25
392 270
141
217 142
347
96
340
14 372
100 2
47
260 101
111 66
100
133
96 18
62
61
63 253 46
66
37 32
24
85
298 17
82
50
187
131 112
174
172
84
61
97 6
78 83 142 77
285
139
6 22
54
108
106°�E 108°�E 110°�E 112°�E 114°�E 116°�E
Longitude
ULS hotspot detection, mapped with R
(a)
The Hotspot of Number of People in Poverty (in thousands) in Java Island, 2007
519.5
229.6
400.4
111.7 231.2
49.1 70.3
371.6
365.3
701.6 267.5 319 258 203.7 215.4260.5
352.3
283.9
394.6
519.1
297.8
288.3
325.5
338.9 257.4
297.6 273.6
178.5 229.5
321.5
203.7
435.5
328.2 361.5
26.2
780 550.2
270.5 300.4 270.4
188.7
11.5 223.3
302.4 375.6 20.1
74.9
261.6143.8
214.9 130.6 230.5
420.6 102.212.1
203
21.3
161.5380.1230.9
278.7
131.5 60
34.9
35.3 267.4 15
93.9
201
277.1
273.3 157.9
56.6
165.7
301.2
125.6 170.5 15.2
199
149.1 171.2 365.3
417
227.3
213.1
9470.7 141.7
35.4 122.6 106.9 294.4
35.9
91.4
235.8
114.5
361.7
28.3 398
161.8 234.4
43.7
22.6
87.2
187.7
54.5 12.9
171.8
106°�E 108°�E 110°�E 112°�E 114°�E 116°�E
Longitude
ULS hotspot detection, mapped with R
(b)
The Hotspot of Low Birth Weight in Java Island, 2007
610 129 261
947 1962 215 392
154
815 90
540
212
814
238
96
386
580
1085 238
490 299
478 752
172
149
113
788
60
768
172
295 300 522 483 9 137
931
445
436 345
606
125 189
164
130 85 144
262 644
208
228 1307
2464 111 105
507
62
572 815 1003
208
276 413
271
36 971
616
357 83
209
556 295
131 214
422
238
274 43
476
86
68 40 350
156
204 5
164
66 401 19
220
530
409
383 187
164
250
176
145
252 11
130 250 668 573
388
184
1456
106°�E 108°�E 110°�E 112°�E 114°�E 116°�E
Longitude
ULS hotspot detection, mapped with R
(c)
234
Latitude
10°�S 8°�S 6°�S
Latitude
The Hotspot of Non Health Personnel Assisted (in percentage) in Java Island, 2007
6.3
14.6 3.2 0
26.6
30.3 14.5
11.7
21.9
43.8
18.5
22.5 10.5
2.5 14.2
43.3 39.7
13.6
21.6
7.6 4.8
18.7
29.7
3.2
33.9
13.5
18.3
37.3
18.5 17.8 15.1 2.3 22 9.9
22.6 21.2
48.9
6
8.9 0
20.6
27.3
28.2 8.7
8.8 10.6
5
18.9
47.6 22.8 22.7
25.8
24.1
0.2
12 5.9
25.9
15.8 9
29.6
0.2
41.1
4.8 9.5
0 4.5
4.5
14 0.2
2.4 11.9
20.3
12.4
6.2 0
9.1
0.9
7.3 9.8 10.4
19.7
6 7.2
4.6 11.6 9.9
19
21.3
14.5 11.3
4.6 14.6
0
12.6
17.6
20.2
3 2.4
16.2 0.5 22.2 5.4
19.3
13.9
0 0 8.9
12.6
106°�E 108°�E 110°�E 112°�E 114°�E 116°�E
10°�S 9°�S 8°�S 7°�S 6°�S 5°�S 4°�S
107 106 94
104 105 99 93
100
79 95
91
92
90
96
80
81
10197
82
87 98
89 88
86
108
83
102 103
84
85
ULS hotspot detection, mapped with R
(d)
Longitude
The Hotspot of Average Education Shortfall in Java Island, 2007
63
62 61 60
78 77
64
23
29
72 71 70 69 68 67 76
26 27
58 59
28
24 25
66
22
46 65
37
47
75
44 45
50
52 57
73
21
35 15
51
74
17 16
19 18
48 56 20 36
49 42 53 54
34
14
39 43
306
33
38
12
40
13
55 2
32
11
41
1 3 4 315
7 8
9
10
106°�E 108°�E 110°�E 112°�E 114°�E 116°�E
Longitude
ULS Hotspot Detection, mapped with R
(e)
Figure 9. ULS Hotspot districts of infd (a), pov (b), lbw (c),
abhp (d), and avedsf (e) as generated by the R commands
[11],[12].
Table 10 shows the five worst districts for salient5, salient3 and
salient53 and information whether the district is a hotspot or not a
hotspot. There is no district of the first column as the hotspot
based on indicator avedsf (average education shortfall), so this
column is omitted. Districts 90 and 87 are strong enough to be
considered as the worst districts of infant health.
Table 10. Five worst districts for salients and ULS hotspot
districts for each indicator
Distr sal5 sal3 sal53 hinfd hpov hlbw habhp
90 Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes
87 Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes
47 Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
58 Yes No No Yes Yes Yes No
81 Yes No No No No No Yes
83 No Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes
44 No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
45 No Yes No Yes Yes Yes No
9

7. CONCLUSION
According to ORDIT analysis with five and three indicators and
sal5 & sal3 as indicators, the most severe districts of infant health
are districts 90 and 87. The least severe districts are district 73,
31, and 35 (all are cities). The most severe districts are in West
Java. The two least severe districts are cities in Central Java and
one least severe (best) district is a city in East Java. The least
severe areas are city type districts. The most severe districts (90
and 87) are also confirmed by the ULS method as the worst
districts for infant health. These districts are in the hotspots area
of three indicators. To improve infant health in Java, the
government, especially the Health Department should give more
attention to districts 90 (Indramayu) and 87 (Cirebon) which are
the worst districts for infant health. Hopefully through this study,
ORDIT ranking and ULS hotspot detection methods will be
recognized to be useful micro tools to support decision makers in
the e-governance.
8. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the valuable guidance of Prof. G.P.
Patil, Center for Statistical Ecology and Environmental Statistics,
Department of Statistics, the Pennsylvania State University. Many
thanks to the Directorate General of Higher Education Indonesia
for financial support through the Doctoral Sandwich Program that
I received.
9. REFERENCES
[1] Gortmaker, S.L. Poverty and Infant Mortality in the United
States. American Sociological Review, 44, 2 (Apr. 1979),
280-297.
[2] Frieden, T.R. CDC Health Disparities and Inequalities
Report – United States. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly
Report. 60. 2011
[3] OECD. Health at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators, OECD
Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/health_glance-­‐
2011-­‐en
235
[4] Frankenberg, E. The Effects of Access to Heath Care on
Infant Mortality in Indonesia, Health Transition Review 5,
(1995), 143 – 163.
[5] Desai, S. and Alva, S. Maternal education and child health: Is
there a strong causal relationship? Demography, 35, 1 (Feb.
1998), 71-81.
[6] Braveman, P., Cubbin, C., Marchi, K., Egerter, S., Chaves,
G. Measuring Socioeconomic Status/ Position in Studies of
Racial/Ethnic Disparities: Maternal and Infant Health, Public
Health Reports: September–October 2001, Vol.116.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/
PMC1497365/pdf/12042609.pdf
[7] Biro Pusat Statistik, Indonesia Population by Province 1971,
1980, 1990, 1995, 2000 dan 2010.
http://www.bps.go.id/tab_sub/view.php?tabel=1&daftar=1&i
d_subyek=12&notab=1, 2010
[8] Myers, W. and Patil, G.P. Preliminary Prioritization Based
on Partial Order Theory and R Software for Compositional
Complexes in Landscape Ecology, with Applications to
Restoration, Remediation, and Enhancement. Environmental
Ecological Statistics. 17, 4, 2010, 411-436.
[9] Jahan, S. Poverty and infant mortality in the Eastern
Mediterranean region: a meta-analysis. J Epidemiol
Community Health 2008, 62, 745–751.
[10] DEPKES RI. Bank Data Pusdatin-DepKes RI. 2009.
http://www.bankdata.depkes.go.id/nasional/public/report/cre
atetablepti
[11] Roger,S.B., Pebesma, E.J., Rubio,V.G. Applied Spatial Data
Analysis with R, Springer, Washington. 2008.
[12] Moore, C. Mapping with R: Choropleth of 3rd grade reading
proficiency in the Twin Cities, Article. April 19, 2008.
[13] Patil, G.P., Joshi, S.W., Koli, R.E. PULSE, Progressive
Upper Level Set Scan Statistics for Geospatial Hotspot
Detection. Environmental Ecological Statistics. 17, 2, 2010,
411-436.
[14] Patil, G. P. and Taillie, C. Upper Level Set Scan Statistic for
Detecting Arbitrarily Shaped Hotspots. Environmental and
Ecological Statistics, 11, 2004, 183 – 197.
http://www.stat.psu.edu/~gpp.
10

Technological Assessment of e-government Web
presence in Nigeria
Awoleye, O. Michael
National Centre for Technology
Management (NACETEM), An Agency
of the Federal Ministry of Science &
Technology, P.M.B. 012, Obafemi
Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, 20005,
Nigeria
+234-(0)7069197823
awoleye@yahoo.co.uk
ABSTRACT
Government bringing innovation into its activities is a good
gesture but innovation that constitutes peril due to inadequate
technical capability necessitates re-assessment, hence this
investigation.This study investigated susceptibility of some
chosen government websites to infiltration due to flaws in the
design of their websites. Sixty four websites of some
organizations were randomly selected using an advanced feature
of google to sieve organization’s websites that have adopted the
use of country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) i.e. the
“.gov.ng”. The research was based on some major measuring
parameters which are: Cross Site Scripting (XSS), Structured
Query Language injection (SQLi), Cookie manipulation (CM),
unencrypted password (UP) and broken links (BL). The sixty four
(64) government websites chosen span 8 categories of sectors
with a view to evaluating their immunity against cyber attacks. It
was found that 27 (42.2%) of the websites are vulnerable to XSS,
while 20 (31.3%) to SQLi. Also, 24 websites which represents
37.5% of the websites examined are having the password inputted
by the user unencrypted while a high percentage (70.3) have
informational issues, like broken links which in itself may not
constitute high vulnerability but could create susceptible platform
which could permit infiltration. Thereafter, some appropriate
policy directions which provide technical advice as to protect
government resources available through the Internet were
advanced. This tends to also increase citizens’ confidence on the
adoption of the government web-presence initiative.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4.6. [Security and Protection]
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Ojuloge, Blessing
National Centre for Technology
Management (NACETEM), An Agency
of the Federal Ministry of Science &
Technology, P.M.B. 012, Obafemi
Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, 20005,
Nigeria
+234-(0)8035762207
blessingojuloge@yahoo.com
236
General Terms
Management, Security, Performance
Keywords
Siyanbola, Willie O.
National Centre for Technology
Management (NACETEM), An Agency
of the Federal Ministry of Science &
Technology, P.M.B. 012, Obafemi
Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, 20005,
Nigeria
+234-(0)8033449687
williesiyanbola@yahoo.com
Web presence, e-government, management, vulnerability, policy,
cross site injection, SQL injection, security, performance, cyber
security
1. INTRODUCTION
Advancement in Internet and its services has culminated into
many applications and it provides information gathering platform
for citizens and opportunities for businesses to thrive [1].
Organizations and government bodies have leveraged severally on
these facilities provided by the web for improved efficiency in
service delivery, transparency, increased revenue, cost-saving and
global competitiveness. The art of online administration of
government activities is referred to as e-government [2]. By this,
the government can reach more citizens without boundary
irrespective of their locations at any point in time. And in turn, the
citizens can also reach the government without the bureaucracy
barrier [3].
The understanding of these facts most especially the benefits,
prompted the Nigerian Government to suggest to all its bodies at
all levels (federal, state and local) to make their presence known
on the Internet, by creating websites to deliver their services and
for effective information exchange. It also mandated them to use
the country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), knowing the
benefits derivable from such as well as its security implications.
Using a ccTLD, the users are guaranteed genuineness of the
domain since the registration of such domain is supervised. It is
worth noting to state that Nigeria Internet Registration
Association- NIRA (a non-government organisation) is
responsible to managing the ccTLD for Nigeria, while National
Information Technology and Development Agency (NITDA) has
been saddled with the responsibility of managing the government
sub-domain (.gov.ng) as a part of the entire ccTLD. The
requirement for the registration processes of the domain is quite
stringent and hence the likelihood of domain hijack or
misrepresentation is remote. This is important because of the
services that some of these organisations provide online which

include but not limited to: payment of tax, record keeping
(financial records, medical records, intellectual property
information, trade secrets and other citizens’ personal data) etc.
Making some of these services available online presents a better
and easy way of government-citizens’ relationship, most
especially on discharging obligations within and across the
parties. However, the concern now is the fear of adequate
technical capability or awareness of susceptibility of the design of
such platforms (websites) without given cognizance for avoidance
of common programming errors which may jeopardize successful
operation of the websites. A website is said to be vulnerable when
it has the propensity for infiltration which may be as a result of
flaws within the codes that made up the website, this is referred to
application level [4] or server side attacks. Other issues of concern
have to do with some underlying technicalities that can prevent
unforeseen circumstances that may befall the successful operation
of the websites.
It has been reported in literature that dynamic web applications
contain a wide range of input validation vulnerabilities such as
cross site scripting [5][6][7][8][9] and SQL injection
[10][11][12][13][14]. Because of the web popularity relative to
the number of millions of Internet users, the internet has become
prime targets for attackers [15] and today they are motivated by
financial gains rather than just being destructive, Symantec (2007)
as cited in [1]. Attacks against web applications constitute more
than 60% of the total attack attempts observed on the Internet as
showed in a report [16]. Also, in the study carried out by [6] it
was reported that 82% of the e-government websites around the
globe were vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and Structure
Query Language injection (SQLi). It was further discovered in the
study that 90% of European, 85% of Asian, 76% of the North
American and 49% of African government websites are
vulnerable to common web application attacks [6]. Apart from the
specified web application attacks earlier mentioned, denial of
service (DoS), unauthorized access to networks, theft of employee
or customer information, online financial fraud etc are also known
prevalent attacks [1].
Furthermore, SQL injection and cross-site scripting may be used
by attackers to alter back-end tables from databases and to launch
phishing attacks on vulnerable servers. Most website owners fail
to validate their application for common flaws and until now,
there is no study that has provided empirical data on how
vulnerable the Nigerian government websites are. It is in this
context that this research is necessitated in order to create
awareness for the government and its bodies on vulnerability level
of their websites and the need to take necessary action. It also
presents some policy suggestions to safeguard possible
occurrences and to present measures to avert continued
susceptibility.
2.0 WEB APPLICATION SECURITY
Web applications have become fertile ground for cyber attackers,
attempting to penetrate systems and misuse private data. Cenzic, a
web security firm, reported that almost 90% of web-related flaws
were caused by web application vulnerabilities with the three
most common types being: SQL injection, Cross-site Scripting,
and Authentication vulnerabilities. The SAN Institute, a
worldwide security organization, reported cross-site scripting,
SQL injection and cross site forgery as major web vulnerabilities
in 2007 [18]. It was further reported that, XSS is the most
237
dangerous and easily found web application security issue that can
cause varieties of issues which may include defacement of web
sites, insertion of hostile content, phishing attacks and allow
hackers to take over a user’s browser. Details of these attacks
shall be discussed in following sections.
2.1 Cross site scripting (XSS)
Cross site scripting is a vulnerability that allows an attacker to bypass
client-side security mechanisms normally imposed on web
content by the browsers. By finding ways of injecting malicious
scripts, usually in the form of JavaScript, VBScript, ActiveX,
HTML or Flash into a vulnerable application, an attacker may
gain privileges to sensitive page-content of the web pages [19]
Because a browser cannot know if the script should be trusted or
not, it will execute the script in the user context and give attacker
access to cookies or session tokens retained by the browser.
Common attack vectors are search applications which reflect the
search string, and parameters supplied in the URL.
2.2 Structured query language injection
(SQLi)
An SQL injection attack consists of insertion or "injection" of a
SQL query via the input data from the client to the application
without proper filtering of dangerous script characters. A
successful SQL injection exploit can read sensitive data from the
database, modify database data (Insert/Update/Delete), execute
administration operations on the database (such as shutdown the
DBMS), recover the content of a given file existing on the DBMS
file system and, in some cases, issue commands to the operating
system [18][19].
2.3 Cookie manipulation
A cookie is a small piece of information usually created by the
web server and stored in the web browser. Each time the user
access the web server, this data is passed back to the server. The
cookie contains information used by web applications to persist
and pass variables back and forth between the browser and the
web application. Client-side cookies can be persistent i.e. files
stored on the client computer until an expiry date; or session i.e.
files kept in the memory of the client computer until the session is
ended. As a result of the cookie structure and their usage, all data
stored in a client-side cookie could be easily read and
manipulated.
2.4 Unencrypted password
One of the security features employed in a web application is
password. Sensitive data such as credit card numbers, social
security numbers sent into the server without using encrypted
connection such as secure socket layer (SSL), can be intercepted
by hackers. Encrypting the transmission of data makes it difficult
to intercept sensitive information as it travels between two parties.
3.0 METHODOLOGY
The research was carried out on 64 Nigerian e-government
websites randomly selected to determine their common web
security issues. An advanced Google search feature was employed
to elicit websites with a sub-domain of ‘.gov.ng’ and with a ‘php
& html’ extension [6] Google retrieved a number of results but
priority was given to the websites with the highest page rank, this

is with a view to using websites which files has been highly
populated in the search engine database.
3.1 Testing tool
The second phase was to choose a software testing tool to scan for
web vulnerabilities. Several criteria were part of the decision in
choosing the testing tool. First, the testing software must be
compatible with the windows operating system since the test was
carried out on the researchers’ personal computer systems (PC).
Secondly, the software must have specific vulnerability testing
options to scan web sites, as opposed to common server-based
scanning products. After review of different web scanners,
Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner was employed. This is noted
to be in the same category with Nmap, which has been widely
used [1]. Acunetix was used to test different web application
vulnerability issues including: Cross-Site Script (XSS), SQL
injection (SQLi), cookie manipulation (CM), unencrypted
password (UP) and broken links (BL) of the web pages, which are
main targets here. The choice of these parameters is premised on
the high impact of its severity compared to others. In addition to
this testing tool, manual testing was also carried out on some few
websites in a way as not to leave footprints on the website. This is
necessary in order to confirm the results generated by Acunetix
web vulnerability scanners.
3.2 Procedure
After launching the web scanner, the desired Universal Resource
Location (URL) is entered in the wizard box provided and the
‘go’ button is fired. If the Internet connection on the computer is
available then the scanner will begin the process. The scanner
(Acunetix), thus virtually crawl the website of any given URL and
presents the analysis of the vulnerability for every run. The
Internet connection used for the exercise is a 3.5G on a High
Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSPDA). The scanning process
took on average 25 minutes, although the times varied from 15
minutes up to 1 hour depending on the size of the entire given
website. The manual test for XSS as well as SQLi was carried out
to confirm the results generated by the vulnerability scanner. This
is possible when such scripts as alert (‘This website is
vulnerable’) is inputted into any available input field
such as: the search, feedback and form fields within the website
and the action button is pressed thereafter. If the web page is
vulnerable, a Java script enabled browser will show a java script
pop-up alert window containing the text in the parenthesis, ‘This
website is vulnerable’. Also to manually test for SQL injection
vulnerabilities, a single quote ( ' ) can be used as input. The single
quote is a special character in SQL, and if it is included in the
SQL query it will most likely generate an SQL statement error.
All the 64 Nigerian government websites were tested over a
period of two weeks within the month of August 2011 and
technical report was produced for each site, listing the types and
numbers of specific vulnerabilities. Each report was divided into
several sections listing four levels of security vulnerability: High,
Medium, Low and Informational. High level – these are critical
problems which could cause high risk damage to the website e.g
website defacement [1], database manipulation and modification
[6], phishing, identity theft [1] amongst others. Medium and Low
level – these are problems that could pose some level of risk to
users of the web application. Informational – these are messages
that probably have little risk to users, but still should be analyzed
238
by web developers because of the possibility of creating high
vulnerabilities. The sites tested were categorized into Agencies,
Judiciary, Law Enforcement/Defence, Media, Ministries,
Parastatals, States and Others categories.
4.0 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Out of the 64 Nigerian government sites tested, 27, which
represent 42.2% were vulnerable to XSS while 31.3% are
vulnerable to SQLi. It was also discovered that 37.5% and 70.3%
were vulnerable to unencrypted password and broken links
respectively. These findings are represented and summarized
mathematically in algebraic expressions using set theory as shown
in Table 1.
Table 1: Algebraic representation of e-government vulnerabilities
in Nigeria
Algebraic
Expressions
Interpretations
U = 64 the universal set, i.e total sample tested.
n(XSS) = 27 the number of websites vulnerable to
XSS.
n(SQLi) = 20 the number of websites vulnerable to
SQL injection
n(UP) = 24 the number of websites vulnerable to UP
n(BL) = 45 the number of websites vulnerable to BL
n(SQLi ∪ XSS) =
34
n(SQLi ∩ XSS) =
13
n(SQLi ∩ XSS 1 ) =
7
n(SQLi 1 ∩ XSS) =
14
n(U - (SQLi ∪
XSS) 1 ) = 30
the number of websites vulnerable to
both SQL injection & XSS
the number of websites exclusively
vulnerable to both SQL injection & XSS
the number of websites vulnerable to
SQL injection but not XSS
the number of websites vulnerable to
XSS but not SQL injection
the number of websites vulnerable to
other parameters under test but not XSS
nor SQL injection
Legend: SQLi – Structured Query Language injection
XSS – Cross Site Scripting
UP – Unencrypted Password
BL – Broken Links
Table 2 shows the distribution of vulnerability in each category,
for example apart from other categories which constitute the
highest percentage of XSS vulnerability; the judiciary followed by
one out of every four being vulnerable 25% relative to the
participation in the test.

Categories
Only XSS
(%)
Table 2: Distribution of vulnerability in each category.
XSS and SQLi Analysis CM &
Only SQLi XSS &
XSS None
UP
(%)
SQLi (%) or SQLi(%) (%)
(%)
Agencies (n=10) 20 (2) 0 (0) 20 (2) 40 (4) 60 (6) 30 (3) 70 (7)
Judiciary (n=8) 25 (2) 12.5 (1) 25 (2) 62.5 (5) 37.5 (3) 37.5 (3) 50 (4)
Law Enf./Def (n=5) 20 (1) 0 (0) 40 (2) 60 (3) 40 (2) 40 (2) 80 (4)
Media (n=2) 0 (0) 50 (1) 0 (0) 50 (1) 50 (1) 0 (0) 100 (2)
Ministries (n=6) 16.7 (1) 16.7 (1) 33.3 (2) 66.7 (4) 33.3 (2) 33.3 (2) 66.7 (4)
Others (n=7) 42.9 (3) 0 (0) 28.6 (2) 71.4 (5) 28.6 (2) 28.6 (2) 85.7 (6)
Parastatals (n=13) 23.1 (3) 15.4 (2) 15.4 (2) 53.8 (7) 46.1 (6) 46.2 (6) 76.9 (10)
States (n=13) 15.4 (2) 15.4 (2) 7.7 (1) 38.5 (5) 61.5 (8) 46.2 (6) 61.5 (8)
* Please note that the values in parenthesis represent the actual number of the vulnerability found.
XSS- Cross Site Scripting, SQLi- Structure Query Language injection,
CM- Cookie Manipulation, UP- Unencrypted Password, BL- Broken Links
Table 3: Type and magnitude of website vulnerabilities across categories
Level of Severity/
Category
Highly Severe Less Severe
XSS SQLi CM/UP BL
Agencies 14.8 10.5 12 15.6
Judiciary 14.8 10.5 12 8.9
Law Enf./Def 11.1 10.5 8 8.9
Media 0.0 5.3 4 4.4
Ministries 11.1 15.8 8 8.9
Others 18.5 10.5 8 13.3
Parastatals 18.5 21.1 24 22.2
States 11.1 15.8 24 17.8
25.0
20.0
15.0
10.0
5.0
0.0
Figure 1: Pictorial representation of vulnerabilities across sectors
239
XSS
SQLi
CM/UP
BL
BL
(%)

In Figure 1, the parastatals have the highest percentages of
vulnerability in all the four parameters used in the research.
Parastatals and Others categories have the highest vulnerability to
XSS with 18.5% each. Ministries and States websites are more
vulnerable to SQLi behind Parastatals with 15.8% each. Media
houses category has the lowest percentage (5.3) of vulnerability to
SQLi. Parastatals and States categories have the highest
percentage of vulnerability to cookie manipulation and
unencrypted passwords with percentages 24% each. Most of the
categories had informational issues with their websites, Parastatals
XSS &
SQLi
40%
None
46%
XSS &
SQLi
33%
None
60%
Agencies
Only
XSS
20%
Law Enforcement/Defence
Ministries
None
33%
Parastatals
None
40%
XSS &
SQLi
15%
XSS &
SQLi
20%
Only
XSS
20%
Only
XSS
17% Only
SQLi
17%
Only
XSS
23%
Only
SQLi
16%
Figure 2: Pie charts showing vulnerabilities for categories of
Government websites
240
(22.2%) and States (17.8%) categories have broken links in their
websites.
Table 3 gives the percentages of vulnerable websites for each
category. ‘Others’ category has the highest ratio of vulnerability
to either XSS or SQLi, followed by Ministries. More than 70% of
‘Others’ category has vulnerability, while 38.5% of state
government websites are vulnerable. Figure 2 illustrates the
sectoral percentages representation of vulnerability to some
parameters under test using pie charts.
None
38%
XSS &
SQLi
25%
Only
SQLi
50%
XSS &
SQLi
29%
None
62%
Judiciary
None
28%
Media
Others
States
None
50%
Only
XSS
25%
Only
XSS
15%
Only
SQLi
12%
Only
XSS
43%
Only
SQLi
15%
XSS &
SQLi
8%

From table 3, it can be deduced that the website from the ‘Others’
and Judiciary categories have the highest percentage of
vulnerability to only XSS, while the Media category has the
highest vulnerability to only SQLi. Out of the 8 categories
examined, State category has the highest percentage (61.5) of
websites that are not vulnerable to XSS or SQLi, use fewer
technologies and have fewer numbers of pages in their websites,
hence decreasing the possibility of introducing vulnerability in
their web application.
Table 3: Vulnerability Test Results
High Level
Agencies
N=10
Judiciary N=8 Law
Enf./Def
N=5
* Numbers of websites are enclosed in parenthesis
Table 3 shows overall vulnerability test results of 64 Nigerian
websites. There was a wide range of total errors for each category.
Within the ‘high level’, which relates to critical problems found in
the sites, the 13 ‘States’ web sites had a total error count of 380
(out of which a particular State Government website had 339),
followed by Judiciary category with total error count of 249.
Media and Ministries web sites had lower numbers of 1 and 64
error counts respectively at this level. Results in the ‘medium/low
error level’ showed that Parastatals websites had 40 errors while
Law enforcement/defence, Ministries and Others categories had 3,
3 and 2 errors respectively. Most of the sites did possess medium
intensity issues, and only 2 Media websites did not have them,
while a good number of 3 Law enforcement/defence, 4 Ministries
and Others websites were free of problems at this level. Most sites
across the categories did have informational warnings. There were
a total of 117 warnings in Parastatals website, 3 in Media and 69
in others websites.
5.0 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
It was shown in this work that most Nigerian government
websites across federal, state and local government are vulnerable
to different forms of attacks. This is due to application errors
and/or deficiency in the design especially as it relates to coding of
the back-end. An average of 53.1 percent of sites contains critical
vulnerabilities (XSS and SQLi), 37.5% have medium-low level
issues (cookie manipulation and unencrypted password) and 70.3
percent contain informational issues (broken links) in their
websites. This is an undesirable level of protection. As more
Media
N=2
services are offered on a daily basis to the public through the
portals and the number of government databases connected with
these services are increasing, the risk of malicious data, identity
theft and manipulating the integrity of the databases increases. It
is therefore important that government take preventive measures
now to prevent any eventualities, some of these are articulated in
the policy recommendation in the next sections.
Ministries
N=6
Others
N=7
Parastatals
N=13
6.0 POLICY RECOMMENDATION
States
N=13
Total Errors 214(4) 249(5) 69(3) 1(1) 64(4) 76(5) 196(7) 380(5)
Site with no
Errors
Medium/Low Level
6 3 2 1 2 2 6 8
Total Errors 18(3) 26(3) 3(2) 0 3(2) 2(2) 40(6) 24(6)
Site with no
Errors
Informational
7 5 3 2 4 5 7 7
Total warning 38(8) 34(4) 25(4) 3(2) 31(4) 69(6) 117(10) 58(8)
Site with no
warning
2 4 1 0 2 1 3 5
241
It is expedient that different organizations take necessary steps to
close all possible loop holes that may be detrimental to their
resources available on their websites. This may involve website
validation or possibly an entire re-design. Before launching a
website, it is a good practice to cross-check and validates all
aspects of the design either by hosting it on a local server or on a
test bed. By this procedure, software development cycle principles
would have been followed, which the application is not out of
order in this context. This involve: planning, requirements
analysis, design & development, implementation (coding), testing
& integration, evaluation (validation), release (launching) and
support (maintenance).
The government also has vital roles to play, this involve setting
web standards as well as monitor and evaluate compliance. This
standard will be for all the government Ministries, Departments
and Agencies (MDAs) and could also extend to non-governmental
bodies and private firms with a web presence activities within the
country or are planning to have one. This standard should cover
all areas of the website cycle which will not leave out: (i) The
domain itself. First, this must be appropriate and must comply
with country code top level if serious transactions involving
ecommerce (for example) are to be allowed on it. (ii) The design
and development up to evaluation in that order must be
ascertained. (iii) Deployment and hosting must be guided; the
country of the hosting service provider may be localized. The

facilities (both hardware and software types, versions etc) in the
premise of the hosting provider must meet a set security standard.
(iv) General management, this includes updating, upgrading and
entire re-design etc, open source could be encouraged but with
caution in this instance. Apart from the fore, the government
should also commission a unit of an agency like National
Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) for
example, to monitor and evaluate compliance to the standards
from time to time. If all these could be dutifully observed, then
there is likelihood that the challenge of web insecurity will
drastically be minimized.
7.0 REFERENCE
[1] Zhao, J.J. & Zhao, S.Y. (2010). Opportunities and threats: A
security assessment of state e-government websites.
Government Information Quarterly 27 (2010) 49–56.
[2] Backus, M. (2001). E-Governance and Developing
Countries: Introduction and examples. Report No 3, April
2001. Available on
http://www.ftpiicd.org/files/research/reports/report3.pdf
[3] Awoleye O.M., Oluwaranti A.I., Siyanbola W.O. and
Adagunodo E.R. (2008). Assessment of e-Governance
Resource Use in Southwestern Nigeria. Proceedings of the
2nd International Conference on Theory and Practice of
Electronic Governance Cairo, Egypt. ACM International
Conference Proceeding Series; Pages 154-159
[4] Ali, A.B., Shakhatreh, Y.I, Abdullah, M.S. & Alostad, J.
(2010). SQL-Injection Vulnerability Scanning Tool for
Automatic Creation of SQL-injection attacks. Procedia
Computer Science 3, pp 453–458.
[5] Cook, S. (2003). A web Developer’s Guide to Cross
Scripting.
[6] Moen, V., Klingsheim, A.N., Simonsen, K.I.F. & Hole, K.J.
(2006). Vulnerabilities in E-Governments. Proc.2nd
International Conference on Global E-Security (ICGeS-06),
ondon, England, April 20–22, 2006.
[7] Christey, S., & Martin, R.A. (2007). Vulnerability Type
Distributions in CVE. Document Version: 1.1, May 22,
2007. available on http://cve.mitre.org/docs/vulntrends/vuln-trends.pdf
[8] Higgins, K.J. (2006). Cross Site Scripting: Attackers’ New
Favourite Flaw. Available on
http://www.darkreading.com/security/applicationsecurity/208804050/cross-sitescripting-attackers-newfavorite-flaw.html
[9] Bates, D., Barth, A., & Jackson, C. (2010). Regular
Expression Considered Harmful in Client-Side XSS Filters.
WWW 2010, April 26–30, 2010, Raleigh, North Carolina,
USA. ACM 978-1-60558-799-8/10/04. Available on
http://www.collinjackson.com/research/xssauditor.pdf
[10] Halfond, W.G.J., Viegas, J. & Orso, A. (2006). A
Classification of SQL Injection Attacks and
Countermeasures. College of Computing Georgia Institute of
Technology, 2006.
[11] Huang, Y.W., Huang, S.K, & Lin, T.P. (2003). Web
Application Security Assessment by Fault Injection and
242
Behaviour Monitoring. WWW2003, May 20-24, 2003,
Budapest,Hungary. ACM 1-58113-680-3/03/0005. Available
http://www2003.org/cdrom/papers/refereed/p081/FINAL_W
AVES_WWW2003.htm
[12] Bandhakavi, S., Bisht, P., Madhusudan, P., &
Venkatakrishnan, V.N (2007). CANDID: Preventing SQL
Injection Attacks using Dynamic Candidate Evaluations.
WWW 2010, April 26–30, 2010, Raleigh, North Carolina,
USA. ACM 978-1-60558-799-8/10/04. Available on
http://cs.uiuc.edu/~madhu/ccs07.pdf
[13] Lee, I. Jeong, S., Yeo, S. & Moon, J. (2011). A Novel
Method For SQL Injection Attack Detection Based On
Removing Sql Query Attribute Values. Mathematical and
Computer Modeling, pp 1-11.
[14] Xie, Y. & Aiken, A. (2006). Static Detection of Security
Vulnerability in Scripting Languages. 15th USENIX Security
Symposium, 2006. Available on
http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/usenix
06.pdf
[15] Balduzzi, M., Gimenez, C.T., Balzarotti, D. & Kirda, E.
(2010). Automated Discovery of Parameter Pollution
Vulnerabilities in Web Applications.
[16] SANS Institute (2009b). Top Cyber Security Risks -
Executive Summary” September 2009. Available on
http://www.sans.org/top-cyber-security-risks/summary.php
[17] SANS Institute (2009a). SANS Top-20 2007 Security Risks
(2007 Annual Update). Available on
http://www.sans.org/top20/#s1.
[18] Halkidis, S.T., Chtzigeorgiou, A. & Stephanides, G. A
Practical Evaluation of Security Patterns. Available on
http://users.uom.gr/~achat/papers/AIDC2006.pdf
[19] OWASP Foundation (2007). The Ten Most Critical Web
Application Security Vulnerabilities. Available on http://
www.owasp.org/images/e/e8/OWASP_Top_10_2007.pdf

Session 9
Social Media in Government

Exploring Social Media Usage in Saudi E-Government
Websites
Hend S. Al-Khalifa, Muna S. Al-Razgan, Nora I. Al-Rajebah and Ameera M. Almasoud
Information Technology Department
College of Computer and Information Sciences
King Saud University
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
{hendk;ma;razgan;nrajebah;amma;masoud}@ksu.edu.sa
ABSTRACT
Many governments worldwide have employed social media
services to increase their openness and transparency. These
services have played an important role in bridging the gap
between governments and citizens and increase the interaction
with each other. This paper explores the prevalence of social
media services in Saudi e-Government agencies' websites and
analyzes their patterns of usage.
Using a comprehensive analysis of 170 Saudi government
websites, we found that Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were the
most commonly used social media services among e-Government
agencies, and they were utilized as a one-way communication
channel.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J.4 [Computer Applications]: Social and Behavioral Sciences –
sociology, psychology.
General Terms
Management
Keywords
Social Media, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blog, E-government,
Saudi Arabia.
1. INTRODUCTION
With the proliferation of an array of different social media
services such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter, people became
more connected to each other. Social media services are defined
as “media for social interaction, using highly accessible and
scalable communication techniques. It is the use of web-based and
mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive
dialogue” [1].
In fact, there are many categories of social media sites based on
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
243
the service they provide, for instance: Blogging services (e.g.
Wordpress/Blogger), Media-sharing services, (e.g. YouTube
"Video", Flickr "photos"), Social networking (e.g. Facebook and
LinkedIn) and Micro-Blogging services (e.g. Twitter).
Social media services are gaining popularity worldwide. Based on
Alexa 1 ranking for top visited sites in the world, we can notice
that 50% of the top ten most visited websites are social media
services, which includes: Facebook, YouTube, BlogSpot and
Twitter.
Recently social media websites have been used to improve the
relationship between government agencies and their citizens and
to increase interaction. They provide good means of eparticipation,
which offers "the opportunity to achieve and satisfy
the need to be heard by politicians and participate in the decisionmaking
and policy formulation processes through the use of ICT"
[2]. In this respect, social media services were widely adopted in
e-Government websites because they created fast and readily
available communication channels with the citizens.
Given the importance of employing social media services in
today's e-Government websites; in this study we present the
results of analyzing the prevalence and usage of social media
services in Saudi Arabia e-Government agencies websites.
In order to explore the prevalence of social media services in
Saudi e-Government agencies websites, we first need to know
what are the widely used social media services in Saudi Arabia?
According to Alexa website, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and
Blogspot, respectively are among the top ten most visited websites
in Saudi Arabia 2 . Also the statistics presented in the "Internet
World Stats" 3 show that there are more than 4.5 Million Saudi
Facebook users on Dec 31, 2011; with a penetration rate equal to
17.4%. Most of these users are under 30 years old. On the other
hand, in September, 2011 the number of Saudi Twitter users has
reached 127,457 users according to Arab Social Media Report [3].
The previous numbers show an increased usage of social media
among young Saudi citizens.
Knowing these facts about the usage growth of social media
services in Saudi Arabia, this study will answer the following
questions:
1
The top 500 sites on the web by Alexa.com on March 26, 2012
2
Top sites in Saudi Arabia by Alexa.com on March 26, 2012:
http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/SA
3
http://www.internetworldstats.com/middle.htm, Date Accessed 26 March
2012.

1. What kind of social media services do Saudi e-Government
websites use?
This research question is meant to address the combination
of technology, telecommunication and social interaction
between the Saudi government and its citizen, and which
tools of the social media is more suitable for Saudi citizens.
Knowing these information will help in improving the
service and delivery of information through the correct
channel.
2. Which e-Government agency is using social media services
and tools and to what extent?
Since the aim of this paper is to know which government
agency is actively using social media and to what extent?
Identifying this government agency will help in delivering
our recommendations and better improve their services.
3. In what capacity in terms of announcement, discussion,
consultation, seeking ideas have social media been used in
Saudi e-Government websites?
Finding the answers to these questions will help in (1) providing
recommendations to Saudi e-Government websites to better
utilize social media services and (2) identify weaknesses in their
current usage. Thus, this study provides the first comprehensive
examination and analysis of 170 Saudi e-Government websites.
The focus will be on top social media services used in Saudi
Arabia, as mentioned before.
In the following section, we present some related work on the
usage of social media in e-Government context. In section 3, we
describe the methodology we followed in order to collect Saudi
government agencies websites. Then in section 4, we discuss our
findings and answer the three posed research questions. Finally
section 5 provides recommendations and future directions for this
research.
2. RELATED WORK
In the past few years, we have witnessed the utilization of social
media services by many governmental websites worldwide. The
aim of the utilization was to provide a two way interactive
communication channel with the citizens and to relate the
government with their constituencies.
Among the previous studies on the adoption of social media
service in government agencies websites, is a study by Alam et al.
[4] on the usage of Facebook in the Australian Taxation Office
(ATO). They found that ATO used Facebook as a one-way
communication tool to provide information about their e-Tax
service.
Similarly, Upadhyay and Ilavarasan [5] studied Facebook pages
of three government agencies in Delhi, India. These include
Municipal Corporation of Delhi, Delhi Traffic Police and
Planning Commission. Based on the agencies usage the authors
offered suggestions for policymaking to facilitate a wider and
more effective reach of social media in the developing countries.
On the other hand, Rojas et al. [6] studied the interaction of six
territorial public entities in Colombia through Facebook and
Twitter. They found that the usage of Twitter and Facebook by the
244
six entities was not as expected. As a result they provided a set of
recommendations to improve eParticipation on Social Media.
In another study based on a three-tiered approach to eParticipation
(Inform, Consult and Empower) [7], Inform: about the existing
policy, consult: by sharing knowledge and opinions, and
empower: by pursuing particular issues to the policy actors. The
authors found that the main challenge to their approach was not
the technological barriers; instead it was the socio-political
barriers.
In a wider context, Chua et al. [8] analyzed 200 international
government websites using content analysis and multiple
regression analysis. They found that the prevalence of seven Web
2.0 applications in descending order was: RSS, multimedia
sharing services, blogs, forums, social tagging services, social
networking, services and wikis. Finally, Gharawi et al. [9]
introduced the perceived values and pressing issues which
concerning practitioners that may complicate adoption of social
media services in e-Government websites.
From the previous research, we can see that many international
government websites do use social media services; however their
usage were very basic and did not fully utilize the potential and
capabilities of social media. So, will this be the case with Saudi e-
Government websites? The answer will be addressed in the next
sections.
3. METHODOLOGY
3.1 Collection of Saudi e-Government
Websites
One hundred ninety four Saudi government agencies websites
listed in the Saudi e-Government Portal (saudi.gov.sa) was
considered in this study. These websites were visited to make sure
that their addresses are correct. From the 194 websites only 170
were working properly. Table 1 shows the number of collected
websites based on their category type.
Table 1. Number of e-Government websites in each category
3.2 Methods of Data Analysis
During the period between 2 ed and 28 th March 2012 three experts
in social media domain were involved in the analysis. The first
step was to count the appearance of four social media services,

namely: Twitter, Facebook, blogs and YouTube for each website
in the e-Government categories (e.g. funds, municipality,
ministries, universities supported by the government, etc.). For
each social media service the expert codes it with either “yes” or
“no” to denote its presence or absence. We also noticed while
visiting some e-Government agencies websites the usage of other
types of social media services such as Flickr, Linkedin, Google+,
etc. Thus, they were counted.
The second step was to observe and distill the usage patterns for
each social media type based on the criteria shown in Table 2.
Table 2. Criteria used for exploring the usage patterns for e-
Government websites
Social Media Type Criteria
Twitter
Facebook
YouTube
Blog
4. FINDINGS
• Number of followers
• Number of tweets
• Is it up-to-date?
• Is it interactive?
• Type of usage (e.g. news,
announcements, answers, etc.)
• Number of likes
• Are user comments allowed?
• Is it up-to-date
• Is it interactive
• Type of usage (e.g. news,
announcements, answers, etc.)
• Number of uploaded videos
• Number of subscribers
• Number of views
• Is it up-to-date?
• Type of videos
• Are user comments allowed?
• Is it up-to-date?
• Type of posted topics
4.1 Prevalence of Social Media Services
To address our first research question "What kind of social media
services do Saudi e-Government websites use?" Figure 1 shows
the breakdown of social media usage based on their types for the
170 different Saudi government agencies.
245
Figure 1. Percentage of Social Media usage
We can see from the figure above that Facebook is one of the
highly used services with 37%, next comes Twitter with 35%,
then YouTube with 25%, and finally Blogs with only 3%. The
usage of Facebook and Twitter are the most popular among Saudi
agencies due to the high engagement of Saudi community in using
these services. We also noticed that since Facebook and Twitter
are becoming popular among young Saudi citizens, the usage of
blogs has started to diminish.
Figure 2. Percentage of Other Social Media usage
We mentioned previously that there are other social media
services that have been used in Saudi e-Government agencies,
such as Flickr, Google+, LinkedIn, Forums, and Scribd. Figure 2
shows the distributions of these services. The highest percentage
is for Flickr which equals to 46%, the second highest is Linkedin
with %21, the third one is Forums which equals to 15%, and the
rest has been used in low percentage as shown in the figure above.
4.2 Uses of Social Media Services
To address our second and third research questions "Which e-
Government agency is using social media services and tools and
to what extent?" and "In what capacity in terms of announcement,
discussion, consultation, seeking ideas have social media been
used in Saudi e-Government websites?" an in-depth inspection
was carried out on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, since they
were the highly used social media services in Saudi e-Government
websites.

4.2.1 Facebook Usage
Figure 3. Percentage of agencies that use Facebook per
category
Figure 3 shows the usage of Facebook among Saudi government
agencies; we noticed that the highest usage in descending order
was in universities (80%), municipalities (56%), councils (51%)
and funds (40%). The rest ranged between 33% and 14%.
The high usage of Facebook among universities websites explains
the popularity of social media services among the young Saudi
generation.
Also, we noticed that some agencies did not use Facebook, such
agencies include: Diwans, Colleges, and Departments. This can be
attributed to the fact that the number of agencies' websites under
these categories was low, i.e. they usually consist of three
websites in each category.
Regarding the usage patterns of Facebook, we can find that news
and announcements dissemination were the most commonly used
patterns. To be more specific, Funds and Presidencies were so
active in terms of updating their pages with news. However, all e-
Government agencies interaction with the citizens via their
Facebook pages used one direction without any discussion, which
can be considered as poor interaction. This way of interaction
might be attributed to the recent establishment of government
agencies Facebook pages or the absence of a clear usage policy of
such a media.
4.2.2 Twitter Usage
Figure 4. Percentage of agencies that use Twitter per category
246
In our analysis we found that there were 64 out of 170
government agencies which have Twitter accounts. From Figure
4, it can be clearly seen that the highest Twitter usage among the
64 government agencies was present in the University category
with a percentage of 72%. Municipality category comes second,
with a percentage of 67% followed by Ministry, Principality,
Fund, Council and other agencies categories that have a usage
range of 38% to 43%. While Directorate, Commission,
Presidency, and Establishment categories have a usage ranged
from 17% to 22%. Similar to the findings of Facebook usage,
College, Diwans, and Department categories were not using
Twitter.
Furthermore, among the 64 agencies which used Twitter, 77%
were up to date with recent tweets. In general, utilizing Twitter to
communicate with citizens is roughly a new trend in Saudi Arabia
as many agencies created their accounts between 2010 and 2011.
In terms of the different themes of usage, Twitter accounts were
mainly used for disseminating news and announcements. Overall,
Twitter is used as a one way channel to broadcast announcements
and news benefiting from the growing interest in Twitter inside
the Saudi society. Small amount of interaction was encountered,
among all agencies, i.e. 22% were interactive. The Ministry and
University categories have good interaction with their followers
which appears in terms of Q&As and replies. Other Agencies like
Saudi Arabian airlines and the National Center for Assessment in
Higher education are very active as well. It seems that these
agencies allocate enough resources (human and time) to interact
with the citizens.
4.2.3 YouTube Usage
Figure 5. Percentage of agencies that use YouTube per
category
Figure 5 shows the usage of YouTube among Saudi government
agencies. The highest usage was in: universities (31%),
municipalities (19%), ministry (13%), other agency (10%), and
the rest were below 8%. The agencies who do not use YouTube
were Colleges, Diwans, Department, and Council. Their lack of
usage might be attributed to the fact that videos are not needed in
their line of business.
Regarding the usage patterns of YouTube, we found that
announcements, interviews, how-to's (direction) and events
broadcasted in TVs were the most commonly used patterns.
Moreover, in most agencies channels viewers’ comments were
allowed. Finally, we can notice that most of YouTube channels

were recently established and they usually have less than 200
videos uploaded.
5. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Social media is newly introduced in Saudi e-Government websites
given the creation date of their accounts in different social media
services. In this paper we have explored the prevalence of social
media services among Saudi e-Government agencies and the
attitude towards their usage.
Our findings show that the use of Facebook and Twitter were
admirable, given the small number of Saudi e-Government
agencies officially using them. In fact, the usage of social media
services was most common in Universities and Municipalities
websites. Our analysis also showed that most e-Government
agencies publish the same content on both Facebook and Twitter.
In terms of their usage trends, we have noticed that either the
agencies’ website was up-to-date and participated in more than
one social media service, or the website is so simple, with no
participation in any service. The apparent usage pattern, as we
have stated previously, was for disseminating news and
announcements, i.e. only as a one way communication channel.
In order to overcome the problems found in current usage of
social media services we provide the following recommendations
for Saudi e-Government agencies:
• Create a clear social media strategy that prevents any
misunderstandings or misuse of the service and defines
the overall goals of its usage.
• Clarify the purpose of each social media service to the
citizens i.e. whether it is for discussions, Q&As, or
news/announcement channel.
• Verify social media accounts to give them more trust and
credibility.
• For agencies from the same category or interest, it is
advisable to get connected with each other, this will help
service the Saudi citizens.
• Allocate enough resources (personnel and time) in each
government agency for moderating and managing social
media channels.
• Learn which social media is popular among Saudi citizen
and engage and focus on that service.
• Improve the current usage of social media services by
adopting an interactive two-way communication channel
with the citizens.
• Consult and seek knowledge from the citizens about how
to improve the agency social media service.
247
Finally, it is worth mentioning that since the usage of social media
in Saudi government is very recent, there is no deep involvement
yet between policy makers and Saudi citizens. Therefore, the
recommendation was given to help improve the usage of the
current services, and hopefully in the near future we reach the
ultimate goal which is “inform-consult-empower” between policy
makers and Saudi citizens.
6. REFERENCES
[1] “Social media - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” [Online].
Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media.
[Accessed: 25-Mar-2012].
[2] K. Ergazakis, K. Metaxiotis, and T. Tsitsanis, “A State-of-
The-Art Review of Applied Forms and Areas, Tools and
Technologies for e-Participation,” International Journal of
Electronic Government Research, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 1–19,
2011.
[3] “Arab Social Media Report,” Dubai School of Government.
Available: http://www.dsg.fohmics.net/en/asmr3/. [Accessed:
25-Mar-2012].
[4] S. L. Alam, J. Campbell, and R. Lucas, “Using Social Media
in Government: The Australian Taxation Office e-Tax
Facebook Page,” in 2011 IEEE Ninth International
Conference on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure
Computing (DASC), 2011, pp. 1002–1009.
[5] J. M. Rojas, C. J. Ruiz, and C. Farfán, “e-participation and egovernance
at web 2.0 in local governments of Colombia,” in
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Theory
and Practice of Electronic Governance, New York, NY,
USA, 2011, pp. 301–304.
[6] A. Upadhyay and P. V. Ilavarasan, “Social media, egovernance
and developing countries: insights from India,”
in Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Theory
and Practice of Electronic Governance, New York, NY,
USA, 2011, pp. 351–352.
[7] Lee D., Loutas N., Sanchez Nielsen E., Mogulkoc E.,
Lacigova O., Inform-Consult-Empower: A Three-tiered
Approach to eParticipation. In Proceedings of 3rd ePart
Conference, Delft, The Netherlands, 2011, pp. 121-132.
[8] A. Y. Chua, D. Goh, and R. Ang, “Web 2.0 applications in
government websites: prevalence, use and correlations with
perceived website quality,” Online Information Review, vol.
36, no. 2, p. 2–2, Apr. 2012.
[9] M. Gharawi, N. Helbig, J. Hrdinová, and D. Werthmuller,
“An exploratory study of social media adoption in
government,” in Proceedings of the 4th International
Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic
Governance, New York, NY, USA, 2010, pp. 359–36

Government Crisis Communication on the Microblog: A
Theory Framework and the Case of Shanghai Metro Rear-
End Collision
ABSTRACT
Crisis brings various damages including a tarnished reputation. To
protect and restore its reputation is an important task for a
government agency in times of crisis. A microblog, which is
attracting more and more public attention, can be used as a
platform for the government to communicate with the public in
order to manage its reputation in times of crisis. However, there is
not enough research done in this area. In this paper, the author
develops a general framework for a government agency to
conduct crisis communication on the microblog. At the end of the
paper, the case of a Shanghai City Metro rear-end collision is
introduced to show how the government can use the framework to
respond to a crisis.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4.m [Computer and Society]: Miscellaneous.
General Terms
Management, Measurement, Performance, Theory
Keywords
Microblog; Social Media; Public Relation; Crisis Communication,
China
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background
On September 27, 2010, a rear-end collision occurred at Shanghai
City’s Metro in China. This accident was first reported by a
microblogger on Sina Microblog [42], a popular Chinese
microblog website 1 .
What makes this affair different is the responses made by the
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
1 http://www.weibo.com/
Xiao Liang
Department of Informatics
University at Albany, SUNY
1400 Washington Avenue
Albany, NY 12222
xliang@albany.edu
248
Shanghai Metro’s official microblog 2 . The response messages
were widely spread, and both the responses and the Shanghai
Metro received considerable acclaim.
On one hand, this indicates that the public would like to see
government agencies appear on a microblog in times of crisis; on
the other hand, it raises the question of how a government agency
could use microblogs in a crisis to facilitate crisis communication.
1.2 Introduction of the Problem
Crisis is the “perception of unpredictable event that threatens
important expectancies of stakeholders and can seriously impact
an organization’s performance and generate negative outcomes”
[6]. One of the negative outcomes of a crisis is a tarnished
reputation [10], which is the source of negative attitudes towards
an organization [26]. Therefore, to protect their reputations
becomes an important task for all organizations in times of crisis.
Crisis communication is the approach aimed at maintaining and
repairing reputation during a crisis. This approach, by definition,
is “the dialogue between the organization and its public prior to,
during, and after the negative occurrence. The dialogue details
strategies and tactics that are designed to minimize damage to the
image of the organization” [12].
As a channel of communication, the media is an unneglectable
constituent. Scholars assert that, according to different
characteristics of the media, an organization should apply
different strategies in order to achieve the best result [4]. The
microblog, as a type of new media, is attracting more and more
public attention. Many organizations have begun to use it as a
platform to communicate with their publics during crises [31].
However, there has not much research done in this area [31].
This paper aims to provide government agencies with a general
framework for harnessing the microblog to communicate with the
public during a crisis. However, there is no one size-fits-all model;
the general framework functions as a basic guideline allowing
government agencies to develop specific strategies in different
situations shaped by factors such as the responsibility of the crisis,
the information required by the public, and the social value in
which the organization is embedded. The model takes a stage
approach, which views the crisis as a process composed of
2 http://www.weibo.com/shmetro/

different phases. Four theories of crisis communication are
discussed, and the common issues that the theories focus on are
used to build the framework. Finally, the author uses Shanghai
Metro’s crisis communication to show how a government agency
can employ the microblog to communicate with the public in
times of crisis.
2. PREVIOUS STUDIES
In this section the author first talks about the stage approach. The
author then discusses four common issues affecting crisis
communication strategies concerned by primary crisis
communication theories. Finally, the author discusses some
features of the microblog.
2.1 Three Stages of a Crisis
According to the stage approach, the development of a crisis can
be divided into phases, according to which different tasks are
assigned [14]. There are many stage models, among which the
three-stage model is the most used [32]. The author will also use
three-stage model due to its simplicity.
Simple as the three-stage approach is, scholars try to assign
various definitions to the phases [15, 30]. Coomb summed up the
previous studies and proposed a summarized three-stage model.
His model includes a pre-crisis stage, crisis event stage, and postcrisis
stage [7].Specifically, the pre-crisis stage is when a crisis
has not happened yet. In this phase, the tasks are to detect crisis
signs, prevent possible risks, reduce the potential harm, and
prepare for possible responses [7, 30]. The crisis event stage is
when crisis has occurred and brought damages. The organization
should recognize the crisis as soon as possible and make
responses to the crisis so as to mitigate negative impact [7, 15].
The post-crisis stage is when the immediate effect of a crisis is
over [7]. In this phase the organization should learn from the crisis,
monitor the public’s impression, and make sure that the crisis is
truly over [7, 27].
2.2 Communication Strategies
In this section, the author discusses four common issues examined
by primary crisis communication theories, namely the corporate
apologia theory, image restoration theory, situational crisis
communication theory (SCCT), and organizational renewal
theory[1, 38].The corporate apologia theory focuses on the
apology strategy in a crisis. The image restoration theory is
concerned with strategies for repairing the reputation under attack.
Apology is included in this theory as a general strategy. The
SCCT argues that an organization should apply strategies
according to the situation of the crisis. Lastly, the organizational
renew theory encourages the organization to emphasize the
positive side of the crisis. These four theories fall in the research
area of public relations and recommend strategies for repairing
and retaining organizational reputation in a crisis. Table 1 shows
the features of each theory.
Table 1. Crisis Communication Theories
Theory Main Arguments
Corporate Apologia
o The theory focuses on apology strategies.
o Depending on the responsibilities for the
crisis, five strategies are suggested.
o Strategies: denial, counterattack, excuse,
promising not to do it again, and seeking a
legal solution which is not a public relation
stance.
249
Image Restoration
SCCT
Organizational
Renewal Theory
o This theory focuses on restoring
organizational image when the image is under
attack.
o Two elements of an attack:
-­‐ The accused is held responsible for an
action.
-­‐ The action is considered to be offensive.
o Strategies:
-­‐ Denial and evasion (to the first element).
-­‐ Reducing offensiveness, and corrective
action (to the second element).
-­‐ Mortification (general strategy).
o Crisis strategies depend on the history of the
crisis, previous reputation, and the
responsibilities for the crisis.
o Crisis clusters divided by the responsibility:
victim cluster, accidental cluster, prevention
cluster.
o Strategies applied accordingly: denial,
diminishing, and bolstering.
o The theory is more prospective than
retrospective. It emphasizes rebuilding.
o Four facets of the theory: organizational
learning, ethical communication, prospective
vision, and effective organizational rhetoric.
The theories mainly focus on four factors that an organization
should consider when designing its crisis communication
strategies. These four factors are the crisis situation, the
stakeholders, the values, and the further view. In the following
part of this section the author discusses the four factors one by one.
2.2.1 Crisis situation
The responsibility for a crisis and the level of damage are two
aspects of crisis situations [2, 5].
First of all, the responsibility for a crisis could affect the public’s
attitude towards an organization. This phenomenon is explained
by the attribution theory, which argues that audiences always
search for the cause of an event and try to form attributions for the
responsibility [41]. Various emotions, such as sympathy and anger,
are experienced by audiences after they attribute the responsibility
[41]. For example, if an organization is a victim of the event,
audiences are likely to develop sympathy towards the organization
[5]. Thus, the responsibility becomes an issue one should consider
when designing a crisis communication strategy.
The corporate apologia theory and image restoration theory stress
the importance of crisis responsibility. Depending on whether the
organization is responsible for the crisis, the corporate apologia
theory suggests strategies such as denial, counterattack, excuse,
promising not to do it again, and seeking a legal solution which is
considered as a no-public-relation approach [16]. The image
restoration theory proposes denial and evasion of responsibility
[2].
The SCCT sums up the work of the previous two theories. It
identifies three clusters of crises according to the crisis
responsibility taken by an organization: victim cluster, accidental
cluster, and prevention cluster [13]. Strategies, such as denial,
diminishing, and bolstering, are suggested by the theory [5].
The perceived level of damage is another factor of a crisis
situation. It is argued that if the crisis manager lessens the
perceived harmfulness of the crisis or shows some control over
the damage; then the reputation damage can be reduced [2]. The
level of damages is thoroughly discussed by Benoit in the image

estoration theory. He termed it as “offensiveness of the wrongful
doing” and took it as one of the components of an attack to the
organization [29]. Benoit argued that the perceived offensiveness
of an action is more important than the reality. In other words, the
wrongful action might not be as heinous as it is perceived by the
audience [2]; thus, the crisis manager should deliver information
that will help the public to objectively assess the damage. The
image restoration theory suggests some message options that can
reduce the perceived offensiveness of wrongful actions, such as
bolstering, minimizing the negative feelings (diminishing),
differentiating the crisis from other similar crises, transcendence,
attacking the accusers, and the compensation [2].
2.2.2 Stakeholders
Stakeholders are vital elements in crisis communication because
they are the ones who are affected by the crisis and who form
attitudes towards the organization. Specifically, the previous
reputation among stakeholders and the needs of the stakeholders
are two important elements which the organization ought to pay
attention to.
Research shows that a negative reputation can lead to additional
damage during crises [21]. The SCCT takes the previous
reputation as an important factor that affects the choice of crisis
communication strategies [5]. Hence, instead of suffering the
negative impact which results from a ruined reputation, an
organization is better to build a sound relationship with the
stakeholders before the crisis.
Besides managing the organization’s reputation, to meet the needs
of stakeholders is the first and foremost task during crises [5].
Different stakeholders have different concerns and expectations.
The paper only discusses some general needs in the crisis event
stage and post-crisis stage respectively.
The first need is to reduce uncertainties. A crisis usually breeds
uncertainties [28]. On one hand, people need information to
reduce uncertainties and thereby to make the right decision in
order to minimize the damage [26]. On the other hand, people
need information to diminish the pressure brought by uncertainties
[5, 36].
Secondly, in the post-crisis stage, stakeholders need compensation
and emotional reparations. The corporate apologia theory stresses
that an appropriate apologetic message should acknowledge all
the stakeholders and express empathy to the injured individuals in
the crisis [17]. The image restoration theory recommends the
organization to compensate for the losses of the victims. If the
compensation is accepted by the stakeholders, the image of the
organization might be improved [2].
Finally, it is worth noting that sometimes the organization does
meet the expectations of its stakeholders. However, the action is
not very well expressed. Hence, it is crucial to fill the gap between
the expression and the action [9].
2.2.3 Values
Failing to meet social values, such as being dishonest, will hurt
the organization’s reputation [11]. During the crisis, an
organization faces different interest groups that have a variety of
values. An effective solution is to stress some core values of the
society [32]. Honesty, addressing responsibility, openness, and
humanism are important values identified as by the literature [18,
40].
250
Being honest means to be truthful and sincere [18]. Accepting
responsibilities is considered ethical [40]. Openness requires the
organization to make the information accessible to the public in
order to reduce uncertainties and increase transparency [40, 43].
Humanistic care is about offering help to the public physically,
psychologically, and financially [40].
2.2.4 The future
That an organization should seek opportunities in a crisis and help
the public to see the future is the core argument of the
organizational renewal theory [39]. To correct wrongdoings and
to learn from the crisis are two important aspects discussed by the
four theories.
Correcting the wrongdoing is regarded by the SCCT and image
restoration theory as part of the diminishment strategy [2, 5]. The
corporate apologia theory also values making statements to
correct wrongdoings as a part of an effective apologetic strategy
[16]. Moreover, the SCCT considers the history of similar crises
to be a factor that can negatively affect crisis communication [5].
To correct the wrongdoing is also a necessary action to renew the
organization’s reputation and to prepare for a future crisis.
Learning from a past crisis plays an important role in rebuilding
an organization. An organization can learn from the crisis by
evaluating its crisis response strategy as well as investigating the
reason for the crisis. To improve the crisis response mechanism,
to correct the reason for the crisis, and to rebuild the organization
are some of the aims.
3. FRAMEWORK
3.1 Microblog
In this section, the author discusses two important activities on the
microblog and some techniques that can help an organization
organize the information on a microblog.
The microblog as a new meda is attracting more and more public
attention [25]. Research shows that people react less negatively to
crisis communication strategies on the microblog (twitter), and the
public tries to seek and share information on the microblog in
times of crisis [31]. Although there is research that has focused on
using social media in crises in general, there is little research that
specifically investigates the usage of the microblog in crises [31].
In order to understand how the microblog can help with crisis
communication, there is a need to first understand its major
activities and how to handle the information on it.
Two major activities on the microblog are collecting and
disseminating information, which are supported by the
information processing capability of the microblog. First, the large
user group provides the organization with a resource for collecting
information about stakeholders’ attitudes and expectations [35].
Secondly, the large number of users also enables the organization
to broadcast information to the relevant audiences. Third,
information spreads quickly on the microblog. Due to mobile
devices, such as smart phones, people can share information
whenever they use their mobile devices. Moreover, the microblog
is interactive. By using functions, such as “@”, comments, and
private chats, the organization could both give feedback to and
receive timely feedback from the public. Finally, people might
argue that the blog is also interactive. However, since it is easy to
create and share information on the microblog, the microblog is

more suitable for information disseminating within a limited time
frame [34].
Besides collecting and disseminating information, handling
information on the microblog is another issue. Two major
problems in terms of handling information are information
overload [19] and the length limitation of each message. In Table
2, the author suggests some techniques to assist in organizing and
retrieving information, as well as breaking length limitation.
Table 2.Information Overload and Length Limitation
3.2 The Framework
The framework is arranged by Coomb’s three-stage model. The
stages are pre-crisis stage, crisis event stage, and post-crisis stage.
Coomb also gives the tasks of each stage. The author will discuss
each task in detail with respect of Coomb’s descriptions as well as
the four factors that the author generalizes from primary crisis
communication theories. Accordingly, the author then discusses
what types of messages could be delivered and collected by the
organization.
3.2.1 Pre-crisis stage
In the pre-crisis stage, the crisis has not happened yet. The task of
this stage is to detect crisis signs, prevent possible risks and
reduce potential harm, and prepare for a possible crisis response.
Firstly, there are usually signs that indicate a possible crisis [8].
However, it is not easy to detect those signals; therefore, it
requires the organization to collect information systematically
from both internal and external sources [8]. A government agency
could take advantage of the large user group of the microblog
[24].The general public and the opinion leaders [8, 22] are both
sources of information [24]. The general public could express
their concerns as well as report suspicious phenomena through
comments, “@”, private messages, and so on. Moreover, opinion
leaders and experts, who have knowledge on particular issues and
the power to affect the public’s opinion, should not be neglected
by government agencies [8, 22]. Besides, the comments on
messages that an opinion leader has posted are also an information
resource. Overall, the information for detecting crisis signs can be
collected from both the public and the opinion leaders and experts.
251
The public’s concerns and attitudes, and the suspicious
phenomena reported are the information a government agency
should pay attention to.
The second task is to reduce potential harm. One of the ways to
reduce the harm is to educate the public so that they can make the
right decisions when a crisis hits. On the microblog, the
government can post educational messages enriched by pictures,
videos, and external articles. However, posting educational
messages is just one way to reduce the potential harm. The type of
information delivered in order to degrade the potential harm
depends on the crisis that an agency anticipates. In other words, a
government agency should analyze the potential crisis and
systematically design the microblog messages that will be helpful
in reducing the harm.
Thirdly, in order to prepare possible crisis responses, a
government agency should consider the four factors that affect the
strategies of crisis communication, namely the crisis situation,
stakeholders, social values, and the future view. Accordingly, in
the preparation stage, an agency should build sound informationsharing
mechanisms on the microblog, establish a good reputation
among stakeholders, understand the needs of stakeholders,
comply with social values, and stress the future view.
Build information-sharing mechanisms before the crisis has been
discussed by scholars for a long time [20]. The public can be one
of the grids that provide information about a crisis. The public can
even spontaneously provide assistance during a crisis. A
government agency may empower the citizen to become involved
in such activities on the microblog.
The microblog can be used as a platform to build a sound
relationship with the public. Few studies have been done on how
an organization should communicate with the public on the
microblog in order to build a good relationship. However, we can
use the studies on general online communication as a source of
reference. Two major strategies to maintain good relationships
have been suggested by scholars: communicated relational
commitment and conversational human voice [23].The former
requires the organization to show willingness to maintain a
relationship with the public; the latter highlights the importance of
the human voice of the people who form the organization [23]. On
the microblog, to enhance relational commitment can be reflected
in the agency’s involvement in the public’s affairs. Besides, to
show openness in organizational affairs can also help to maintain
commitment [34]. The humanity of a government agency can be
reflected in microblog posts that use a personal voice instead of an
official tone. The person in charge of the official microblog can
also show personal opinions, which can help with expressing a
human voice [23, 34, 37].
Information about the public’s expectations (needs) will assist the
government in coping with a crisis. Such information can be
collected directly from the public’s comments, “@”, and private
messages. Again, the opinion leaders and experts play a role as
well.
The fourth requirement is to deliver messages fitting with social
values. The posts and discussions on the microblog can reflect
some social values as well as rules in the world of the microblog.
A government agency should continuously monitor the public’s
values on the microblog. Table 3 shows strategies for the precrisis
stage.

Table 3. Strategies for Pre-crisis Stage
3.2.2 Crisis event stage
In the crisis event stage, the tasks are to identify the crisis and to
launch appropriate crisis responses.
A crisis usually hits suddenly, leaving the organization and the
public little time to respond [3]. Consequently, to identify the
crisis at the first moment becomes vitally important. Online
information dissemination is fast; thus, online media can be used
as a channel to report the crisis. A good example for this is the
Shanghai City Metro accident, which was first reported on a
microblog by an ordinary citizen [42].
After identifying a crisis, an organization should respond to it as
soon as possible. In rest of Section 3.2.2, the author discusses the
response strategy according to the four factors covered by popular
crisis communication theories: the crisis situation, the
stakeholders, the social values, and the future view.
First of all, public-generated messages might contain clues of a
crisis situation, such as the crisis responsibility/perceived crisis
responsibility and the level of damage/perceived level of damage.
Thus, the government agency can pay attention to both the factors
involved in the crisis as well as the public’s attitude on the
microblog. Moreover, the government should design crisis
communication strategies according to the crisis situation.
Secondly, the response messages posted on the microblog should
meet the needs of stakeholders. On one hand, a government
organization can make use of information that is collected in the
pre-crisis stage; on the other hand, the organization can deliver
information that meet the general needs of stakeholders, such as
decision-making needs, the need to reduce emotional uncertainties,
and the need for reparations and compensation. Importantly, if an
organization meets the needs of the public, then it should be
reflected in its messages.
252
Third, the response messages on the microblog should also be in
accord with the core values of stakeholders. The public’s
perception of social values and the rules of messages on the
microblog should be collected and analyzed in the pre-crisis stage;
thereby, the organization can deliver appropriate information in
legitimate formats.
Ultimately, to stress the future can be another task in this stage.
The government agency can inform the public that they are
correcting the wrongdoing as well as learning from the crisis. The
rhetoric used in the posts underlining the future view should be
positive [39]. Table 4 shows the strategies in the crisis event stage.
Table 4. Strategies for Crisis Event Stage
3.2.3 Post-crisis stage
In this stage, the tasks are preparing for the next crisis, making
sure the stakeholders are left with positive impressions, and
checking that the crisis is truly over.
Preparing for the next crisis includes activities such as evaluating
the crisis response strategy and learning from the most recent
crisis [7, 39].On the microblog, feedback is the material for
evaluation and learning purposes. The public’s attitude displayed
in each message can be used to evaluate whether the strategy was
favored. The public’s needs in the crisis as expressed in their posts
and comments can be used to adjust the crisis strategy during and
after the crisis.
Besides the evaluation and learning purposes, feedback can also
be used for the purpose of investigating the public’s impression of
the organization.
Sometimes after the end of the immediate effects, the long-term
impact of a crisis can last months or even years. For instance,
even after physical and financial losses are compensated for,
people still need time to seek emotional relief and rebuild
confidence [5, 7]. Another example is that the organization needs
time to investigate the responsibility for the crisis as well as the
level of damage. In both cases, the organization should continue

collecting information about the crisis. On the microblog, the
public’s feedback and the experts’ opinions should be monitored
so as to help evaluate whether the crisis is truly over. If the crisis
is not completely over yet, the organization should continue to
apply response strategies depending on the crisis situation and the
needs of the public. Table 5 shows the strategies for the post-crisis
stage.
Table 5. Strategies for Post-crisis Stage
4. THE CASE
In this section, the author will introduce the Shanghai City
Metro’s crisis communication on the microblog.
4.1 Introduction, Method, and Questions
The rear-end collision happened at Shanghai City Metro’s Route
No.10 on September 27, 2011. This accident was first reported by
an ordinary microblogger on Sina Microblog [42].The first report
appeared on the microblog website at 14:47 [42]. Before this post
occurred, on the same day from 14:17 to 14:20, the Shanghai City
Metro’s official microblog had posted three messages reporting
that the equipment on Route No.10 had malfunctioned, and the
train was required to slow down. At 14:40, five minutes before the
first report of the collision, the official microblog made a post
informing the public that they were controlling the amount of
passengers connecting to Route No. 10. At 15:03, the official
microblog informed the public that Route No.10 between Yili
Road and Sichuan Bei Road was closed, and no passengers were
allowed to access the train. Two minutes later, the official
microblog made another post that repeated the content of the
previous post, as well as provided information to assist the
passengers in choosing other vehicles for transportation. In the
next 48 hours, the official microblog responded to the crisis. The
response was widely spread by the public and received many
compliments.
In this section, the crisis response made by the official microblog
will be discussed. The questions are:
1) How did the official microblog respond to the crisis?
2) How does the response fit the framework proposed in this
paper?
The data was collected in December 2011. The 52 crisis-related
messages posted and reposted between September 27, 2011 and
253
September 29, 2011 were examined. The author classified the
messages by their main purposes. For instance, the official
microblog apologized in many posts; however, the main purpose
of only two posts was to apologize.
Eight categories are identified. The apology category contains
messages only expressing an apology. The human care messages
show that the organization cares about the victim’s feelings. The
future view category stresses what the organization is going to do.
The responsibility category contains messages related to the
responsibility for the crisis and the investigation into the
responsibilities. Both the “current situation” and the “help
information” help with reducing uncertainties. “Positive tone”
tries to view the crisis from the positive side, such as how people
have helped each other. Figure 1 shows the classification of the
posts. Other relevant posts were searched by using the search
function and keywords such as “passenger education,”“Metro
safe,” etc.
Figure1.Classification of the Posts
These crisis responses will be discussed within the framework that
the author proposed in Section 3. The author will especially focus
on the crisis event stage.
4.2 Pre-crisis Stage
In the pre-crisis stage, the tasks are detecting crisis signs, reducing
potential harm, and preparing for crisis responses.
4.2.1 Detecting crisis signs
First, in order to acquire external information for possibly
detecting signs of a crisis, a government agency should have
many followers and the concerned public on the microblog. The
Shanghai City Metro’s official microblog has millions of
followers, including individuals, relevant organizations, and even
the news media. In the meantime, the official microblog follows
various microbloggers such as individuals, experts, other
organizations, and the news media, which is helpful in acquiring
information from experts and opinion leaders. Besides, there is
evidence indicating that the official microblog is aware of external
information on the microblog. For instance, in August 2011,
among 229 messages relating to Metro affairs posted by the
official microblog, there were 82 messages from external sources.
The messages were from comments, the accounts followed by the
official microblog, and the people who “@” Shanghai Metro in
their messages. In fact, during the crisis the official microblog
posted 8 messages based on information provided by other

accounts, among which seven messages were from external
resources and 3 help messages were generated by individual
microbloggers.
4.2.2 Reducing potential harm
The second task in the pre-crisis stage is to reduce potential harm.
The Shanghai City Metro’s official microblog tries to reach this
goal by offering educational information so that the passengers
could understand safe and dangerous behaviors on the Metro. The
official microblog has two groups of messages under the tag of
“To teach you how to take the Metro” and “safe Metro”. However,
there is little information on what to do when collisions and other
disasters happen.
4.2.3 Preparing for crisis responses
To prepare for possible crisis response is the third task of the precrisis
stage. Three sub-tasks here are preparing to collect
information on crisis situations, understanding the needs and core
values of the public, and building a sound relationship with the
public.
In order to prepare for collecting useful information during a crisis,
an organization should encourage the public to share information
on the microblog. There is no evidence showing that the Shanghai
City Metro’s official microblog is deliberately promoting such an
information-sharing system; however, it does actively reply to and
appreciate those who report suspicious behaviors and items. For
instance, on August 29, 2011, a microblogger found a suspicious
bag on the train and reported it to the official microblog. The
official microblog informed the Metro staff to check the train and
posted the result on the microblog. Another example is that a
passenger complained about the Metro staff at the station asking
him for his personal information. After investigation, the official
microblog told the passenger that those people were not Metro
staff and warned other passengers to stay alert. Such
communication assists in managing the Metro and could be a
strong beginning to building an information-sharing system.
Another two sub-tasks in terms of collecting information to
prepare a crisis response are to understand the needs of
stakeholders and to investigate their values. As the author has
argued in Section 3.2.1, such information can be collected from
comments, “@”, private messages, messages produced by opinion
leaders and experts, and so on. The Shanghai City Metro’s official
microblog firstly has rich information resources, as is argued in
Section 4.1; it also displays awareness of user-generated
information by replying to comments and reposting messages.
The author suggests the official microblog should also pay
attention to the public’s opinion of social events and the way
people communicate on the microblog in order to learn the rules
of the microblog and values of the public/stakeholders.
The final sub-task of preparing crisis responses is to build a good
relationship with stakeholders. Two techniques are suggested by
the author in Section 3.2.1, namely to show willingness to
maintain the relationship and to communication with a human
voice. The Shanghai City Metro’s official microblog engages in
maintaining the relationship by involving the public in Metro
affairs. It also shows enthusiasm to those who need help. For
instance, a person lost the ID card on the train. The Metro
broadcasted this information on the microblog so that this person
could get the card back. Besides, the official microblog tries to
respond to the public’s suggestions on the management issues of
the Metro, which indicates the open attitudes of the Metro. The
254
human voice is about showing personal opinions on
organizational affairs [23, 34, 37]. One example of this is that the
official microblog forwarded the news that the ticket department
of Metro Company visited a rest home for the elderly. Along with
the “thumbs up” picture, the Metro made the comment that “to
love old people is to love ourselves”. Moreover, the official
microblog also displays Metro employees’ working lives along
with pictures and explanations. For instance, the official
microblog once forwarded a message with a picture of the dinner
of a train operator who also used a microblog. The author
understands that it is sensitive to express personal opinions on
certain organizational affairs. Thus, such less sensitive affairs can
be a good place for the official microblog to show the human
voice.
4.3 Crisis Event Stage
In the crisis event stage, the tasks are recognizing a crisis and
responding to the crisis. The rich information resources on the
microblog can help with recognizing the crisis. In this section, the
author only focuses on the strategies that the Shanghai City
Metro’s official microblog has used to cope with the crisis.
4.3.1 Crisis situation
Firstly, crisis communication strategies should cope with the
situation of the crisis; that is, the responsibility for the crisis and
the level of damage. There were two messages made on
September 28 that related to the responsibility for the collision.
One message explained the reason for the accident and admitted
that there were “relevant individuals” violating the “relevant
rules” which led to the collision; the other message indicated that
the “relevant department” and “relevant agency” had tested the
“relevant equipment” of the Metro, and punishment would be
applied to those responsible for the accident. The public’s
attitudes towards these two messages were varied. For instance,
the first message received 395 comments. There were 78
messages doubting the investigation result, among which 35
messages criticized the wording “relevant individuals” and
“relevant rules” for the vagueness. People also complained that
the message was too simplistic and gave no detailed information
or systematic analysis. To the second message, people still had
problems with the word “relevant”.
According to the crisis situation, the official microblog apologized
twice. The first apology was made during the crisis (at 20:18 on
September 27): “This is the worst day in the history of Shanghai
Metro. No matter what the reason is and who should take the
responsibility, we regret the loss and the hurt experienced by the
citizens and the passengers. We will help the injured and return to
normal option as soon as possible. We will also assist in the
investigation and accept the possible responsibility. We will learn
from the accident and do better in the future. Although the
apology is so powerless, we have to profoundly
apologize.”Another apologetic message was posted at 14:52 on
September 28, saying, “We appreciate all the criticisms…We will
work hard…We apologize again”. The former message received
9945 comments; while the latter received 112 comments. Some
comments concerned the reason of the crisis. One comment was:
“What we need is the reason and the responsibility for the
accident instead of apology…” There were also voices of support.
A microblogger commented, “I feel …this message expresses the
good attitude and the willingness to take responsibilities…”
Another comment said, “The communication is good. The Metro

is better than those government agencies that will never accept
their faults.”
The level of damage was also addressed. Four messages published
information about the number of injured and their situations in the
hospital. In a message posted at 17:43 on September 27, the
official microblog claimed that according to the information from
the hospital, 212 people were injured. It was also claimed that
most of the victims were slightly injured. The wording “slightly
injured” could be seen as fact information as well as a diminishing
strategy. However, the audience showed suspicion of the data. For
instance, one comment was: “How do you define the phrase
‘slightly injured’?” Moreover, there were more than one comment
indicating doubt about the number of injured persons. For instance,
one microblogger claimed that the number of injured reported by
Japanese TV (at 22:00 on September 27) was 271. However, the
official microblog failed to respond to these different voices.
Bolstering is also suggested by crisis communication theories [2,
5]. This aims at increasing positive feelings towards the
organization in order to reduce the offensiveness of the crisis [2].
The official microblog tried to show concern for the passengers
and the efforts they were making to mitigate the negative impact
of the collision. For instance, the official microblog reposted a
message (9:01 on September 28) with a picture of volunteers
helping passengers. The official microblog commented: “We
appreciate the citizen’s support. Watching the passengers living
the station, we feel very sorry. Now we will do our best to check
the route and return to normal option as soon as possible. Please
trust us.” This message showed concern for passengers who were
affected by the collision. It also showed people were helping each
other. This message received 210 comments. There were 17
comments indicating that what the public needs is the
investigation into the responsibility for the collision and the
reason of the accident, 10 comments concerning the future safety
of the Metro, 13 messages blaming the Metro for trying to turn the
bad event into a good one, and 8 comments blaming the Metro for
talking rather than doing. However, there were still 26 comments
supporting this post. One comment was: “The government does
not usually speak in such a tone. The Metro’s public
communication is praiseworthy. In my opinion, this crisis
communication is acceptable and even touching. ” Interestingly
enough, some of the microbloggers expressed their love of the
city and the volunteers other than the Metro. One comment was
“This is the spirit of Shanghai City (to help each other).” It seems
that the official microblog successfully related the accident to the
whole city.
4.3.2 Meet the public’s needs
The general public’s needs in the crisis event stage are the need
for the organization to make decisions and reduce the negative
emotions caused by uncertainties.
The official microblog posted 18 messages with alternative bus
transfer information. Pictures and tables were appropriately used
here in order to bypass the limitations of the length of the text
message. Moreover, the official microblog attempted to report the
current situation of the crisis, including how many people were
injured and the status of the train involved in the collision. Such
information contributed to reducing uncertainty about the crisis.
The reactions of the public were varied. Some were appreciative,
saying, “The reaction of the Metro is quick and efficient.”
However, there were still microbloggers showing their concerns
255
for the issues of who or what was responsible for the crisis. Other
citizens were worried about safety issues.
4.3.3 The social values
The messages posted during the crisis should meet the
requirements of social values. Some core values identified by
scholars are honesty, responsibility, openness, and humanism.
Many of the messages posted by the official microblog were with
pictures from the scene of the accident, which increased the
reliability of the Metro Company. What is more, the official
microblog also cited posts from other microbloggers. However,
the Metro failed to respond to the fact information that was
different from the information posted by the official microblog,
which hurt the trustworthiness of both the messages and the Metro.
Moreover, there was no clear statement regarding the
responsibility for the collision. We can see from the comments
that people were angry about the vague descriptions of the
responsible parties. However, the official microblog did express
the willingness to release information. Messages tagged “the latest
information” were used to release information about the crisis
situation.
For humanism, in their apology the Metro Company showed their
regrets. They used the words “we regret the loss and the hurt
experienced by the citizens and the passengers”. Besides, in one
message it was shown that volunteers, police, and bus drivers
were there to help passengers enthusiastically. In a message
saying, “Watching the passengers leaving the State, we feel so
sorry…”, the Metro showed concern to those who were involved
in the accident. However, the official microblog did not
particularly show sympathy for the injured.
4.3.4 The future view
The future view should stress the positive side, the future,
rebuilding, and correcting mistakes. The official microblog did
meet this requirement. In more than one message, the Metro use
the words “We will”. For instance, in the apology messages, “We
will learn from the accident…” and “We will work hard…” were
used. In some messages, the official microblog cited pictures of
people helping each other to remind the public of the positive side
of the accident. Although the messages received support, such as
“cheer up!” and “touching,” there were people who wished the
Metro would act instead of only speaking.
4.4 Post-crisis Stage
In the post-crisis stage the tasks are preparing for the next crisis,
namely learning from the crisis as well as evaluating the crisis
response strategy; checking the public’s impression; and checking
that the crisis is truly over.
First, the organization showed its intention to learn from the crisis,
at least in its apology. Moreover, the comments made by the
public during the time of the crisis can be a good resource for the
organization to evaluate its crisis communication strategies.
Secondly, there was evidence indicating that the official
microblog did try to follow the public’s comments and monitor
the public’s impression. The official microblog replied to one
citizen’s comment, “We appreciate all of the comments; even
some of the comments are criticisms”.
Finally, strategies such as apology, bolstering, and compensation
can all be used in the post-crisis stage due to the lack of full

information in the crisis event stage. In the apology message,
which appeared in the crisis event stage, there was no clear
statement of responsibility. This vagueness could be due to the
lack of information in the crisis event stage. However, at the postcrisis
stage, there was no further statement about the responsibility
for the accident. Instead, the official microblog posted one
message which expressed the future view. The message (18:48 on
September 29) received 52 comments. Other than support, the
major issues as seen by the public were still the reason and the
responsibility for the accident and the real actions taken by the
Metro.
5. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
In this paper, the author develops a general framework for a
government agency to develop crisis communication on the
microblog. Coomb’s three-stage model is used, and four issues
concerned by primary crisis communication theories are discussed.
The four issues are the crisis situation, stakeholders, the values,
and the future view. In each stage of a crisis, the crisis manager
should take into account both the tasks of each stage and the four
issues when designing crisis communication strategies.
The author also uses the Shanghai City Metro rear-collision as an
example to show how a government can use the framework to
communicate with the public on the microblog. The case enriches
the framework in the following aspects.
First, the primary concern of the public is the reason and the
responsibility for the crisis. The statement of responsibility should
not be vague and lacking in detail; otherwise, the public will be
unsatisfied and may even develop a negative impression of the
organization.
Secondly, the strategies aimed at lessening the perceived level of
damage should be based on facts. The organization should be able
to convince the public; otherwise, such strategy will only lead to
untrustworthiness. The microblog is interactive, which is an
advantage when dealing with third-party information. When
confronted by third-party information which is different from
official information, the organization should actively respond in
order to avoid the impression of being dishonest.
People would like to see the organization admit responsibility and
seek forgiveness. However, the apology as well as other strategies,
such as positive tone and human care, should be accompanied by
effective action taken by the organization.
6. LIMITATIONS AND FURTUER
RESEARCH
First, evidence indicating that at least two crisis-related messages
posted by the official microblog was deleted. Thus, there is no
way of knowing whether the messages were consistent with the
crisis communication strategy.
Secondly, the four theories employed in this paper are mostly
developed in business settings. Although scholars have applied
them to government agencies, a thorough comparison and contrast
of business and government settings will improve the
effectiveness of these theories.
Finally, in the paper, it was asserted that an organization should
learn from the public by listening to their opinions on the
microblog. A further study could be done on how a government
256
agency should collect and analyze the information on the
microblog to understand and learn from the public.
REFERENCES
[1] Avery, E. J., Lariscy, R.W., Kim, S., and Hocke, T. A
quantitative review of crisis communication research in
public relations from 1991 to 2009. Public Relations
Review,36, 2 (2010), 190-192.
[2] Benoit, W. L. Image repair discourse and crisis
communication. Public Relations Review, 23, 2 (1997), 177-
186.
[3] Claeys, A., and Cauberghe, V. Crisis response and crisis
timing strategies, two sides of the same coin. Public
Relations Review. 38, 1 (2012). 83-88.
[4] Coombs, W. T., and Holladay, S.J. Further explorations of
post-crisis communication: Effects of media and response
strategies on perceptions and intentions. Public Relations
Review, 35 (2009), 1-6.
[5] Coombs, W. T. Protecting organization reputations during a
crisis: The development and application of Situational Crisis
Communication Theory. Corporate Reputation Review, 10,
3(2007), 163-176.
[6] Coombs, W.T. Ongoing Crisis Communication. Sage,
Thousand Oaks, CA, 2006, 2-3.
[7] Ibid. 17-20.
[8] Ibid. 21-31
[9] Ibid. 41.
[10] Coombs, W. T., and Holladay, S. J. Helping crisis managers
protect reputational assets: Initial tests of the Situational
Crisis Communication Theory. Management Communication
Quarterly, 16 (2002), 165-186.
[11] Curtin, P. A., and Boynton, L. A. Ethics in public relations:
Theory and practice. In R. L. Health (Eds.), Handbook of
Public Relations, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2001, 411-421.
[12] Fearn-Banks, K. Crisis Communications: A Casebook
Approach. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ,
2002, 2.
[13] Fediuk, T. A., Pace, K. M., and Botero, I. C. Exploring crisis
from a receiver perspective: Understanding stakeholder
reactions during crisis events. In T. Coombs, and S. J.
Holladay (Eds.), The Handbook of Crisis Communication.
Wiley-Blackwell, New York, 2010, 635-656.
[14] Gonzalez-Herrero, A., and Pratt, C. B. How to manage a
crisis before – or whenever – it hits. Public Relation
Quarterly, 40, 1 (1995), 25-29.
[15] Health, R. L., and Millar, D. P. A rhetorical approach to
crisis communication: Management, communication
processes, and strategic responses. In Dan P. Millar, and
Robeert L. Health (Eds.). Responding to Crisis. Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates. Mahwah, NJ, 2004, 1-17.
[16] Hearit, K. M. Crisis Management by Apology. Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 2006, 15-17.
[17] Ibid, 68.

[18] Ibid, 64-66.
[19] Hemp, P. Death by information overload. Harvard Business
Review, (September 4 th 2009), Retrieved from
http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2009/09/death-byinformation-overload/ar/pr
[20] Jaeger, P. T., Shneiderman, B., Fleischmann, K. R., Preece,
J., Qu, Y., and Wu, P. F. Community response grids: Egovernment,
social networks, and effective emergency
management. Telecommunication Policies, 31 (2007), 592-
604.
[21] Jeong, S. Public’s Responses to an oil spill accident: A test
of the attribution theory and situational crisis communication
theory. Public Relations Review, 35 (2009) 307-309.
[22] Kaiser, C., Schlick, S., and Bodendorf, F. Warning system
for online market research – Identifying critical situations in
online opinion formation. Knowledge-Based Systems. 24
(2011), 824-836.
[23] Kelleher, T. Conversational voice, communicated
commitment, and public relations outcomes in interactive
online communication. Journal of Communication. 59 (2009),
172-188.
[24] Kelleher, T., and Miller, B. M. Organizational blogs and the
human voice: Relational strategies and relational outcomes.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11, 2 (2006),
395-414.
[25] Lovejoy, K, Waters, R. D., Saxton, G. D. Engaging
stakeholders through Twitter: How nonprofit organizations
are getting more out of 140 characters or less. Public
Relations Review, 38 (2012), 313-318.
[26] Maxwell, T. T. The public need to know: Emergencies,
government organizations, and public information policies.
Government Information Quarterly, 20 (2003), 233-258.
[27] Mitroff, I. I., Crisis management and environmentalism: A
natural fit. California Management Review, 36,8 (1994),
101-113.
[28] Moyihan, D. P. Learning under uncertainty: Networks in
crisis management. Public Administration Review, 68,2
(2008), 350-361.
[29] Muraliadharan, S. Dillistone, K., and Shin, J. The Gulf Coast
oil spill: Extending the theory of image restoration discourse
to the realm of social media and beyond petroleum. Public
Relations Review, 37, 2011, 226-232.
[30] Richardson, B. Socio-technical disasters: Profile and
prevalence. Disaster Prevention and Management, 3, 4
(1994),41-69.
[31] Schultz, F., Utz, S., and Goritz, A. Is the medium the
message? Perceptions of and reactions to crisis
257
communication via twitter, blogs and traditional media.
Public Relations Review, 37 (2011), 20-27.
[32] Seeger, M. W., Sellnow, T. L., and Ulmer, R. R.
Communication and Organizational Crisis. Praeger,
Westport, CT, 2003.
[33] Seeger, M. W., and Ulmer, R. R. A post-crisis discourse of
renewal: The cases of Malden Mills and Cole Hardwoods.
Journal of Applied Communication Research, 30, 2 (2002),
126-142.
[34] Smith, B. G. Socially distributing public relations: Twitter,
Haiti, and interactivity in social media. Public Relations
Review.36 (2010), 329-335.
[35] Stelzner, M. A. Social Media Marketing Industry Report,
2010, Retrieved from
http://marketingwhitepapers.s3.amazonaws.com/SocialMedia
MarketingReport2010.pdf
[36] Sturges, D. L. Communicating through crisis: A strategy for
organizational survival. Management Communication
Quarterly, 7 (1994), 297-316.
[37] Sweetser, K. D., and Metzgar, E. Communicating during
crisis: Use of blogs as a relationship management tool.
Public Relations Review, 33 (2007), 340-342.
[38] Ulmer, R. R., Sellnow, T. L., and Seeger, M. W. Effective
Crisis Communication. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2011, 16-
20.http://www.google.com/books?hl=zh-
CN&lr=&id=bC3J1C0BXQwC&oi=fnd&pg=PR1&dq=effec
tive+crisis+communication&ots=kxQvzSFyyt&sig=uAhAU
NczYbXa7ZuZdMpb1UlTgw#v=onepage&q=effective%20crisi
s%20communication&f=false
[39] Ulmer, R. R., Seeger, M. W., and Sellnow, T. L. Post-crisis
communication and renewal: Expanding the parameters of
post-crisis discourse. Public Relations Review, 33 (2007),
130-134.
[40] Ulmer, R. R., Sellnow, T. L., and Seeger, M. W. Effective
Crisis Communication. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2007,
170-174.
[41] Weiner, B. An attributional theory of achievement
motivation and emotion. Psychology Review, 92 (1985), 548-
573.
[42] XINHUANET. Ten Hours of Shanghai Metro Rear-end
Collision on Microblog, 2011, Retrieved
fromhttp://news.sina.com.cn/c/2011-09-
28/002423227102.shtml
[43] Yang, S., Kang, M., and Johnson, P. Effects of narratives,
openness to dialogic communication, and credibility on
engagement in crisis communication through organizational
blogs. Communication Research. 37, 4 (2010), 473-4

Government Official Microblogs: An Effective Platform for
Facilitating Inclusive Governance
Xinping Liu and Lei Zheng
Department of Public Administration, Fudan University
619 Wenke Building, 220 Handan Road, 2000433 Shanghai, China
ABSTRACT
Applications of social media could bring more convenience to the
government for getting public feedback, or more citizen
participation, in order to provide more inclusive public services.
Microblogs is one of those social media tools. Nowadays, all
governments have begun to use government official microblogs to
publish information, collect public opinions, and interact with the
public. Based on current literature review and analysis, this paper
first develops a theoretical framework on the effect that
microblogs brings to public inclusive governance from the
perspective of microblogs’ interaction object. Theoretically, this
research indicates that microblogs have a positive impact on
inclusive governance, but this effect remains to be tested by future
practice. There are still some problems in current public
interaction between governments and citizens through microblogs,
and the government needs to change their musty ideas and guide
the effective interaction actively. Finally, this paper further
discusses limitations of this research and directions of future
research.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.6.1 [Management of Computing Information Systems]: Project
and People Management-Management Techniques
General Terms
Management, Measurement, Performance
Keywords
Government Microblogs, Governance, Social Media, China
1. INTRODUCTION
The development of ICTs has brought public governance new
opportunities, as well as challenges. In the era of Web 2.0, a huge
number of web-based applications have emerged. These
applications rely on the concept of the user as a producer of
information, which provide more possibilities for better
governance [13], for example, government official microblogs.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
+86 13774260846, +86 13501838298
{081017039, zhengl}@fudan.edu.cn
258
Nowadays, countries around the world take seriously to apply
social media like microblogs, and high-level officials from US,
Britain, and Japan has been microblog users. Applications of
social media could bring some improvements aiming at providing
feedback to agencies, and more citizen participation. Also, agency
staff could use social media for improving formal cooperation
[13].
By the end of 2010, Chinese microblog accounts have exceeded
75 million. With its network effect taking shape, microblogs is
playing a more and more important role in Chinese social and
political life. The year of 2010 was named as “China’s first year
in microblog's era” by Chinese citizens. By taking advantage of
the rapidly growing microblog community, government could run
official microblogs to interact with citizens, enhance government
information services, keep tracking with public opinion, help with
emergency response, improve government credibility and further
promote the development of e-governance. Nowadays, many
Chinese governments and officials have opened official
microblogs to interact with citizens. Microblog, to some extent, is
becoming a more and more useful tool for the government.
However, compared to the traditional channels between
government and citizens, what are the new changes of
microblogs? What meaning does it bring to government
governance? These are the main research questions of this paper.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
As a new kind of social media and web2.0 tool, microblogs
attracted much academic attention in recent years. The current
studies are mainly focusing on the definition of microblog, its
characteristics and its implications on government governance,
especially on public participation.
2.1 Definition of Microblog
Microblog as one kind of social media has increasingly become an
effective way of information dissemination and personal
communications. Social media is “a group of Internet-based
applications that build on the ideological and technological
foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange
of User Generated Content” [4]. With the help of social media,
ordinary people have become producers of content as well as
consumers so called “prosumers”, being capable of publishing
their own contents on the Web. Microblog is one kind of social
media using web 2.0 technologies, which make people
communicate with each other without ant time and space
constraints once the Internet is available. The users send message
on these websites to interact with other people, and the maximum
length of one message should be less than 140 words.

When it comes to the characteristics of microblog, it is commonly
believed by the scholars that microblogs is a new kind of social
media and Web 2.0 tool, with the main features include
timeliness, simplicity, economy, grassroots, interactive, pluralism,
autonomy, the original ecology, fragmentation, group
polarization, and at the same time it could weaken the role of
opinion leaders. Zhao and Lai [15] also argued that microblogs
have 4A characteristics, including Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime,
Anything, that is, anyone can become the microblog
communicators and can transmit any information at any time and
any place.
2.2 Microblogging on Government Inclusive
Governance
With the development of international electronic public services,
new information technologies has contributed a lot on the
promotion of inclusive governance and improved the level of
public participation. Governments has been increasingly paid
more attention on providing diversified, personalized, ubiquitous,
and high-quality public services, which has clearly showing the
characteristics of e-inclusion" [5][6]. Also, in public participation
area, successful public participation depends on diversification,
inclusiveness and equality; and diversification means its
participants are able to represent the view of people from different
social fields, social hierarchy; inclusiveness refers to lowering the
threshold of e-participation; equality involves equal participation
[1]. Microblogs provide a useful platform to improve public
participation.
2.3 The Mechanism of Microblog’s Effects on
Public Inclusive Governance
As mentioned earlier, public participation requires people from
different social fields, social hierarchy to participate equally [1],
and microblogging reduce the threshold of public participation, so
people could participate in anytime and anywhere. Therefore,
microblogs expand the scope of public participation, and could
provide more feedback to citizens.
2.3.1 Different Types of Microblog’s Users: A Multi-
Perspective
Microblogs has significant differences from the traditional
government portal, blogs and other forums. Their users on these
websites overlap a lot, but still not the same. The characteristics of
different website applications involve different active citizens.
1) Personality. Previous research has proved that in the
increasingly user-generated Web, users’ personality traits
may be crucial factors leading them to engage in this
participatory media [3]. The former researches established
three personality traits that are central to social media use:
extraversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience
[3][10].
2) Age: Correa et al. [3] also found that it was particularly
important among the young adult and extraversion was the
most important predictor of social media use. Prensky
concludes that many digital immigrants confront each change
in technology as something new to be mastered. Generally,
young adult, the elderly who are open to new things and
digital technologies tend to be more active in microblogs and
other social media tools [8].
259
3) Gender: Gender presented another difference among
personality traits. While extraverted men and women were
both likely to be more frequent users of social media tools,
only the men with greater degrees of emotional instability
were more regular users. No significant relationship existed
between women and emotional stability [3].
4) Social ranking: the low threshold of microblogs and the
characteristics of the grass-roots has weakened the role of
opinion leaders which enables people from different social
class to participate in public governance, and promotes the
exchange of social heterogeneity groups [12], namely, people
from different social classes, departments, and other ethics.
5) Education Level: since microblog is easy to use, users could
come from different education levels. Technology is not a
barrier any longer, which could give the government more
kinds of public opinions.
6) Special Target Group: taking the disabled as an example,
Zhao & Qiu [14] examined the significance of social media
to disabled students, and argued that social media tools are
vital to the lives of teenagers today because microblogs
removes physical distances and can significantly expand the
living space of youth who otherwise are confined by their
disabilities. The Center for Technology in Government
(CTG) identified that social media like microblogs could
provide more service channels for the disabled [2].
7) Space-time dimensions: Microblogs has 4A characteristics,
that is, Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime, Anything [15], which
expand the scope and depth of interaction and participation
both vertically and horizontally.
In summary, microblogs has not only expanded the scope of
public participation, so that different personality traits, age, sex,
social class, education level could have equal interactions with the
governments, but also expanded the channels for participation.
Moreover, it vertically breaks the time limit of interaction and
weakens the barriers of geographic isolation to promote
participation any time at anywhere.
2.3.2 Governance in Microblog Era: Inclusive and
Targeted
Based on the literature review above, with the help of microblog
platform, government expands their service scope effectively, and
brings more G2C participation and interaction, which give great
impetus to inclusive governance. Due to the particularity of online
participation, more introverted people could participate more,
which could also strengthen the interactive effects of other active
users. Those digital immigrants like the elderly who are open to
new things and digital technologies, and the digital natives, that is,
young people, and can participate public affairs online, while they
have limited channel to participate before. So microblogs can
make up the general public participation. From the social level,
citizens from varied levels can participate equally, and this could
impel the government to promote public decision-making more
democratization and deliver more equal public services
effectively. Microblogs also enables those vulnerable groups to
participate in the process of governance. From the space-time
dimension, it brings more possibilities for the government to
provide cross-regional (or even cross-border) services
ubiquitously, and extends depth of inclusive governance.

It is worth mentioning that, while expanding the breadth of
interactive citizens, microblogs could also strengthen the
interaction more targeted. Interactive citizens could have a
significant difference depend on different government
departments or various events. For example, from gender
perspective, women may mostly participate in microblogs for
expressing their views, or expanding their social networks and
social activities, while men may be for strengthening their
relationship with others, learning about current political events.
Therefore, education, tourism, food and other related government
departments may be more favored by women, while
transportation, defense, and public security will be paid more
attention by men.
3. METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCH
PLAN
This research will take an analysis on secondary data, including
research reports, thesis and research papers. In order to ensure the
impartiality of the findings, the reports selected in this article are
not only from universities or other research institutes, but also
those from enterprises and social organizations.
There are many microblog platforms, like Sina, Sohu, Tencent,
and so on. It could be a great challenge to discuss all the
government official microblogs. Therefore, this paper simplifies
the data collection and chooses Sina as an example. According to
the DCCI survey in 2010, Sina is the most preferred microblog
platform, which has the highest number of users or potential users,
with the selection rate 69.7%. So I believe the status quo on Sina
could reflect the reality of microblogs in China.
4. ANALYSES ON STATUS QUO OF
GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL
MICROBLOGS
In theory, microblog brings opportunities to the governments for
inclusive and targeted governance by expanding the range of
public participation. However, due to the development of China's
microblog is not mature enough, so evaluation and discussion on
the current status quo can provide recommendations for the
development of the governmental official microblogs.
4.1 The Existing Government Official
Microblogs and its Populations of
Concern
1) Governmental institutions start opening microblogs: according
to “2011 China Administrative microblog research report”
(conducting by “Public Opinion and Communication Research
Laboratory”, Fudan University), till March 20, 2011, 1708
governmental agencies have opened real-name authentication
microblogs, and the distribution of the government's official
microblogs are not balanced either geographically or
institutionally, including governmental level, institutional, and
sectoral distribution [9]. The report further found that most
Shanghai government officials registered there microblogs on the
Xinmin Net (http://t.xinmin.cn), with the proportion up to total
more than 84 percent, followed by Eastday (http://t.eastday.com/),
which accounts for 15 percent account, while only 1 percent of
them has registered on Sina or other microblog platforms. This
situation is worthy of consideration, microblog is the interactive
platform of government and the public, while most citizens are
260
mainly active on the website of Sina or other open microblog
platform, how to promote the interaction between governments
and the public if governments open their microblogs on other
website like Xinmin or Eastday.
2) The analysis of “Concern” subject of government official
microblogs: for governments, microblogs is not only a platform
for issuing information, but also to collect public opinions.
According to a cursory analysis of governmental official
microblogs “concerns”, different governments have various kinds
of “concerns”. Most government microblogs has few “concerns”,
and even many government official microblogs concerned no
more than ten other microblogs. Those “concerns” are mainly
from the mass media, government agencies or departments of the
same level, other government agencies, government branches at
lower levels which have business contact, government officials,
corporate high level executives, academics and other citizens.
Government official microblogs pay more attention to the mass
media, government agencies (all levels), and government officials,
while less on citizens’. Microblogs provide a more convenient and
efficient platform for the government to collect public opinions,
but its active attention to the practical needs of ordinary citizens is
still relatively lack.
4.2 The Main Characteristics of Sina
Microblog Users
Currently, many scholars have conducted lots of analyses on the
characteristics of the user of the microblogs multi-dimensionally.
On the segmentation of individual users, taking "behavioral
loyalty" and "emotional loyalty" as two standards, Zheng [16]
divided all the Sina individual users into three types, mild,
moderate, and extreme, and she further analyzed the user
difference in terms of gender, age, education, and income. Report
from Beijing Online Media Association analyzed the
characteristics of the early users of the microblogs, and find out
that the microblog users can be divided into four categories,
namely, self-expression type (46%), socially active (16%), discuss
and participatory (16%) and diving-prefer type (21%).
Specifically, microblogs has opened up the possibility of
expanding interactive citizens or organizations, which could
enhance inclusive governance. According to Sina’s White Paper
on Chinese First-year microblog, among all the active users of
Sina microblog, women occupy 65 percent, while men accounting
for 35% [11].
On the dimension of age, users from different ages use microblog
on different purpose. Mainly of them are 20-30 years old, with
main purposes to maintain contact with their friends, or to record
their feelings, and to learn the social hot issues, while people from
30 to 40 years old is more focus on learn the social issues and
expanding the circle of friends; however, users over the age of 40
pay more attention to understand the social hot issues, expressing
their opinions, and expand their network; on the contrary, users
under the age of 20 is more emphasis on recreation and leisure,
recording their feelings, and making new friends [7]. Studies have
shown that the younger age groups from 18-30 years old has a
greater level of participation on microblogs, accounting up to
67%, which means microblog users tend to be younger [16].
From the view of income, occupation and education, data from
Beijing Online Media Association shows that more than 63%
microblog users has got a bachelor degree at least. Moreover,
there is no significant income difference between microblog users

and non-microblog users. The number of microblog users with
income of more than 5000 RMB per month is a little bit higher
than those of non-microblog users, by 3 percent. Zheng [16]
argued that current Sina microblog extreme users have lower
education level and relatively low income.
5. CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS
The most important reason for government to use social media is
to move closer to the users, in other words, “go where the mass
go” [8]. Given the breadth of microblog users, government could
achieve a more effective interaction and communication with the
public by opening official microblogs. Theoretically, this research
indicates that microblogs have a positive impact on inclusive
governance, but this effect remains to be tested by future practice.
It could expand the channels for vulnerable groups to participate
more in public affairs, and it breaks the time and space isolation,
and enables ubiquitous participation. With the help of microblog
platform, government expands their service scope effectively, and
brings more G2C participation and interaction, which give great
impetus to inclusive governance. Upon the participation of
different groups, government could conduct more targeted
governance.
Overall, microblog makes interaction between governments and
citizens more easily accessed in terms of geography, time, gender,
age, occupation, income, and education. The assessment results
are consistent with the theoretical framework, but still need
further discussion and verification. Government concerns on
microblogs are still in a narrow range, and they needs to pay more
attention on ordinary people. Although governments conduct
more interaction on government official microblogs, the degree of
participation still needs to be improved. Theoretically speaking,
one can access to the Internet with a mobile phone, but microblog
is still a new thing. The current use of it is still very limited, and it
will take more time to develop microblogs and to promote its
implications in public governance.
According to DCCI's estimates, the annual growth rate of the
various microblog accounts will be 140%-200% in the following
three years, and the outbreak year of growth will appear in the
years 2012, 2013 [11]. Government should pay close attention on
the implications of microblogs continuously. Meanwhile,
microblog is a grassroots media with no information
“gatekeeper”, so government also needs to correct and clarify
information timely.
The limitations of this study are very obvious. Since the practical
development of microblogs in China is still in its infancy stage,
the discussions in this study are only a theoretical analysis. There
are many other problems which need to be further solved, such as
who are relatively active on what on microblogs, the public are
concerning about what kind of topics, viewpoints on what kind of
topics can be collected through the microblogs, what are the
differences between microblog users and users of traditional
media. The discussion on the status quo is mainly based on the
assessment of current report, and lack of further empirical data
validation. All these problems provide direction on further
expanding and sublimation of this study.
261
6. REFERENCES
[1] Brasier, K.J. Planning for citizen engagement. USGSA,
Engaging Citizens in Government. Fall 2009, Retrieved
October11, 2009
[2] Center for Technology in Government. Exploratory Social
Media Project: Phase I: Identifying benefits and concerns
surrounding use of social media in government, 2010.
[3] Correa, T., Hinsley, A. W., and Zúñiga, H. G. Who interacts
on the Web? The intersection of users’ personality and social
media use. Computers in Human Behavior, 26 (2010): 247-
253.
[4] Kaplan, A., and Haenlein, M. Users of the world, unite! The
challenges and opportunities of social media. Business
Horizons, 2010, 53(1), 59–68.
[5] Liu, X. The trends of EU e-government development.
Chinese e-government E-government Blue Book (2010) ,
Wang Changsheng Xu Xiaoping (ed.) , Social Sciences
Documentation Publishing House, 2010.
[6] Liu,X., and Zheng, L. New trend of international egovernment:
the inclusive public services. E-government
Journal, 2010(12).
[7] Ma, X. The value and development of China 's microblogs.
Master's thesis from Nanchang University. December 2010.
[8] Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On
the Horizon, 9(5), 1–6.
[9] Ren, Y. The status quo Research on Chinese government's
official microblogs. Undergraduate dissertation from Fudan
University. June 2011.
[10] Ross, C., Orr, E.S., Sisic, M., and Arseneault, J.M. M.G.
Simmering, & R.R. Orr. Personality and motivations
associated with Facebook use. Computers in Human
Behavior, 2009, 25(2), 578–586.
[11] Sina. Sina’s White Paper on Chinese First-year microblog,
September 2010.
[12] Tang, L., and Liu, H. Understanding Group Structures and
Properties in Social Media. Yu, et al.(eds.), Link Mining:
Models, Algorithms, and Applications. 2010.
[13] Traunmüller, R. Web 2.0 Creates a New Government. K.N.
Andersen et al. (Eds.): EGOVIS 2010, pp. 77–83, 2010.
[14] Zhao, Y., and Qiu, W. The Potential of Social Media for
Students with Disabilities. Gray, T., and Silver-Pacuilla, H.
(eds.), Breakthrough Teaching and Learning: 2011: 71-86.
[15] Zhao, Z., and Lai, X. Analysis of the implications of
microblogs on the dissemination of news and information:
based on Twitter.com, Socialist Theory Guide, 2010 (4): 93 -
95.
[16] Zheng, Y. The development of Sina microblog. Master's
thesis from Beijing Jiaotong University. June 2010.
[17] Zhou, C. Microblog: the implications of new network
platforms on government affairs. E-commerce Journal, 2010
(10): 39- 40.

Managing Chinese Government Microblogs:
Enablers and Barriers
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the enablers and barriers for the effectiveness
of Chinese government microblogs with regard to government
information disclosure, public service and citizen participation,
and then builds a theoretical framework.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.4.2 [Information Systems Applications]: Type of systems – egovernment
applications
General Terms
Management, Human Factors, Theory
Keywords
Social Media, Government, China, Enablers and Barriers
1. INTRODUCTION
Since 2010, a great number of government microblogs accounts
have been opened and run by Chinese government agencies to
foster government information disclosure, public service and
citizen participation. According to the Chinese Government
Microblogs Assessment Report of 2011, the total number of
Chinese government microblog accounts have exceeded 50
thousand by the end of 2011 [1]. This paper examines the enablers
and barriers for the management of Chinese government
microblogs with an empirical study, and attempts to identify the
social, economic, political, organizational and technological
factors that could influence the effectiveness of government
microblogs. It also explores the relationship among these factors
and builds a theoretical framework. Based on the findings of the
study, the paper also makes some recommendations to Chinese
government agencies in order to improve the effectiveness of
government microblogs.
As part of a research project on government microblogging in
China [2], this paper conducts an empirical study on the factors
influencing the effectiveness of Chinese government microblogs,
and explores the interrelationship among these enablers and
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Lei Zheng
Fudan University
NO.220,Handan Road, Shanghai, China
+86-21-55665676, 200433
zhengl@fudan.edu.cn
262
barriers. This study employs two methods for data collection. One
is focus groups carried out from April through June, 2011, with 78
civil servants from Shanghai Municipal Government agencies and
county governments, using brainstorming method to collect
various viewpoints. The other is in-depth interviews conducted
from July through October, 2011, using semi-structured
questionnaires with managers of nine popular and influential
government microblogs in Shanghai, as well as managers who are
responsible for government customers, in the two major
microblogs operating companies in China. The author records and
transcribes the data collected, and analyzed the data with
qualitative approach under the guidance of grounded theory by
using Atlas.ti software. The research findings are as follows.
2. FINDINGS
2.1 External Enablers for Government
Microblogs
2.1.1 Growth in the Living Standards
In recent years, Chinese people’s living standards have been
greatly improved. The ownership rates of home computers and
mobile phones are rising continuously, so is the rapid growth in
microblog users. As interviewees mentioned, the increasing
income of citizens has provided a basic foundation for the
development and pervasiveness of microblogs.
2.1.2 Rising Citizen Participation
The rising intention of Chinese citizens to participate in public
affairs in China has created favorable conditions for the
development and management of government microblogs.
Microblogs have gained wide public attention as a new tool of
communication and interaction. Citizens use this platform actively
to read news, express their opinions and participate in public
affairs, which also propel government departments to open
institutional microblogs to interact with the public. Therefore,
some interviewees believe that it is the high time for government
to operate microblogs.
2.1.3 Policy Support
Some civil servants pointed out that the existing national policy
environment is also favorable for Chinese government to run
microlbogs. In recent years, the government attaches importance
to build a service-oriented government and harmonious society,
and to achieve social management innovation. The central
government introduces corresponding policies and regulations to
promote government information disclosure. Overall, this policy
environment promotes the disclosure of government information
and citizens’ interaction with government.

2.1.4 Technological Maturity of Microblogs
The microblog applications and platforms continue to mature,
which guarantees the sustainable operation of government
microblogs. Some interviewees pointed out that microblog
platforms such as Sina and Tencent are easy to operate, stable in
technology, and mature in functionality with friendly user
experience. Therefore, the technological risks for the government
to run microblogs have been minimized.
2.1.5 International Influence
In recent years, employing social media by government has
become a global trend and has created huge impacts. In many
countries, government agencies and senior officials use social
media for political elections and political communication. Some
interviewees in this research believed that this international trend
has also influenced China to some extent, and propelled Chinese
government agencies to run microblogs to interact with the public.
2.2 Internal Enablers for Government
Microblogs
2.2.1 Leadership Attention and Supports
The rapid development of microblogs has gained great attention
from many government leaders. Some government microblog
accounts were opened at their direct requests. One interviewee
mentioned, “The leaders in our bureau placed serious emphasis on
government microblogs. The project was fully funded and staffed,
while trainings and working sessions were held regularly. Leaders
in various offices and institutions opened their own personal
microblogs to interact with our institutional microblog.”
2.2.2 Abundant Information Resources in Government
At present, government possesses a wealth of information
resources to support the operations of government microblogs. As
many civil servants mentioned, government is now the largest
reservoir of authoritative, reliable and timely information in
society, with strong potential to disseminate information, deliver
targeted information services, and respond promptly to the public
response.
2.2.3 Advantages in Human Resources
Some civil servants pointed out that the government had
considerable advantages in human resources, which could
contribute to the operation of government microblogs. The
advantages are generally twofold. One is the human resources
within the government. “China has a large number of civil
servants”, an interviewee pointed out, “many of them are young
and mastered with network technologies. They are potential
microblog managers.” The other is the human resources outside
the government. “Government can also use external human
resources, such as experts, scholars and overseas returnees. These
people could be invited as trainers and researchers to enhance the
operational capability of government microblog managers.”
2.2.4 Secured Funding
The daily operation and management of microblogs require a
certain amount of financial investment to cover personnel costs,
training costs, equipment costs and communication costs. Many
civil servants said, as long as the leadership paid attention to
government microblogs indeed, funds would not be a big problem.
Moreover, government microblogs are usually running on existing
microblog platforms maintained by private companies. Given that
ICT infrastructure had been considerably invested in many
263
government agencies, there wouldn’t be large additional
equipment investment to run government microblogs.
2.2.5 Adequate ICT infrastructure in Government
Interviewees indicated that after years of e-government
development, most government agencies has now possessed
adequate ICT infrastructure, equipped with computers, servers,
networks and other hardware facilities and software applications.
The government's information security capabilities have also been
greatly improved in recent years, and all these have provided a
strong guarantee for the government to run microblogs effectively
and safely.
2.3 External Barriers for Chinese
Government Microblogs
2.3.1 Hackers and “Water Army”
The ecological complexity of Internet society barricades the
development of government microblogs. There are both angels
and devils on the Internet. Some interviewees pointed out that
hackers were hard to defend on the Internet. Government
microblogs are especially threatened by hacking. Once the
accounts were broken through, the negative impact would be very
serious. A microblog manager stated: "Although Sina and Tencent
claimed that they would ensure the security of government
microblogs, these accounts are still at the risk of malicious
intrusion. The account security is difficult to be guaranteed.
Recently, one government microblog in Dalian City has just
suffered a hacker attack.”
“Internet water army”, a group of Internet also composes a
challenge. The “army” refers to ghostwriters who are paid to post
online comments with particular commercial or political
intentions. These comments could manipulate, mislead and cover
up public opinions for the benefits of special interest group, and
make it hard for government to tell the true opinions of citizens
and interact with citizens.
2.3.2 Low trust in government and disinterests
In addition, citizens’ low trust in government and disinterests to
politics also exist on the Internet. Some interviewees
acknowledged that citizens’ trust in government declines in recent
years, and the government was facing a huge challenge. As for the
posts published on government microblogs, “the public would
hold a skeptical attitude. Thus government microblogs would not
only have difficulties to play their roles, but also become the
public laughingstock in some occasions, which couldn’t worth the
candle.”
Due to either low interests in public participation or suspicion of
the government’s intention, some citizens don’t have much
interest in interacting with government microblogs. Some people
believe that government microblogs were opened up just for a
“show”.
2.3.3 Lack of Regulations
Meanwhile, the ambiguity and absence of Internet regulations and
policies also affect the performance of government microblogs.
One interviewee pointed out: "The low threshold of posting
information on microblogs and the inadequate review process
make it hard to authenticate the information on microblogs. And
there may be some ‘Internet Water Army’. Thus, the effectiveness
of the government microblogs would be undermined. “Another
civil servant mentioned: “At present, speech on the Internet is
relatively free in China. Without a sound regulatory mechanism,

due to their tremendous influence, government microblogs may
become the target of malicious attacks.”
2.3.4 Digital Divide
Some interviewees worried that the users of microblogs were
mostly young people in middle class, while the elderly and poor
could rarely use microblogs, not even use computers. This
situation is unlikely to change in short term. After the opening up
of government microblogs, non-users of micorblogs would be
further marginalized and their interests might be ignored, which
would exacerbate the digital divide.
2.3.5 Fast Technological Upgrading and Substitution
Some civil servants also doubted about the sustainability of
microblogs and worried that they wouldn’t be popular for long
due to the rapid IT advancement and upgrading. “Government
websites, mayor’s mailboxs and the official blogs which were
once hot for a time perhaps could be the lesson for government
microblogs.” “What if microblogs have been abandoned by
Internet users after the government had put a lot of manpower and
material resources on microblogs? Wouldn’t it be worthless?”
As the future of government microblogs still lies in uncertainties,
consequently, microblog management has not yet become a
routine work in government agencies with designated and fixed
posts. Some civil servants worried that if they were assigned to a
full-time job on microblog management, once their superiors shift
their attention on government microblogs, their positions will be
removed. One microblog manager gave a vivid description: “No
one wants to work full-time on the microblog, because no one
wants to ‘die’ on it”.
2.3.6 Technological Risks
Some civil servants also worried that, as a new phenomenon,
microblog was not yet mature, and some risks were still unknown.
For example, some interviewees said that “government
microblogs were operated on external platforms, and the
platform’s operation faults may lead to system errors and even
crashes, resulting in unexpected consequences.”
2.4 The Internal Barriers for Chinese
Government Microblogs
2.4.1 Lack of Institutions and Guidelines
Because microblogs are new tools for government, some
interviewees indicate that the government still lacks adequate
institutions for the operation of government microblogs. In
addition, in lack of effective and specific guidelines, microblog
managers are confused with conflicting issues and hesitate to take
measures. As results, the effectiveness of government microblogs
is seriously affected.
With regard to which department within the government should be
responsible leading and managing government microblogs, there
are no existing policies or regulations to follow in most
government agencies. Nowadays, most leading departments of
government microblogs are in the charge of Party Committees or
publicity departments, and specific management teams and
coordination teams for microblogs are quite different. In most
occasions, government microblogs are operated by either the
Internet Management and Publicity office, or General
Administrative Office, or the Communist Youth League, or
related functional departments. Both advantages and
disadvantages are found with these different arrangements.
264
Besides, the interviews discovers that Chinese government
agencies now mainly adopts two forms—part time jobs and shifts
—to assign staff to the daily operation and management of
government microblogs. The size of the operating teams ranges
from one person to as many as ten members, and few departments
introduce full-time posts for the management of government
microblogs. A microblog operator mentioned, “We do our job in
shifts. From Monday to Friday, the one who has spare time can
post service tips or something at his or her convenience.” And due
to the special nature of microblogs, the peak time of usage are the
30 minutes before work in the morning, the lunch break and the
evening session, while most civil servants work from nine to five,
some of the microblog managers have to work overtime.
Owing to the feeling of uncertainty towards government
microblogs, some civil servants worried that once they worked on
government micorblogs full time, their original jobs would be
affected. Therefore, workers in some departments take shifts for
the daily operation of microblogs. The shift lasts from three
months to six months. The shift is temporary for a specific
operator so that their original post won’t be influenced, and the
operatoe on the shift is not required to work on other tasks until
the shift is over. With this arrangement, the experience that a
certain government microblog operator accumulated during his or
her shift would hardly pass on to his or her successors. With their
varied personal styles of different operators, the management
stability of government microblogs is also jeopardized.
2.4.2 Low Attention from Leadership
Some government microblog managers mentioned that although
their leaders requested them to open and run government
microblogs, they didn’t pay attention to them fundamentally. That
is to say, they just stress the importance orally, but do not provide
matching personnel, financial and material resources. Some
leaders did nothing more than coping with a task assigned by
leaders in higher levels. In addition, the attention of the leadership
frequently shifts, which would also affect the stable and
sustainable operation of government microblogs.
In particular, many civil servants pointed out that under the
existing Chinese administrative system, the attention and support
of superior leadership is extremely important to the development
of government microblogs, and is the key to success. “The reason
why some government microblogs are abandoned was that they
didn’t earn full attention and support from the leadership.”
Therefore, a lot of microblogs have become an object of “display”
of the government, a microblog manager mentioned, "Currently,
what concerns us most is the support of higher authorities."
2.4.3 Lack of Resources
Many government departments reported that in spite of the
increasing tasks and workload of government microblogs, the
necessary funds and resources still fell behind. As mentioned
above, a good support of human, financial and material resources
mainly depended on the attention earned from the leadership. At
present, most government microblogs have no specifically
allocated funds. The facility investment, daily operation expenses,
communication costs, training fees, and personnel expenses (work
allowances and bonuses) are not secured financially. Some
departments stated clearly: “Our human and material resources are
limited. We lack funds, equipment and professional supports.”
Without secured specially allocated funds, the expenditures on
government microblogs in many departments were mainly

appropriated from the budget for general administrations or other
purposes. A government microblog manager illustrated: “The
Bureau of Finance said that they haven’t listed this item in their
budget in advance, so they could not allocate any fund for us.
Therefore, this year we used the overhead cost, which is from the
General Administrative Office’s expenditures.” “Other costs such
as training and activities are not funded at all. Even our own
finance staff wouldn’t approve them, not to mention the Bureau of
Finance. ”
2.4.4 Conservative and Closed Organizational
Culture
The study finds out that many government agencies shows
apprehension towards external barriers and attacks. The
government microblog managers worried that when the Internet
users and opinion leaders questioned the contents on government
microblogs, the government's authority would be directly
challenged. “Government microblogs might be taken advantage of
by interest groups, resulting in social discord. They may also give
a vent for disadvantaged groups to show their angers and be
threatened by malicious comments, which would pose negative
impacts on the image of government.”
Besides, the current messages and posts in government
microblogs are too official, formal and rigid, and present
themselves as government “bulletin boards”. “In the long run,
government microblogs would inevitably lose their attractiveness
and vitality, and ultimately become useless things.” a civil servant
noted, “The current ‘leader first’ culture prevails within the
government, forming an arrogant attitude of government on the
Internet as well. It would inevitably intensify the tension between
the government and the public, which would worsen the
communication between them.”
2.4.5 Bureaucratic Review Process
As a novelty, government microblog is however restrained by the
traditional bureaucratic review process currently. In fear of
making mistakes when posting information and interacting with
citizens, some government microblogs still adopt traditional
review process and thereby reduce the speed and effectiveness of
response. A government microblog manager pointed out: “the
review process is also where the contradiction lies. If we response
every microblog in accordance with the full-process review,
timeliness will be hurt. With this process, we then could only take
official and diplomatic phases to answer them.”
Moreover, the leadership often lacks a thorough understanding of
the features of microblogs and the way of managing them. Some
leaders still adopts old ways to superintend government
microblogs, and some of them are even blind commanders. Under
their improper leadership, some microblog managers are very
confused and frustrated. A government microblog manager
mentioned “The leader who is responsible for government
microblogs doesn’t have a good knowledge of them. He views
operating microblogs as the same way as publishing a newspaper,
and holds editing assemblies every morning and night.”
2.4.6 Inadequate Personnel Capabilities
Since managing government microblog is a fresh new task for
agencies, many managers still lack management experiences and
capabilities. For an instance, some civil servants worried about
answering questions in specialized field raise by the public. “If
you respond with insufficient or inaccurate information, you could
265
not satisfy the public needs; if you put aside questions, people
would feel ignored. So it is quite a dilemma.”
Therefore, many government microblog managers reflected their
urgent need to receive professional trainings, particularly in the
skills of attracting attentions and response in emergencies. “If you
want to attract public attention, professional media packaging or
trainings are very much needed to improve our management
capabilities.” “I hope there are regular trainings, and show us how
to deal with unexpected things. In addition, when a government
microblog is just opened, it is actually our own staff who initiates
the participation in the microblog. Therefore, these people must
also be trained in dealing with complex situations.”
Many government microblog managers also mentioned that the
original workload for some civil servants was already very heavy.
In microblog management, they felt hard to balance their new task
with the old one. They were unable to response quickly or manage
government microblogs at any time. A government microblog
manager pointed out clearly: “there are only six people in our
office. In order to take care of all the tasks, we could only take
turns to work part-time on microblogs. Gradually we feel
exhausted.”
2.4.7 Lack of Cross-boundary Collaborations
The study has found that most government microblogs are
unlinked with each other, without information sharing or
operational collaborations. Especially in dealing with
emergencies, there are no joint efforts among institutions and
individuals to enhance information dissemination and interaction.
A microblog manager from the railway station cited an example:
“our services are information-based. The source of information is
rather important, but very often in emergencies the information
from other transport units is way beyond our grasp. The customers
were very confused and failed to receive information from our
service counters. The truth is that we didn’t know the information
they asked either, because we didn’t have any sources of
information. Talking about this accident on high-speed railways,
we didn’t receive any notifications from the dispatch center and
other transportation partners. Actually, we knew about this
accident by searching content by ourselves through other
microblogs. Without any information provided by our partners in
transportation, it is not surprising that we couldn’t serve the
passengers well. All complaints are pointed to the front desk,
because we are the service terminal. However, we have no
partnership with other units.”
2.4.8 Information Confidentiality
The government has considerations for security and
confidentiality towards the information published by microblogs.
Some microblog managers worried that “Once the government's
confidential information was revealed on the Internet, the situation
would be difficult to restore”. This would make the government
hesitate to publish information on microblogs.
2.4.9 Information Accuracy
Besides, some interviewees also worried that the limitation of 140
characters for each message may result in information inaccuracy
and ambiguity. “Different people have different interpretations of
the contents, which would affect the accuracy and authority of the
information published by government microblogs.”

3. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This research is funded by the Shanghai Pujiang Plan and the
Education Innovation Project by Education Committee, Shanghai
Municipal Government.
4. REFERENCES
[1] China National Academy of Governance (2011). Assessment
Report on Chinese Government Microblogging.
[2] Zheng, L., et al (2011). Studying the Management
Mechanism of Government Microblogs in China: A Research
Plan. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on
Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, ACM Press.
266

Study on Social Media Applications by Government in
Hong Kong
ABSTRACT
In the Web2.0 Era, social media is playing a more and more
important role in government affairs. This paper conducts a
research based on 44 accounts opened by Hong Kong government
on five social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, SinaMicroblog and Blog. The authors identify fourteen
observation contents of those accounts in order to give a general
picture of the current situation of Hong Kong government social
media application. Finally, give some suggestions to mainland
China social media application practice.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.6.1 [Project and People Management]: Management
Techniques
General Terms
Management, Measurement, Performance
Keywords
Hong Kong, Government, Social Media, Application
1. INTRODUCTION
Chinese government agencies and officials have set up microblog
accounts since 2008 and are facing many challenges. Even though
western countries start early in government social media
application, it’s hard to copy their experience due to China’s
unique national contextual. Hong Kong Special Administrative
Region, on one hand, shares the same language and culture origin
with Mainland China. On the other hand, it started social media
application in government earlier. Its experience will have a great
reference value to Mainland China. Through observing 44 social
media accounts of Hong Kong government agencies and officials,
this essay studies the current situation of social media application
by Hong Kong government and gives suggestions for the future
social media practice of mainland government.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
Many scholars have contributed a lot in the field of government
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
Huina Xu and Qian Chen
Department of Public Administration
Fudan University
220 Handan Road
200433, Shanghai, China
{11210170057, 10210170073}@fudan.edu.cn
267
using social media tools in recent days. David Landsbergen (2010)
studies the use of social media by several departments within the
city of Columbus, USA and discusses how social media provide
the government a way to do things in way that government
haven’t done before[1]. Enrique Bonson et al. (2012) find out that
most EU local governments are using social media tools to
enhance transparency[2]. Sergio Picazo-Vela et al. (2012) present
the perceptions of risks, benefits and strategic guidelines about
social media application in Central Mexico[3]. John Carlo Bertot
et al. (2012) indicate how governments promote transparency and
accountability through ICTs, social media, and collaborative egovernment[4].
Chinese scholars also have done some researches
on government using social media. The 2011 China government
microblog research report generally introduced the current
situation of government moicroblogs development in China[5].
Yan Su (2011) introduces several examples of the internet and
social media communication by Hong Kong government[6].
Since Chinese government social media application is now facing
many challenges, this study aims to analyze the current situation
of Hong Kong social media application and give some
suggestions to Mainland China.
3. RESEARCH METHOD
On the basis of non-participant observation and secondary data
analysis, this article studies the current situation of Hong Kong
government social media application from the public management
perspective. This study conducts both quantitative and qualitative
analysis by observing fourteen contents of Hong Kong
government social media accounts. This study selects the research
objects by applying the data provided on Hong Kong Government
portal (www.gov.hk) which has set "social media links" that lists
Hong Kong government agency and official social media
accounts. According to the data updated on the website in April
2011, a total of 44 social media accounts have been opened by 14
Hong Kong government officials and 16 government agencies on
five social media platforms including Blog, Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube and SinaMicroblog. In reference to western countries’
social media application handbooks while considered the actual
situation in Hong Kong, this study identifies the following
fourteen observation contents.
1) Account owner: to distinguish whether the social media
account is owned by government official or government
agency;
2) Social media types: to specify which social media platform
the account belongs to: Blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or
SinaMicroblog;

3) Established year: to specify the established year of the social
media account;
4) Account introduction: to find out whether the social media
account identifies itself as government agency or official
clearly;
5) Account images/photos: whether the Hong Kong government
social media account has its own account image or photo;
6) Amount of followers: refers to the amount of followers who
subscribe the government social media accounts;
7) Amount of followings: refers to the amount of social media
accounts that government social media accounts have
subscribed;
8) Type of followings: refers to the type of accounts that Hong
Kong government agencies and officials subscribe;
9) Amount of posts: refers to the amount of posts that released
from the established date till April 20, 2011;
10) Posting frequency: refers to how often Hong Kong
government agency and official accounts post one piece of
information;
11) Content of posts: such as work-related information,
entertainment information, personal views, etc.;
12) Posting forms: to find out whether government agency and
official accounts use pictures, video or other forms in posting;
13) Language: refers to the type of language used in posting,
including English, traditional Chinese and simplified
Chinese;
14) Interaction: to find out whether there is interaction between
government social media account owners and netizens.
4. RESEARCH FINDINGS
4.1 Account Owners, Social Media Types and
Amounts
The figure 1 shows that the most widely used government social
media types are Facebook and YouTube. The data also shows that
Hong Kong government agencies and officials have different
preference on social media types. Government agencies prefer
opening accounts on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, while
government officials prefer Facebook and Blog.
Figure 1. The number of Hong Kong government agency and
official accounts on different social media platforms.
The Figure 2 shows that nine out of thirty HK government
agencies and officials have opened more than two social media
accounts, among which seven are government agencies.
Government agencies, compared with government officials, seem
to open two even more social media accounts.
268
Figure 2. Number of social media accounts each Hong Kong
government agency and official opens.
4.2 Established Year and Newly-Opened
Social Media Accounts by Year
Figure 3 shows that Hong Kong government has opened social
media accounts as early as in 2006 (Since the web design of
Facebook is difficult for researchers to find the established year,
Facebook is not included in this statistical analysis.). The annual
amount of the newly-opened government social media accounts
has raised up since 2009. Seventeen new social media accounts
were established in year 2010, which seems to be the peak year of
Hong Kong government social media application development.
Figure 3. Newly-opened HK government accounts by year.
Among seventeen newly-opened social media accounts in 2010,
fourteen are opened by government agencies while three by
government officials (Table 1). Government agencies social
media applications appears to develop faster than government
officials. Furthermore, most newly-opened accounts in 2010 open
on YouTube and Twitter.
Table 1. Newly-opened Hong Kong government social media
accounts in 2010 on different social media platforms
Hong Kong
government
officials
Hong Kong
government
agencies
Twitter 0 4 24%
SinaMicroblog 1 2 18%
YouTube 0 8 47%
Blog 2 0 11%
Percentage
Total 3 14 100%
4.3 Account Instruction
Ninety-five percent of the Hong Kong government social media
accounts clearly identify themselves as government agencies or
officials. All of those accounts not identifying themselves are
Hong Kong government official accounts opened on Facebook.

4.4 Account Images/Photos
All the government social media accounts have their own images
or photos. In terms of the consistency of images/photos of the
same government agency/official on multiple social media
platforms, this study finds out that three Hong Kong government
agencies (Chief Executive's Office, Hong Kong Observatory and
the Investment Promotion Agency) and one government official
(Kenneth Chen, Deputy Secretary of Department of Education)
use the same images and photo on different social media
platforms. Another four government agencies, each of which has
opened more than three social media accounts, use partly the same
image on different social media platforms. One government
agency, the Hong Kong Government, use different images on its
Twitter and Facebook accounts.
4.5 Amount of Followers and Followings
The amount of followers of government agency and official
accounts indicates the coverage and effectiveness of accounts
among the netizens. The analysis of the amount of the followers
of 36 Hong Kong government social media accounts (Since Blog
doesn’t have the function of following, it is not included in this
statistics.) shows that 78% government social media accounts
have 100 to 10000 followers. Only a few accounts have either less
than 100 or more than 10,000 followers.
Compared to the large amount of followers of Hong Kong
government social media accounts, most government agencies and
officials follow only several accounts. Seventy-five percent
government accounts only follow other government accounts,
while 25 percent follow other government accounts as well as
non-government accounts such as news and media, celebrities,
companies, ordinary netizens, etc.
4.6 Amount of Posts
The amount of posts is calculated from the established date to
April 20, 2011. Most Hong Kong government accounts post fewer
than 1000 pieces of information till April 20, 2011. Only four
accounts including Hong Kong Radio on YouTube, Independent
Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) on YouTube and
Government Information Services on both Twitter and YouTube
have posted more than 1000 pieces of information. (Since the lack
of data of the amount of posts on Facebook, accounts on
Facebook are not included in the statistics.)
A cross analysis of amount of posts and social media types
indicates a significant difference among each platform. The
amount of posts of 75% government accounts on Blog is less than
100 while amount of posts on Twitter and SinaMicroblog is
mostly between 100 and 1000. The amount of posts on Blog is
smaller than that on other social media platforms (figure 4).
269
Figure 4. Cross analysis of amount of posts and social media
types.
4.7 Posting Frequency
Posting frequency is calculated as follows: P (frequency) = (the
total number of days from the established date to April 20, 2011) /
(Amount of posts). The authors have classified the calculation
result as follows: (0-1) represents that on average, posting one
piece of information costs less than one day. (1-7) represents that
on average, posting one piece of information requires one to seven
days. (7-30) represents that on average, posting one piece of
information costs more than one week (7 days) but less than a
month; (30-50) represents that the average posting frequency is
more than one month but within two months. Figure 5 shows that
more than half of government accounts post information every
one week. The average highest posting frequency is nine times a
day while the slowest is every 40 days.
Figure 5. Posting frequency of HK social media accounts.
4.8 Content of Posts
Based on observation, most information released by government
accounts is related to the work of agencies and officials.
Government official accounts release information not only related
to their own work but also related to their after-work life and
personal points of view. However, government agencies only
release information related to the agencies themselves.
4.9 Language
Figure 6 shows traditional Chinese is the most widely used
language in Hong Kong Government social media accounts. The
study also finds that some government agencies (such as Hong
Kong Observatory) launched one Chinese version account and
one English version account on the same social media platform.
Those two accounts update synchronously and the content of the
posts are almost the same. Tracing back to the origin of those two
accounts, the information is released in both Chinese and English
in one account. After a period of time, this account is separated
into two accounts, Chinese one and English one.

Figure 6. Language used in Hong Kong social media accounts.
5. INSPIRATION AND SUGGESTIONS
5.1 Government Social Media Applications
and Effects are Influenced by the
Characteristics of Social Media Platforms
Based on the different characteristics of different social media
platforms, the amount of posts, posting frequency and posting
forms on different social media platforms vary a lot. Both the
amount of posts and posting frequency on Blog are the lowest,
compared with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. In addition, the
social media openness to the public has influence on the
government social media applications. The study indicates that
even though the established date of SinaMicroblog is later than
other social media platforms, the amount of followers on
SinaMicroblog is larger than that on Facebook, Twitter and
YouTube. One possible reason is that SinaMicroblog mainly
targets Chinese which have the largest population in the world. At
the mean time, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked in
Mainland China.
Each social media platform has its own characteristics which
would attract different user groups. Government agencies should
choose suitable platform to provide service to its target citizens.
5.2 Government Social Media Applications
and Effects are Influenced by the
Characteristics of Government Agencies
and Officials
This study has shown that the functional difference of government
agencies and officials would affect their performance on social
media applications. For example, Government Information
Service and Hong Kong Observatory are two different agencies.
They vary in the command of information resources, posting
techniques, and allocation of human resources and funds. As a
result, their performance on social media applications differs a lot.
Furthermore, the study has shown that government agencies open
more social media accounts than government officials.
Government agencies have professionals to manage accounts and
funds to support the daily account maintenance. On the contrast,
most government officials have to manage account by themselves.
Each additional account would put extra burden on the officials.
That may be the reason why government agencies seem to open
more accounts than government officials.
In general, different government agencies and officials have
different command of posting techniques, human resources and
funding, which would result in the performance difference.
270
Government should match their own characteristics with the
social media platform to achieve the best results.
5.3 The Normalization of Government Social
Media Application Should be
Strengthened
This study has found out that there are still five percent
government accounts not identify themselves. In addition, half of
the government social media accounts, which open more than two
accounts on different social media platforms, don’t share the same
image or photo. Account identification and the same image would
help to enhance the authority of government accounts and make it
easier for citizens to recognize the government accounts.
5.4 Followings Amount Should be Enlarged
Compared with the great amount of followers of government
accounts, the followings should be enlarged. It would help the
government agencies and officials get close to the ordinary people
and know what the people are thinking.
6. CONCLUSION
With the social media playing a more and more important role in
public affairs, government using social media has become
inevitable. Mainland china can learn from the experience of social
media applications by HK government. First, mainland china can
take advantage of different types of social media platforms to
reach different netizens and realize the equalization of services
supply. Second, mainland government agencies and officials
should choose one or more suitable social media platforms and
maximize the advantages of the platform. Third, government
agencies and officials should follow more non-government
agency accounts in order to hear the voice of the people. Finally,
multiple languages should be used in social media applications to
meet the needs of different people working or traveling in China.
7. REFERENCES
[1] Landsbergen, D. (2010). Government as Part of the
Revolution: Using Social Media to Achieve Public Goals.
Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on E-
Government, pp. 243-250.
[2] Bonsón, E., Torres, L., Royo, S., & Flores, F. Local egovernment
2.0: Social media and corporate transparency in
municipalities. Government Information Quarterly, pp.123-
132
[3] Picazo-Vela, S., et al., Understanding risks, benefits, and
strategic alternatives of social media applications in the
public sector, Government Information Quarterly (2012)
[4] Bertot, J. C., Jaeger, P. T., & Grimes, J. M. Using ICTs to
create a culture of transparency: E-government and social
media as openness and anti-corruption tools for societies.
Government Information Quarterly, 27(3), 264–271.
[5] China official microblog research report. (2011). Public
opinion and transmission laboratory.
[6] Yan Su. Internet communication analysis of Hong Kong
Special Administrative Region government. Journalism
Lover, 2011(11), pp.74-75

Session 10
ICT & Governance
Transformation

E-Government and Transformation of Governance and
Service Delivery in Bangladesh: A Developing Country
Perspective
ABSTRACT
As elsewhere around the world, lately e-government has become a
major component of governmental policy in Bangladesh. It has
received a particular push with the launch of ‘Digital Bangladesh’.
The twin pillars of the campaign - ‘connecting citizens’ and
‘offering services to their doorsteps’ - are considered key to
fighting poverty and achieving the Millennium Development
Goals. While enthusiasm for e-government is widespread and a
variety of programs are currently underway that offer endless
opportunities for the future, in a developing country like
Bangladesh road to e-government is not without pitfalls and
challenges. This paper sheds lights on the trajectory of egovernment
in Bangladesh with a particular focus on its current
status and future goals. More specifically, it seeks to highlight
some innovative e-government schemes and their impacts on
service delivery processes and mode of interactions between
government and citizens. The paper focuses on some key
constraints that undermine and frustrate governmental drives for
realizing the vision of Digital Bangladesh. It also comments on
their policy implications.
Category
General Literature
General Terms
Management, Human Factors, Performance, Reliability and
Security
Keywords
E-government, Digital Bangladesh, ICT Policy, Union
Information Service Centres, Digital Divide
1. INTRODUCTION
Public governance around the world has long been subjected to
widespread criticisms for poor performance and procedural
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Noore Alam Siddiquee
Department of Politics & Public Policy
Flinders University
Adelaide 5001, Australia
+ 618 8201 2302
noore.siddiquee@flinders.edu.au
271
rigidities, among others. Decades of public sector reforms appear
to have done little either to improve the delivery of
public services or to brighten the image of service providers.
Inefficiency, lack of accountability and transparency, inflexibility,
red-tape and corruption are among the multitude of problems that
characterize public bureaucracies and service delivery systems.
This is particularly the case in developing countries. The advent of
e-government has offered real prospects of making a difference in
this regard. E-government promises not only to improve
efficiency in service delivery but also to promote transparency and
accountability thereby reducing corruption and mismanagement in
public governance [4; 16]. In addition, it is believed to promote
innovation in delivery of public services, offer increased
flexibility in the service use and foster people’s participation and
empowerment [18]. In developing countries e-government has
assumed an additional significance: it is expected to help eradicate
poverty, boost national economic growth, reduce bureaucratic
complexity and establish good governance [7].
Thus it is nothing surprising that of late e-government has become
a key component of public sector reform across the globe. So
popular is the e-government today that it is hard to find a country
that has not embraced it in recent years. As elsewhere, Bangladesh
has followed the global trend. Since the adoption of e-government
as a policy issue in late 1990s, the government of Bangladesh has
initiated and implemented variety of measures seeking either to
improve internal efficiency of the government agencies or to
enhance external delivery of services to the citizens or both. Egovernment
is seen as strategy for transforming public governance
and service delivery, it is also viewed as a tool for fighting
poverty and achieving Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
While enthusiasm for e-government is widespread and a variety of
programs are currently underway as part of governmental aim of
developing an efficient, accountable and citizen-centric public
administration, in a developing country like Bangladesh the road
to e-government is anything but smooth and straightforward. In
fact, a large number of countervailing forces and barriers act to
thwart and frustrate governmental drives in this regard. This paper
reviews the trajectory of e-government in Bangladesh. Based
mainly on secondary sources the paper seeks to highlight the roles
of e-government in transforming governance and service delivery
system and some of the constraints and challenges involved.

2. THE EVOLUTION OF E-GOVERNMENT
IN BANGLADESH
Even though development of an efficient, transparent and
accountable system of administration has been a recurrent theme
of all reform initiatives since Bangladesh gained her independence
in the early 1970s, e-government has not found expression in the
governmental policy discourse until the late-1990s. In fact, the
ICT revolution and growth of e-commerce etc. elsewhere did not
generate much interest among the Bangladeshi policy makers.
Thus, the initial period was characterised by what could be termed
as a combination of lack of interest, confusion and neglect on part
of political and administrative leadership. After initial periods of
confusion and inaction the first concrete step towards egovernment
was made by the Awami League government
following its assumption of power in 1996. It agreed to connect
the country with the information superhighway, designated ICT as
a thrust sector, waived taxes on computers and computer
accessories and allocated US $6 million in 1997-98 annual budget
towards supporting the development of ICT sector in the country.
It also formed a Task Force with the Prime Minister as its head.
Composed of representative of the government ministries, the
private sector, academia and NGOs the Task Force was
responsible for providing overall direction concerning the
application of ICT in government in order to improve operational
efficiency, enhance quality of services and advance public welfare
by extending public services even to most remote areas. All this
marked the beginning of Bangladesh’s journey towards egovernment.
Following the political change in 2001 the new government
continued the drives initiated by the previous regime. The
formulation of ICT Policy, 2002 was among significant moves
made during 2001- 2005 period. However, in the absence of
coherent vision and well-designed strategies various agencies
initiated and implemented e-government programs in isolated and
uncoordinated fashion. With the launch of the Access to
Information (A2I) programme in 2006 a new phase of egovernment
development began. Located in the Prime Minister’s
Office and supported by the UNDP the A2I program has played a
catalysing role in promoting people oriented to e-government.
Series of workshops and seminars organised under the A2I
program have led to identification of a large number of citizen
services for implementation at various levels. This has also
encouraged various ministries and divisions of the government to
initiate and implement a range of e-government programs aimed
at offering enhanced services to their respective clients. The
military backed care-taker government that was in power during
2007-2008 was highly supportive of the e-government agenda: it
played a vital role in successfully implementing web-initiatives
and augmenting capacity and awareness at various levels. This
may have marked a shift from infrastructure building towards
delivery of services using ICT, still programs remained largely
isolated and limited in scope.
The incumbent Awami League government having assumed power
in 2009 made e-government a priority and initiated
comprehensive measures to this end. In line with its election
manifestos the new government introduced a charter of change
with ‘Digital Bangladesh’ as an integral component of its Vision
2021. Conceived and implemented under the United Nations
Development Program (UNDP) –funded Access to Information
(A2I) program –Digital Bangladesh represents the cornerstone of
272
e-government in Bangladesh. The Digital Bangladesh agenda
involves a digitised government, ICT enabled services, nationwide
internet connectivity, high-tech parks for businesses and IT
trained professionals. It consists of four pillars: (i) developing
human resources suitable for 21 st century demands; (ii) connecting
citizens in a meaningful ways; (iii) taking services to the
doorsteps of the people and (iv) making private sector more
productive and competitive through the use of ICT [10]. The
Digital Bangladesh campaign has led to a more comprehensive,
sustained and robust approach to e-government with emphasis on
citizen-centred service delivery. Although the drives for
infrastructure development continue in view of country’s overall
e-government development index currently emphasis is placed on
fostering integration and expansion of scopes for transactional
services. Numerous programs and projects (as shown later) are
being implemented towards realizing the vision.
3. INSTITUTIONAL AND LEGAL
FRAMEWORK
E-government is a relatively new phenomenon in Bangladesh.
Hence, the institutional, legal and regulatory framework for egovernance
is still evolving. At the apex of the institutional
framework for e-government in Bangladesh is the Prime
Minister’s Office (PMO) that provides stewardship of the Digital
Bangladesh program. The E-Government Cell established within
the PMO provides policy directives and guidelines for the
implementation of e-government programs including oversight
and coordination of such initiatives. The National ICT Task Force
(NTF) chaired by the Prime Minister is responsible for
mainstreaming ICT throughout the public sector. Renamed
recently as the Digital Bangladesh Task Force it is represented by
stakeholders from the government, the private sector and the civil
society. It is responsible for monitoring milestones in the
implementation of Digital Bangladesh agenda and advising the
government on policy matters and means of achieving goals
identified. A number of government ministries have been given
significant roles to play. The Ministry of Science and Information
Communication Technology (MoSICT) is responsible for the
development of infrastructure and human resources for successful
application of ICT in the society. It also formulates ICT policies
and oversees the implementation of such policies. Given that one
of the responsibilities of the Ministry is to support the overall
socio-economic development of the country through research,
development, extension and successful utilisation of science and
technology including ICT, it has undertaken and implemented
variety of programs including the establishment of computer
training centres throughout the country to impart ICT related
knowledge and skills to government employees as well as
members of the public. The Bangladesh Computer Council
(BCC)- an autonomous agency established in 1990 provides
technical assistance to the MoSICT.
The development of telecommunications infrastructure is the
responsibility of the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications
(MoPT). It lends critical support to the e-government by
promoting the growth of telecommunications sector
commensurate with emerging demands and needs. While the
ministry is responsible for the overall development of the
telecommunications sector, Bangladesh Telecommunications
Company Limited (BTCL) – a public limited company under the
ministry has been mandated to provide basic telecommunications
services throughout the country. It provides landline telephones

and domestic as well as international call services. Likewise, the
Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission
(BTRC) - an autonomous body established under the Ministry in
2002 is the licensing authority that regulates telecommunication
service providers – both fixed line and mobile phones throughout
the country. It is also responsible for promoting ICT application
through, among others, oversight of the VSAT operators and
internet service providers, the development of digitisation
schemes and regulation of tariffs and standards. Table 1 lists
major agencies involved along with their primary responsibilities.
Table 1: Important Public Sector Actors in E-Government
Government
Ministry/Agency
Prime Minister’s Office
(E-Government Cell)
Ministry of Science &
Information and
Communication
Technology
Bangladesh Computer
Council
Ministry of Post and
Telecommunications
Bangladesh
Telecommunications
Regulatory Commission
(BTRC)
Responsibilities
Overall policy directions
Policy formulation and
mainstreaming ICT in the public
sector
Support MoSICT and provide
training as well as advisory services
to government and citizens.
Develop telecommunication
infrastructure and services
Regulation of the
telecommunications industry &
licensing
Ministry of Information Dissemination of information
Ministry of Planning Support DBTF to realize its goals
Ministry of Finance Support the e-government programs
with appropriate allocation of funds
Ministry of Education Development of curriculum for ICT
education; computerisation of
schools
Ministry of Law, Justice
and Parliamentary
Affairs
ICT Task Force/Digital
Bangladesh Task Force
National Information
Management
Committee (MoP)
National ICT Education
Task Force
Review of ICT related laws and
policies
Mainstream ICT in the government,
advise ministries/agencies and
monitor progress
Development of citizen
identification card for service
delivery purposes
Advancing educational skills and
quality through ICT
273
Source: Based on [14] & other sources
Likewise, a set of policies and laws have been formulated and
enacted in order to provide a legal framework for e-government in
the country. The National ICT Policy formulated in 2002
represents the first concrete measure that provides a
comprehensive outline of the vision of e-government. The ICT
policy 2002 presented e-government as a strategy for improving
efficiency of the government, reducing wastage of resources and
enhancing planning and raising the quality of public services. It
also envisaged, among others, the establishment of
telecommunication infrastructure nationwide, connecting to
submarine fibre optic cable network, extending internet facility to
rural areas, establishing cyber kiosks in post offices, Union
Parishad and Upazila (sub-district) complexes, setting up an
internet exchange and increasing the bandwidth capacity and
availability [9]. Thus it had underscored the spread of ICT in
governmental agencies across the country. The policy required
each Ministry/Division to have an ICT unit comprised of ICT
professionals and websites with policy documents and updated
information.
However, the implementation of the policy was anything but
satisfactory. Among others, the lack of ownership and
coordination among implementing agencies and absence of
leadership have contributed to the failure of the policy. The
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Act was
adopted in 2006. The Act was also intended to help prevent
cybercrimes and safeguard online transactions so as to promote ecommerce.
However, the Act could not be implemented in its true
spirit as necessary rules and regulations were never introduced
[9]. Following the launch of the Digital Bangladesh as the flagship
project the government has promulgated a new ICT policy. The
ICT Policy 2009 envisions the ICT as a tool to bring about
‘transparent, accountable and responsible government’ [11]. It is
fairly comprehensive for besides outlining specific objectives and
priorities it has identified over 300 action items for
implementation in key sectors of the economy in order to improve
the delivery of services. It also seeks to develop human resources,
enhance social equity and ensure cost-effective delivery of
governmental services to support the national goal of becoming a
middle-income country within 10 years and joining the ranks of
developed nations within 30 years [11]. Another major legislation
is the ICT Act 2009. This is, in fact, a slightly modified version of
ICT Act 2006 which remained unimplemented. The Act provides
legitimacy of the electronic records and digital signature. While it
is true that the current legal framework of e-government is largely
driven by ICT Policy 2009 and the ICT Act, 2009 a number of
other tools and policy documents as listed in table 2 have had a
significant bearing on e-government. Collectively, they provide a
broad framework of e-governance in the country.
Table 2: Major E-government Policies and Laws
Policy/Legislation Objective(s)
Telecommunications
Act, 2001
Facilitate liberalisation of
telecommunications sector
ICT Policy, 2002 Provide guidelines for development
of the ICT sector

Internet Connection &
Usage Policy, 2004
Copyright (Amended)
Act, 2005
Provide a framework for the use of
internet facilities
Protect intellectual property rights
and legalise electronic
communication
ICT Act, 2006 Provide legal basis of the ICT
Right to Information
Act, 2009
Provide legal entitlement to citizens
to seek public information and
demand transparency &
accountability of public institutions
ICT Policy, 2009 Provide an up-to-date and
comprehensive framework for the
development of ICT with action
plans consistent with Digital
Bangladesh vision
ICT Act, 2009 Improve legal structure of ICT by
incorporating necessary
amendments to ICT Act, 2006
Broadband Policy, 2009 Facilitate the growth of high-speed
internet services at an affordable
price
Telecommunications
Act (Amended), 2010
International Long
Distance
Telecommunication
Services Policy, 2010
Update Telecommunications Act,
2001
Facilitate low-cost ILDTS
including VOIP services
Source: Based on [14] and other sources
4. TRANSFORMATION OF GOVERNANCE
AND SERVICE DELIVERY: SELECTED E-
GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS
Although a late starter, the government of Bangladesh has
initiated and implemented a large number of schemes with the aim
of realizing the visions and goals as outlined above. More
specifically, these programs seek to transform governance and
service delivery system offering citizens with improved services.
In this section of the paper we focus on selected e-government
schemes that portray the current state of e-government in
Bangladesh and the progress made to-date in various spheres.
These are some well-known programmes and they capture G2C,
G2B and G2G dimensions.
4.1 Web-Presence of Government & Forms
Concerted governmental drives during recent years have resulted
in a considerable progress towards making government
information and services available online. One clear indication is
that most government agencies including ministries, divisions,
departments and statutory bodies have web-presence with useful
information and contact details. The national web portal of the
government of Bangladesh (www.bangladesh.gov.bd) serves as a
one-stop access to information and services offered by various
274
agencies and departments. Governmental websites and portals
have begun to offer services beyond information dissemination.
The Prime Minister’s Office has launched a website
(www.forms.gov.bd) which has made virtually all government
forms accessible online. This is a significant development in that
the citizens and businesses are now able to access variety of forms
without having to visit respective offices. This saves time and
helps them avoid the hassle associated with visiting various
agencies.
4.2 Digitisation of Land Records System
This involves digitisation of country’s complex and age-old land
ownership records that are source of huge corruption and
litigations. Following several successful pilot projects the
government decided to spread the benefits of such experiments
throughout the country. Currently in progress, this project would
drastically reduce the complexities and corruption associated with
land administration. This would greatly simplify land
administration and put an end to the current practice where
citizens need to visit more than 10 different agencies to obtain
their records and/or to have them updated.
4.3 Online Hajj Information Management System
The Online Hajj Information Management system of the Ministry
of Religious Affairs is an example of innovation in area of G2C
service. In place since 2002 the portal serves as a source of
information to thousands of pilgrims who go to Mecca to perform
Hajj every year. Besides allowing verification of information like
their location, health condition and flight details etc. the
interactive features of the portal allow easy and reliable
communication between pilgrims and their relatives.
4.4 Land Resources Information System
The Agro-Ecological Zone (AEZ) database of the Bangladesh
Agricultural Research Council (BARC) contains information on
country’s land resources including geography, soil, and climate,
hydrology, cropping system and crop sustainability. This is used
to generate readily accessible information of the physical land
resources of the country for use by researchers, extension workers,
and decision makers in land and agricultural resource
management as well as for agricultural planning. This has served
as the basis for the development of a more comprehensive and
multi-scale GIS-based Land Resources Information System which
helps deal with the intricacies of land resource planning under
complex environmental conditions.
4.5 Electronic Birth Registration System, RCC
The Electronic Birth Registration Information System (EBRIS)
introduced by Rajshahi City Corporation (RCC) with technical
assistance from the UNICEF has earned award as an innovative egovernment
at the local level. It allows registration of birth
electronically, generates birth certificate and immunisation card
for each newly born babies and list of babies due for vaccination
on a particular day. The EBRIS has replaced the manual process
of registration where multiple agencies were involved thus
helping remove duplication of entries and other problem. Also, it
has contributed to achieve near 100 % immunisation coverage in
RCC area [1].

4.6 Computerisation of Railway Ticketing System
Under one of the early e-government projects the Ministry of
Communication computerised the railway seat reservation and
ticketing system nationwide. In operation since 1996 this is now
being expanded to e-ticketing where the passengers of inter-city
trains will be able to purchase electronic ticket using mobile
phones and other devices. This would help rail users to avoid
hassle of travelling all the way to train stations and waiting in long
queues for collecting tickets.
4.7 Automation of Internal Processes: The
Bangladesh Bank
While the drives for process automation can be found in virtually
every public entity, the Bangladesh Bank is among the handful of
agencies that have been successful in integrating ICT in its core
business processes. As such all aspects of its operation including
internal management, export receipts and import payments and
monitoring and supervision of commercial banks have been
automated. It has also made a significant progress with electronic
banking through the introduction of automated check clearance
and e-payment gateway, online money transfers and payment of
utility bills via the internet.
4.8 HRM Database, Ministry of Public Administration
The Ministry of Establishment - recently renamed as the Ministry
of Public Administration was among the first to computerise part
of its internal operation. The Personnel Management Information
System (PMIS) is an online database that covers information of all
class I officers of the government of Bangladesh. It has shown
immense benefits for the ministry as well as the concerned
officials. The supervisory authority uses the database for
personnel management functions including the management of
their annual confidential reports (ACRs). The respective officer
can access his or her personal data sheet (PDS); it also allows
him/her to request updating personal information to reflect
changes to situation such as completion of a training program.
This also helps them to track their career development and
provide regular information on career opportunities.
4.9 Process Automation, NBR
As a result of the successful implementation of a number of
donor-funded projects like Customs Administration
Modernisation Project, Excise, Taxes and Customs Data
Computerisation Project and Modernisation and Automation
Project, much of the core businesses of the National Board of
Revenue (NBR) have already been automated. Thus NBR has
recorded a considerable success in its operations and objectives.
For example 90% of country’s trade are now fully automated
which reduces the cost of doing business on the one hand and
facilitates trade and commerce on the other. This has also
contributed to reduce tax evasion raising governmental revenue
considerably. Significant progress has also been made with
regard to e-taxation especially filing of tax returns by individuals
and small businesses.
4.10 E-Procurement
Currently under active implementation the eGP project seeks to
make public procurement system efficient, transparent and
accountable. This would allow the entire cycle of procurement
decisions and actions from the opening of tender to evaluation of
bids and authorisation and final payment could be done
275
electronically. It will not only reduce time required in completing
tender procedures, it will also reduce corruption leading to
improvement in quality of government purchases. While the
government plans to bring the entire public procurement system
under e-procurement in phases, initially four government
departments/agencies that handle lion’s share of government
contracts - the Directorate of Roads & Highways, Local
Government Engineering Department, Bangladesh Water
Development Board and Rural Electrification Board - have been
selected for the first phase of e-tendering pilot project (Daily
Inqilab, 3 June, 2011).
These alongside many other similar schemes in various spheres of
public administration indicate a new trend where ICT is applied to
improve internal efficiency of the government agencies at the
same time making sure that the citizens and businesses get fast,
reliable and hassle-free services. Clearly, e-initiatives cover all
possible dimensions (G2C, G2B and G2G) of e-government and
offer enormous prospects to redesign governance and service
delivery in future. Progress already achieved, limited though
compared to other similar contexts, like online presence of
government agencies and interactive features is no less significant.
When considered against e-government maturity models, it is
evident that Bangladesh has progressed from information stage to
permit online interaction and transactions with government
agencies [for more on this, see 12, 3 & 4]. Such features allow
citizens to download various government forms, policies and
regulations and a range of other useful services at their own
convenience. Also there are cases where people are able to pay
utility bills, buy train tickets, register for admission into public
universities and get results of public examinations using mobile
phones. However, still benefits of e-government are limited due
mainly to factors like insufficient infrastructure development and
connectivity, inadequate interactive and transactional features and
widespread digital divide in the society.
5. BRIDGING DIGITAL DIVIDE: E-
GOVERNMENT AT LOCAL &
COMMUNITY LEVELS
Such problems however have not escaped attention of the policy
makers and other actors. This is evident in various efforts made to
find innovative solutions to such problems thereby ensuring the
benefits of e-government are widely shared. The Union
Information & Service Centres (UISCs) are cases in point. Driven
by the desire of achieving twin goals of Digital Bangladesh, i.e.,
connecting citizens and delivering services at their doorsteps
UISCs have been established throughout the country (Daily Star,
1 Nov, 2010). Conceived and implemented under the UNDP
funded A2I program, UISCs in fact represents a bold attempt at
bridging digital divide and connecting the rural communities to
the Internet. Equipped with computers and internet UISCs are
now functioning in all 4501 unions – the lowest tier of local
government offering useful services to citizens. The services
offered in UISCs range from email, word processing, printing
and scanning to access government forms, birth and death
registration information, passport and visa support and
information on public examinations to health, education and
disaster management. Modelled on the successful Gyandoot
project of Uttar Pradesh, India the UISCs are housed in in the
local Union Parishad office and managed by local entrepreneurs.
While the initial funding and hardware support came from the A2I

program and the Ministry of Local Government is responsible for
coordinating the overall activities and building capacity by
training relevant personnel [14] the sustainability of the scheme
has been taken care of by involving local youths who run the
centres and charge a modest fee for the services rendered.
It is pertinent to note that a number of non-governmental
initiatives have already laid the foundation for schemes like
UISCs. NGO initiatives have demonstrated success in reaching
out to the unreachable in the countryside. The GramenPhone
Community Information Centres (GCIS) and Pallitathya Kendra
(Village Information Centres) are among the leading nongovernmental
initiatives in this area. GrameenPhone has set up
over 500 information centres in remote locations seeking to
enhance the rural communities’ access to internet and multi-media
services. Managed by local entrepreneurs, who receive training
and initial support from GrameenPhone, these centres offer wide
range of off-line and on-line services. Usual GrameenPhone
services (e.g., payphones and electronic recharge for prepaid
mobile accounts services) aside, these centres provide internet
surfing and emailing, chatting, computer composing, scanning and
printing and information on health and education. Plans are
underway to expand the range of services available via such
centres. Similarly the initial success of the Pallitathya Kendra
project of Development Research Network (D.Net) has led to its
subsequent expansion. Currently, there are over 100 Pallitathya
Kendras around the country that provide IT skills, training in
computer operations, advanced IT courses, ancillary services and
livelihood information. Citizens use these centres to access variety
of information from common agricultural problems, socio-legal
advice and financial services to medical issues [14]. An important
feature of the PK is that mobile InfoLadies help make services
available to those who cannot physically reach the centres. These
Infoladies on their bicycles carry notes, phones and medical
equipment thus making the services to those most disadvantaged
and in the remotest corners of the country.
The other initiatives that seek to address digital divide and make
the benefits of ICT available to the disadvantaged groups include
e-huts and Tathya Toris. BracNet - an affiliate of the Bangladesh
Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) established e-huts with
the aim of making internet accessible to those living in rural areas
at an affordable price. Currently e-huts provide technological
solutions for small businesses and local people. BracNet aims to
expand the scope and reach by multiplying the number of e-huts
to 1000 - each serving as a one-stop shop for various types of
digital services including internet browsing, basic computer
training, broadband internet services, photocopying and scanning
[6]. Likewise, Tathya Tori (information boat) project of the
GrameenPhone is an innovative scheme that seeks to educate and
empower river-based people with information and services [15].
Under the support from CARE Bangladesh Tathya Toris are
equipped with digital content and serve as mobile centres to
provide internet and associated services to the people living in
haor areas. Besides the provision of periodic medical services
and computer training, Tathya Toris also make available
information on agriculture, fisheries and other livelihood matters.
6. MAJOR CONSTRAINTS &
CHALLENGES
It is obvious from the preceding discussions that Bangladesh has
made slow but steady progress towards implementation of e-
276
government. Wide variety of measures undertaken and
implemented in various spheres has helped raise country’s eprofile
and readiness. However, still the overall progress is rather
modest when considered against other countries around the world.
The 2010 e-government survey ranks Bangladesh at 134position
out of 185 nations globally [19]. Although Bangladesh has
advanced from the earlier position of 142 in 2008 and placed
herself ahead of Bhutan and Pakistan, on the whole this progress
is far from satisfactory given the fact that compared to many other
countries around the world and some of her neighbours (e.g. India,
Sri Lanka and Maldives) this rank is abysmally low and the level
of preparedness is far from what is required to provide integrated
services to the citizens. Table 3 shows the current state of ICT
infrastructure in Bangladesh and the nation’s overall position in
World E-government Index. Currently, governmental drives for
expanding the benefits of e-government are handicapped by a
range of challenges and constraints:
Table 3: Bangladesh’s Position in World E-Government
Development Index, 2010
World E-Government Development
Index Rank
Online Service Component (Rank 60)
a. Points for emerging
information service
b. Points for enhanced
information services
c. Points for transaction services
d. Points for connected
approach
Telecommunication Infrastructure
Component (Rank 161)
a. Estimated user per 100
inhabitants
b. Fixed telephone lines per 100
inhabitants:
c. Mobile subscriber per 100
inhabitants
d. Personal computers per 100
inhabitants:
e. Total fixed broadband per
100 inhabitants:
Human Capital Component (Rank 167)
a. Adult literacy rate:
a. Combined gross enrolment
ratio for
primary, secondary and
tertiary schools:
E Participation index (Rank 102)
Source: [17: p. 117]
2010 2008
134 out
of 190
48
44
05
15
0.32
0.84
27.90
2.25
0.03
53.50
48.46
0.1000
142 out
of 192
NA
NA
NA
NA
0.31
0.79
13.25
2.42
0.00
47.50
56.01
Rank 78
6.1 Infrastructural Challenges
The infrastructure serves as the backbone of e-government. It
encompasses computers and telecommunications capacity in terms
of wireless and broadband networks. In order to avail the fruits of
ICT revolution compatible ICT infrastructure must be in place.
Viewed from this perspective, the overall situation in Bangladesh
is hardly satisfactory. Computer Ownership per 100 people is

abysmally low (2.25). In addition to those presented in table 3
other evidence indicates a poor state of affairs. Internet penetration
rate has been very low: there are only 204 internet service
providers (IPS) 80% based in Dhaka, and the number of regular
internet users is 3 million. Tele-density per 100 people is 32.04;
number of fixed phone lines in 2007 of 1.12 mil and mobile phone
users of 76.43 million (2011). In fact, inadequate infrastructure is
a huge challenge for the government as well as the citizens.
Despite very many efforts made to build strong ICT infrastructure
still most government agencies operate with manual systems and
procedures making digitisation of data an enormous task. The ratio
of personal computers to staff of government offices has improved
–but still low. This means that many of those junior officers and
those working at the field levels are without much needed
computers which hamper the delivery of services online. Also,
government departments and agencies are not interconnected
between themselves and with their field offices; the networking
infrastructure is weak outside capital and major cities [12].
Given the fact that ICT penetration in Bangladesh is still low,
people having no or limited access to Internet are unable to enjoy
the benefits of e-government, even if services are available
electronically. Evidence shows that despite recent improvements
in ICT infrastructure, Bangladesh is still at the bottom of network
readiness index and ranked 118 among 133 countries [8]. The
proportion of households with computers increased from 0.8 in
2002 to 1.9 in 2007 and the proportion of households with internet
has increased from 0.1 in 2002 to 1.3 in 2007. The problem is
exacerbated by inadequate supply of electricity and the
concentration of PC and Internet users in major cities and towns.
Majority of the population in Bangladesh are without electricity
and those having access to it also experience regular blackout and
disruptions without notice. Likewise, computers are still too
expensive for most Bangladeshi households and the Internet
remains costly on the one hand and unreliable in most parts on the
other. Even the introduction of mobile Internet and WiMax
technology that promises to break the barrier of reaching the
unreachable has recorded limited success given that very few
users are currently prepared or trained to use such devices to
access government information and services.
6.2 Digital Divide
Bangladesh is a country of extreme disparities. Such disparities
seem to be widening in recent times as the vast majority of the
population remain unaffected by the ICT revolution,
notwithstanding the governmental drives to bridge the divide by
making the ICT services to those who cannot afford them.
Without doubt, the existing programs are steps in the right
direction- but they are grossly inadequate to tackle the massive
gaps created by the ICT revolution. The government is faced with
an enormous challenge to ensuring that people of various socioeconomic
strata have equitable access to services and benefits. As
noted, access to Internet and ownership of PCs are
disproportionately concentrated in Dhaka and major cities. It is
true that the internet users and broadband networks are growing,
however this appears to create further divide between the cities
and rural areas, between the educated and affluent segments of the
population and the poor and ordinary masses. Although data on
gender, age of ICT users are unavailable, it is conceivable that the
vast majority of those using ICT in Bangladesh are male and
young – not female and elderly. Prevailing problems like massive
277
poverty and inequality, illiteracy and widespread corruption
contribute to widen the gaps further under of e-government.
6.3 Inadequate Human Capital
Low levels of literacy among the general masses and lack of
efficiency among the government servants responsible for
implementing e-government initiatives frustrate governmental
drives. It is ironical that despite being one of the most populous
countries in the world, inadequate human capital continues to be a
major barrier to e-government in Bangladesh. First, lack of literacy
poses a formidable challenge to the development of a competent
user group in the country. Currently Bangladesh’s Human Capital
Index is only 0.5182 with adult literacy rate of 53.5% and the
combined gross enrolment of primary, secondary and tertiary
schools being 48.46% [19]. This low level of literacy makes it
difficult for nearly half of the population fails to understand any
meaning of e-government. Second, though projects are underway to
promote IT literacy among the students the use of those equipment,
especially in rural areas, is far from optimal because of such
setbacks as interrupted power supply, poor location, unavailability
of trained personnel, low motivation and awareness among those
involved.
Third, the current level of skills and expertise available in the public
sector is inadequate. A recent study shows that 52% of the officers
of the Bangladesh who are IT literate do not find their skills
sufficient to perform daily work and only 38.7% use ICT in official
activities. A vast majority of the officers (82%) felt that they needed
training to be able to discharge their duties [13]. Training programs
run by government and private institutions have generally failed to
keep pace with the developments and growing demands; whatever
training is available rarely need-based and carefully planned to
allow application in the workplace. The Bangladesh experience also
shows disconnects between high level policy development and lower
level engagement and commitment, between infrastructure capacity
and field level operations. Many public officials have access to
computers and internet but they rarely make appropriate use of such
facilities. It merely suggests that the potential of such tools remains
mostly underutilised; they are used primarily for purposes other than
service delivery for example word-processing, browsing the internet
and for preparing presentational materials.
6.4 Financial, Legislative and Regulatory Constraints
E-Government in Bangladesh is still in its infancy. Despite the
recent drives and programs, the vision of using ICT to improve
governance and quality of life of citizens has not been fully
embedded in the legal and regulatory framework [14] As
indicated, the current legislative and regulatory framework of egovernment
driven mainly by two important documents - the ICT
Policy 2009 and the ICT Act 2009 has addressed many of the
inadequacies and concerns, yet it fails to provide a comprehensive
and robust basis for e-government. While the government aims to
provide greater public access to ICT and facilitate transactions and
services, the existing laws are insufficient in terms of privacy,
security and intellectual property rights [14]. In the current
context there is a feeling that a far more comprehensive legislative
framework is required than at present, not just for tackling
cybercrimes and for electronic certification and authentication
purposes but also for standardisation of government data and
information, security of shared services platforms and the like [2].
Needless to add that poor legal and regulatory framework along
with insufficient ICT infrastructure serves as a fundamental

constraint on online and integrated services. Also, a key challenge
of e-government in Bangladesh is limited funding from the
government and its heavy reliance on donor support. Budgetary
allocation for e-government has remained inadequate; although it
has increased in volume it continues to remain very low as a
percentage of total developmental spending. The planned target of
increasing governmental spending for ICT sector to 2% of the
annual development plan (ADP) has remained far way off. In
2009-10 budget the government allocated $ 20.83m to ICT
development which represents a mere 0.43% of the total ADP.
7. CONCLUSION
It is obvious that Bangladesh has made slow but important
progress towards implementation of e-government. Although
initial drives began in the late 1990s, the e-government campaign
received a major push in recent times which paved the way for the
development of key ICT infrastructure – both hardware and software
- and some important initiatives. Variety of schemes initiated
and implemented since the early years have raised Bangladesh’s eprofile
and e-readiness. Currently virtually all public agencies
including those at the field level have their web-presence; they
also offer informational and in limited cases, interactive and
transactional services. Bangladesh has also seen the introduction
of a number of innovative schemes that promise to transform
nature of governance and pattern of interaction between the
government and citizens and deliver significant gains in terms of
efficiency, convenience and accountability, among others.
Attempts are currently underway to expand the range of services
that could be offered online and to ensure that those without
access to new technology are able to enjoy the benefits of ICT
revolution. Taken together they have marked the beginning of
citizen-centric public administration: members of the public are
now provided with alternative channels of accessing services in a
more hassle-free environment.
However, it must be emphasized that e-government has yet to
bring about a fundamental change in public governance as most
programs have not gone beyond informational and interactive
stages and the vast majority of services continue to be provided
through traditional channels. The expansion of e-government
benefits has been handicapped by a range of constraints and
limitations. As shown, the barriers and challenges that Bangladesh
faces are complex and multi-dimensional which must be overcome
in order to achieve radical change to the process of governance
and service delivery. In fact, the experience of e-government
around the world shows that there is no quick fix to such
challenges. It requires robust leadership, continuous drive and
innovation in different spheres where the government, the private
sector, NGOs and members of the community all have important
roles to play. Perhaps the most critical in this regard is the
commitment and conviction on part of political and administrative
leadership to carry this task forward. Without such commitment
and sustained efforts the vision of Digital Bangladesh is unlikely
to be realized.
8. REFERENCES
[1] Akther, M.S., Onishi, T. and Kidokoro, T. (2007).’ Egovernment
in a developing country: citizen-centric approach for
278
success’, International Journal of Electronic Governance, 1(1): 38-
51
[2] Bangladesh Enterprise Institute (BEI) (2010). Realizing the
Vision of Digital Bangladesh through E-Government, July.
[3] Bhuiyan, M.S.H. (2010). E-Government Applications in
Bangladesh - Status and Challenges, Paper presented at Fourth
International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic
Governance October 25-28, Beijing China.
[4] Bhuiyan, S.H. (2011). ‘Modernizing Bangladesh public
Administration through e-governance: Benefits and challenges’,
Government Information Quarterly, 28: 54-65
[5] Bhatnagar, S. (2004). E-Government: From Vision to
Implementation, New Delhi: Sage Publications
[6] Ebrahim, A. Pirson, M. and Mangas, P. (2009). ‘Brummer and
the bracNet Investment’, Harvard Business School, April.
[7] Faroqi, M.G. and Siddiquee, N.A. (2011). ‘Limping into the
Information Age; Challenges of E-Government in Bangladesh’,
Journal of Comparative Asian Development, 10(1): 33-61.
[8] GITR (2009). The Networked Readiness Index & Ranking
2009-2010, The Global Information Technology Report 2009-10,
World Economic Forum.
[9] Government of Bangladesh (GoB) (2002). National Information
and Communication Technology (ICT), Policy 2002, Dhaka:
Ministry of Science and Information and Communication
Technology.
[10] GOB (2009a). E-Government Bulletin January: Access to
Information Program, Dhaka: Prime Minister’s Office
[11] GOB (2009b). National Information and Communication
Technology (ICT), Policy 2009, Dhaka: Ministry of Science and
Information and Communication Technology.
[12] Hasan, S. (2011). E-Government in Bangladesh Public
administration: Impact on the Procedure of Interaction, PhD thesis
submitted to the University of Sydney, August.
[13] Hoque, S.M.S. and Zaman, F. (undated). ‘E-Government:
Preparedness of the Bangladesh Civil Service’. Unpublished paper.
[14] Institute of Governance Studies (IGS) (2009). Digital
Bangladesh: The Beginning of Citizen-Centric E-Government? IGS:
BRAC University.
[15] Islam, M.A. and Tsuji, K. (2009).’Bridging digital Divide in
Bangladesh: Study on Community Information Centres’, The
Electronic Library, 29(4); 506-522.
[16] OECD (2003). The E-Government Imperative, OECD E-
Government Studies.
[17] Rahman, T. and Khan, N.A. (2012). ‘Reckoning Electronic
Government in Bangladesh’, International Journal of Public
Administration, 35: 112-121
[18] United Nations (UN) (2008). E-Government Survey: From E-
Government to Connected Governance, Ney York.
[19] UN (2010). Global e-Government Survey, 2010, UN
Department of Economics and Social Affairs.

Evaluating and Assessing a Typology of Ubiquitous City
Services by Classifying and Assigning Actual Services
from an Inventory of Identified Services in Practice
Jungwoo Lee
jlee@yonsei.ac.kr
Hyejung Lee
h.jlee@yonsei.ac.kr
Taesung Kim
Yonsei University
Yonsei University IT Policy & Strategy Research Institute
Seodaemungu, Yonseiro 50, NMH 412 Seodaemungu, Yonseiro 50, NMH 412 Seodaemungu, Yonseiro 50
120-749, Republic of Korea, Seoul 120-749, Republic of Korea, Seoul 120-749, Republic of Korea, Seoul
+82-10-5398-7751
+82-2-2123-4526
+82-2-2123-8308
ABSTRACT
Two trends are obvious in urban management. Urban areas are
increasing in scope and population worldwide, and ubiquitous
services(u-services) are becoming critical in urban management
worldwide. Though many u-services are under development, no
consensus seems to be made concerning common typology,
though a number of frameworks are suggested. In this study,
efforts are concerted to heuristically validate a rather
comprehensive typology of u-city services. Using 228 u-services,
inventoried and presented in u-Eco City projects in Republic of
Korea, classifying exercises are conducted, by three experts in the
field, against a most popularly quoted typology. Findings indicate
that the selected typology is high on comprehensively
exhaustiveness and empirical applicability while low on mutual
exclusivity, simplicity and theoretical contribution. Implications
for improving the typology are suggested followed by limitations
and directions for further research.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4.0 [COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY]: General
General Terms
Design, Standardization
Keywords
U-City Services, Service Classification, Classification, Validation,
Service Typology, Typology
1. INTRODUCTION
With the advances in ubiquitous technologies, attempts were
made to change the paradigm of urban development by
introducing those technologies into city planning and
management. These attempts are attracting attentions from city
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
279
sgtkimts@yonsei.ac.kr
administrators. Many cities are developing and implementing uservices
using U-technologies, positioning themselves as u-city or
smart city [1], [2], [17].
U-services are (1) available to a large number of beneficiaries as
they cover almost every dimension of human life and municipal
administration; (2) likely to develop into convergence services by
combining with many different functions; and (3) expected to help
enhance efficiency through inter-service interactions unlike the
existing unit services which are typically walled by functions. In
reality, local governments are developing u-services independent
from each other due to current institutional walls. This seems to
lead into inefficiencies in u-service operations as well as
overlapping investments [3], [4], [5].
To overcome these problems, it is important to standardize uservices.
Relevant authorities’ service systems which have been
separately managed should be connected and talk to each other
using a bit standardized definitions and technical details, enabling
us to build integrated operations centers for different u-cities and
services [17].
These integrated operation centers may play a critical role in
providing efficient u-services to its people and enhancing their
convenience of living and quality of life by using state-of-the-art
IT infrastructure and ubiquitous information services to make the
urban environment more sustainable. For connection and
expansion of u-services, it is necessary to classify the services
first so that their types and interrelationships can be identified,
theoretically and practically. For this purpose, previous studies
have attempted to develop and synthesize a u-service typology.
However, most of these typologies are based on theoretical or
normative point of view. The appropriateness of these typologies
is scarcely put into empirical verification.
In this regard, this study selected a relatively comprehensive
typology of u-services presented in a academic literature, and
evaluate this typology, heuristically and intensively, using 228 uservices
inventoried and identified in U-Eco City projects [1].
Results of the study are presented at the end with suggestions for
enhancements.
2. RELATED WORK
2.1 U-service typology
Table 1 list the previous studies in which any type of u-service
typology are presented. In studies conducted before 2008, the u-

services were mainly classified in terms of service providers,
urban activities/functions and special differences. Many of those
studies failed to depart from the patterns of classifying the
services by pre-defined administrative functions. Moreover, they
have a limitation in understanding inter-service relationships, due
to the lack of view on bigger goals such as objectives, and
methods of classifications [9], [10], [13], [15]. K. S. Jeong claims
to propose an integrated typology combining and merging existing
typologies [6]. His typology uses four larger categories, nine
medium categories and thirty four small categories, covering
physical space, electronic space, service types, and aspects of
service providers, element technologies and values. It is claimed
as a flexible, comprehensive and multi-dimensional typology that
may allow components and elements of a city, providing criteria
Table 1. Previous Typologies of U-Services
for applying in a variety of combinations. In addition to Jeong,
others also have proposed u-service typologies. However, no
efforts have been concerted minimum level of evaluation of such
typologies.
These typologies seem to be not much based on empirical
evidence but formed from a theoretical or normative perspective.
The ideal typology of any kind in scientific research is based on
empirical induction from corroborative data, but actually in social
science research it is difficult to derive such an inductive model
[13], [16]. Therefore, in social sciences, models of intentional
classification are commonly used as alternatives, which are
difficult to evaluate in terms of validity because they have not
been verified with empirical evidence.
Type Service category Service areas
Personal Life Culture/Entertainment, Health/Welfare
Industry classification,
Industrial Economics
KETI 2006 [15]
Business/Commerce, Communications/Broadcasting/Publishing,
Construction, Finance/Insurance, Logistics/Transportation, Information
Public Administration General Administration, Social Security Administration
Public sector
Facilities management, Environmental,
Security /Police/Safety, Transportation, Complaints/Administrative
Service provider, Jung
(2007)[9]
Private sector
Corporations
Individuals
Business/Commerce,Communications/Broadcasting/Publishing,Finance/Ins
urance, Logistics/Transportation, Construction, Information
Dwelling-houses, home, health/welfare, education,
culture/recreation/tourism
Industry support U-work, U-convention
City activities and Community support U-government, U-administration, U-tourism, U-office/business, U-learning
features, Lee (2007)
[10]
Life support
Construct city
U-home, U-health, U-Prevention/Police Administration
U-Port, U-underground facility, U-Traffic, U-Facilities Management, U-
Environmental Management
City component‧
features, Lim (2008)
[12]
Life
Industry
Public
U-Dwelling-houses, U-Education, U-Broadcasting/Communication, U-
Prevention/Police Administration
U-Production, U-Business, U-Logistics, U-security
U-Defence, U-administration, U-health/welfare, U-Culture/Tourism, U-
Traffic/Transportation
Environment U-environment, U-disaster
Laws Regulations
Spatial unit Building, street, district, facility, city, broadband
Space factor
Spatial facilities
Comprehensive
By whom
typology for U-city Human factor
For whom
service, Jeong (2009)
Goals
[6]
Activities
Function factor
media facilities, Unit Space control facilities, Community complex,
integrated control center
Public, private, public-private partnership
Public agencies, citizens, Company
Life support, business support, industrial support
Living healthy, Security and Safety, Community, Education, Economy,
Leisure, Culture
Behaviours Living, Working, Moving, Playing, Cybering
Commonalities Common-based services, Specialized services, Potential service
Also, there are not many studies of the criteria that can be used to
evaluate the social science models of classification. Since it is
difficult to verify the social science models empirically, a
theoretical evaluation must be involved, but there have been few
attempts to study the criteria by which to verify them theoretically.
Recently, in order to resolve the problem, Y. H. Chun suggested
five conditions under which to evaluate the fitness of a typology
[13]. This study aims to make clear the ambiguous definitions of
u-services by empirically and theoretically evaluating Jeong’s
280
typology in view of the five conditions suggested and to suggest a
way to build a better typology.
2.2 General Conditions to be a Good
Typology
Chun suggested that the classification model for a desirable
typology should meet five general conditions: 1) exhaustiveness,
2) mutual exclusiveness, 3) parsimony, 4) empirical workability,
and 5) theoretical fruitfulness [13], [16].

Exhaustiveness indicates that all categories should be included
within a typology. For U-services, exhaustiveness has an
important significance in that the U-services are not fixed or static
but highly likely to develop into convergence services according
to their necessity. If a U-service typology lacks exhaustiveness, it
may be meaningless as a typology because it will not cover all of
the U-services that can be created or terminated depending on
environment.
Mutual exclusiveness can be a good condition for typology in that
confusion may be caused if there is a logical overlap between
categories or if a single concept simultaneously falls into different
categories, but actually it is difficult to meet in social sciences
where each classification target does not have a rapid discontinuity
between categories. In particular, the condition of mutual
exclusiveness is difficult to satisfy in U-services that include many
convergence services, and thus if this is taken into account, it will
end up just in enumeration, not in classification.
Parsimony is the concept that when other conditions are the same,
the simpler classification model the better and the more
complicated the worse. However, the parsimony a typology has is
commonly against the practical value of the classification model.
Accordingly, if a category becomes too wide for parsimony, the
classification may be made simpler than necessary and thus not be
of help in empirical studies or practical applications. For U-service
classification models, it is difficult to ensure parsimony due to the
complexity of U-services themselves. However, if the principle of
parsimony is not met, the U-service classification models can end
up merely serving for enumeration, not as typology, due to the
complexity of services themselves.
Empirical workability indicates that operations for measurement
should be possible when verification is conducted with an
involved person’s arbitrary decisions limited to a minimum in
classification. However, the lack of such empirical workability is a
troublesome problem which is present in most classification
models available in social sciences and can be considered as an
inherent limitation of social science research that takes advantage
of abstract concepts.
Theoretical fruitfulness is that it will be good if eventually a
typology itself presents a generally acceptable theory. As
mentioned above, this theoretical fruitfulness commonly conflicts
with empirical workability. The reason is that due to the
abstractness of classification criteria it is very uncommon that the
classification models making theoretical fruitfulness actually
extend to empirical studies.
In this study, we selected Jeong’s typology and heuristically
classified 228 unit U-services being currently developed in Korea
after their application to the selected system. The results of
classification were empirically analyzed in terms of whether they
are compliant with the five conditions. Through the analysis this
study identified the shortcomings of the total U-service typology
and other things that need to be made up for in the system.
3. ANALYSIS
In evaluating the appropriateness of Jeong’s U-service typology,
this study examined the distribution patterns and characteristics of
current services by assigning 228 unit services to eight medium
classification categories (i.e., spatial units, spatial facilities,
service providers, beneficiaries, service objectives, urban activities,
281
human behaviors, and function-implementing methods), exclusive
of laws/institutions.
3.1 Procedure
The medium category of “laws/institutions,” unlike other
classification criteria, represents which laws include U-servicerelated
provisions, rather than a set of actual services. This
category was excluded because it was not fit for the purpose of
this study, and eight other medium categories of actual services
were used in this study.
In the classification of U-services into eight medium categories,
the 228 unit services were verified through in-depth interviews
with three experts selected from those who participated in the U-
Eco City project for two or more years. As the first activity of
service classification, each expert reviewed a list of 228 Uservices
and classified the U-services appropriately into one of the
given categories. The second activity was to compare the Uservice
classifications with those by two other experts. In the
coherence of service classification, 195 (85.5%) of 228 unit
services were consistently classified by all the three experts as
“culture, tourism or sports” but the classification of 11 services
(4.8%) was completely inconsistent among the experts who
categorized them as “transportation, health care, facility
management or labor/employment.”
3.2 Heuristics Used
Table 2(Fig. 1-8) shows how the services were categorized. The
classification of 228 unit services by the given criteria revealed the
following limitations: (1) the definitions of some small categories
were unclear to use for classification purposes; (2) there was a
preponderance of certain categories in the classification of Uservices;
and (3) there were similar items overlapping between
medium-categories.
First, some classification criteria were unclearly defined. Two
examples are the definition of information media facility services
as types of “services provided from fixed facilities” and the
definition of unit-space control facility services as types of
“services limited to facilities and their attached facilities.” Both
of the definitions reflect the concept of “services provided from
facilities,” and accordingly this causes confusion when services
are actually classified. For instance, the “traffic signal violation
enforcement service” working on the road can be recognized as
being provided from fixed facilities and at the same time viewed
as that limited to attached facilities. Moreover, if it is unclear
whether service beneficiaries are the public or business entities,
the human behavior forms of moving and cybering can be
considered for service classification. Second, when the 228 unit
services were classified in terms of their names, some
classification criteria were found to play only a nominal role rather
than serve as typology. For example, in the service classification
by urban activities, the category of “security/safety” represented
95% of transportation services, 100% of crime/disaster prevention
services, and 93% of facility management services; and the
category of “leisure” included 94% of culture, tourism and sports
services. This typology does not seem to reflect service types in a
balanced way, and therefore further studies need to focus on
reducing the uneven distribution of classification items and
making classification criteria more practical. Third, there were
similar items overlapping between medium categories. Especially,

such overlapping was prominent between the medium categories
of urban activities and human behavior.
In this study, urban activities were subdivided into life/health,
security/safety, community, education, economy and leisure, and
human behavior was classified into living, working, moving,
playing and cybering. In the human behavior category, living,
playing and working seem similar to life/health, leisure and
economy, respectively, in urban activities. Actually, these
similarities were found in the classification of U-services as well.
In the medium category of “service objectives” with three small
categories (i.e., life support, activity support and industrial
support) thereunder, life support and activity support can be
considered as corresponding to life/health and economy,
respectively, in the urban activities category, and likewise they are
also similar to living and working, respectively, in the human
behavior category. Consequently, there are semantic overlaps not
only between the three medium categories of service objectives,
urban activities and human behavior under the large category of
“functional elements” but between their subcategories as well. A
solution to this overlapping problem is to develop different types
of medium categories or provide small categories directly under
the large category of “functions.” More studies will be needed on
the way to improve the classification of functions by removing
overlaps from small categories [Supplementary table 1].
3.3 Analysis Results
The present study analyzed a U-service typology empirically
through the categorization of U-services. In light of the study
findings, we can assume that Jeong’s U-service typology is high in
exhaustiveness and empirical workability and low in mutual
exclusiveness, parsimony and theoretical fruitfulness.
1) Exhaustiveness: Unlike the previous studies which analyzed
services from a single or two points of view, Jeong attempted
to explain his typology from nine different points of view. In
the process of analyzing 228 unit services, his typology
covered all the services as classified. These facts indicate that
Jeong’s typology is highly exhaustive.
2) Mutual exclusiveness: Even though Jeong’s typology
satisfies the condition of exhaustiveness, it is difficult to say
that it is faithful to the principle of mutual exclusiveness,
because of cases where a single unit service falls under more
than one category simultaneously. Emergency medical
service and U-ski service can be taken as examples of this.
Emergency medical service is to give first aid to a patient
while he/she is being carried in an ambulance, reviewing
patient data with a doctor in hospital. U-ski service helps
users to use ski equipment rentals and lifts conveniently and
provides supports for skiers to monitor their movements and
routes in play and check their achievement records. In this
Table 2. Relevance of Jeong’s classification
3)
study, both of the two services were thought to take not only
a form of life support—for example, making life more
convenient or helping the ambulance crew save a patient’s
life—but also a form of activity support—for example,
helping skiers improve their performance. As a result, they
overlapped between two different areas.
Parsimony: Jeong’s typology consists of 9 medium categories
and 34 small categories. It was a good attempt to try to cover
all possible things on a categorical basis, but his typology is
bad in terms of parsimony because it involves too many
subdivision levels and thus takes a very complicated form.
This low parsimony is also associated with overlaps between
medium categories founded in the empirical analysis. It
should be noted that it is somewhat inevitable to sacrifice
parsimony for comprehensiveness and practicability, but if
any typology does not maintain a certain level of parsimony,
it may end up just enumerating or listing things, not
analyzing them as intended.
4) Empirical workability: This is that operations for
5)
measurement should be possible at acceptable level. Some of
classification criteria were found unclear or ambiguous, but
experts who participated in this study showed consensus in
85.5% of the 228 unit services they categorized using the
present typology. This indicates that the system has high
empirical workability. In general, empirical workability is
low in social science studies as abstract concepts are used,
but Jeong’s typology ensures high empirical workability
because his suggested classification criteria are based on
substantial concepts.
Theoretical fruitfulness: The primary purpose of developing a
classification model is to discover a certain pattern and
regularity from real-world information which appears messed
up, scattered and diverse. In this sense, theoretical
fruitfulness is an important principle for evaluating a
classification model. In view of the current level of
contribution, the U-service typology used in this study seems
limited as it just takes a combination of other typology rather
than advances a new theory. This limitation resulted in a
preponderance of certain categories in the empirical analysis.
For example, in the service classification by urban activities,
the “security/safety” category represented 95% of
transportation services, 100% of crime/disaster prevention
services and 93% of facility management services; and the
“leisure” category included 94% of culture, tourism and
sports services. In short, the services were unevenly
distributed among given categories, like a set of services
entirely belonging to a single category. This indicates that the
present typology failed to play its role properly.
Summarizing all the findings above together, relevance of Jeong’s
typology can be described as shown in Table 3.
Exhaustiveness Mutual exclusiveness Parsimony Empirical workability Theoretical fruitfulness
Suitability + - - + -
282

Fig. 1 Spatial Unit
Fig. 3. By whom
Fig. 5. Objectives
Fig. 7. Behaviour
Table 3. Service Classification Results
283
Fig. 2 Spatial facilities
Fig. 4. For whom
Fig. 6. Activities
Fig. 8. Commonality

4. CONCLUSION
This study empirically evaluated the appropriateness of a Uservice
typology by applying 228 unit U-services to Jeong’s
typology for the categorization of the services. As compared to the
previous studies of u-service typologies which regarded it as
meaningful to develop a theoretical framework for classification
of U-services, it is important to note that this study found the
problems with the present typology via empirical heuristic
application and identified problem areas. Jeong’s typology was
found to have high exhaustiveness and empirical workability when
the system was analyzed from empirical and theoretical points of
view. Since u-services are variable according to service categories,
they can be newly developed or combined when the needs for
them increase in future with technological or environmental
changes. The high empirical workability of the typology used in
this study can be explained by the fact that there was a consensus
of 85.5% among experts in U-services when they categorized the
services using the typology. High empirical workability helps
reduce confusion in a process of service development as it allows
U-services to be accurately classified. The results from an
empirical analysis suggest that the classification criteria should be
defined more clearly so that empirical workability is enhanced.
However, Jeong’s U-service typology needs to be improved in
terms of mutual exclusiveness, parsimony and theoretical
fruitfulness. Such typology provides a foundation in building a U-
Eco City and must be organized for extension to broadband
services. This study is significant in that it attempted empirical and
theoretical analyses of a U-service typology and came up with
ways to evaluate and improve the typology, but on the other hand
its research methodology was limited to qualitative approaches. In
order to recover this limitation, future studies will need to build an
improved typology through a quantitative analysis of contents.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was partially supported by Office of Research Affairs
(2010-7-0571) at Yonsei University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
Authors also appreciate help and support of Ms. Hahyun Kim and
Dr. Minjung Lee in preliminary analysis of this study.
This research was partially supported by a grant (07High Tech
A01) from High tech Urban Development Program funded by
Ministry of Land, Transportation and Maritime Affairs of Korean
Government. Preliminary results of this study have been reported,
in Korean, in the Journal of Korean Society of IT Services, 11(1),
pp. 325-340, in March 2012.
6. REFERENCES
[1] Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs, U-Space
Construction Technology, 2010
[2] H.J. Woo, J.H. Lee, S.Y. Park, "Proposing User-Oriented u-
Service Classification by Ubiquitous Characteristic", Journal
of the Korea Society of IT Services, V.10 N.2, pp.119~139,
2011
284
[3] H. J. Roh, "Analysis on the u-City Conceptual Design Factors
from Ubiquitous Computing Technology", Master Thesis,
Yonsei University, 2005
[4] J. C. Kwon, "A study on Law and Institution environment for
Development of U-city", National Information Society
Agency (http://www.nia.or.kr/), 2006
[5] H. M. Oh, A study on Service Convergence Roadmap for
Ubiquitous Environment, National Information Society
Agency (http://www.nia.or.kr/), 2006
[6] K. S. Jeong, T. H. Moon, S. Y. Heo, "A Study on U-City
Service Classification and the Service Framework for the
Standardization of U-City Service", Korea Planners
Association ,V.44, N.3, 2009
[7] Gu Kim, "A study on U-City service priorities and the spread
strategy", JOURNAL OF KOREAN ASSOCIATION FOR
REGIONAL INFORMATION SOCIETY, V11 No. 1, pp
127-148, 2008
[8] S. J. Ahn, D. H. Oh, "A Study on the Classification Criteria
of U-city based on the Characteristics of U-city Services",
Journal of The Korean Urban Management Association v.23
n.3, 2010
[9] W. S. Jeong, B. S. Cho, "A Study on Priorities of u-City
Services Using Weighted Model", Korea Spatial Planning
Review, V52 N.3,pp 93-214, 2007
[10] J.I. Oh, "Concept, Vision, and Vitalization Strategies of U-
City", Journal of the Korean Information Science Sociaty,
V.23. N.11, pp 21-26, 2005
[11] J.G. Lee, H.S. Uk, "A Study on the diffusion and
advancement of U-city service model", National Information
Society Agency(http://www.nia.or.kr), 2006
[12] C.S. Leem, E.J. Yu, B.G. Kim, N.S. Baek, Y.D. Son, "u-City
PIPE Model", ITR report, IT Research & evaluation, 2008
[13] Y. H. Chun, "The Diversity of Policy Tolls: Issues and
Evaluations of Tool Classifications", Journal of
Governmental Studies, V.13 N.4, pp. 1-37, 2007
[14] K.S. Jeong, T.H. Moon, S.Y. Heo, "A Study on U-service
Pool Evaluation and SRM Template for Development of U-
City SRM", korea Planners Association, V.45 N.13, 2010
[15] W.S. Jeong, B.S. Jo, H.S. Jo, “U-City Industry and Service
Classification Trends”, Korea Electronics Technology
Institute, http://www.eic.re.kr, 2006.08,
[16] Yong-Sik Lee, "Policy Instrument Typology and
Applicationon Sports for All Policy , Korea Sport Science
Institute, Korean Journal of Sport Science, , Vol. 21, No. 3,
1431-1440 2010.
[17] J.W. Lee, S.H. Baik, C.H. Lee, "Building an Integrated
Service Management Platform for Ubiquitous Ecological
Cities", IEEE Computer Society, pp.56-63, 2011

SUPPLEMENTARY TABLE 1. RESULT OF SERVICE CLASSIFICATION
Space
Human
Functions
By spatial unit
By function
By whom
For whom
For what
Activities
Behavior
C/S
Domain
Administration
Traffic
Health & welfare
Environment
Crime & Prevention
Building 2 0 8 1 3 2 6 7 7 7 9 52
Street 5 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 4 10
District 1 0 3 1 1 0 0 0 2 0 0 8
Facility 2 8 2 3 2 8 3 4 0 0 3 35
City 7 22 12 7 9 1 6 3 2 4 1 74
broadband 0 12 3 5 6 2 2 4 9 6 0 49
Information media 11 13 19 8 6 1 9 4 9 10 4 94
Spatial unit control 3 10 6 5 3 11 4 8 7 7 11 75
Community management
facility
Facilities
Management
0 0 2 0 0 0 4 4 0 1 2 13
Integrated control center 1 19 1 6 12 2 0 2 4 1 0 48
Public 14 29 8 16 20 13 1 11 0 2 4 118
Private 0 4 10 0 0 0 1 4 19 7 7 52
Public-private partnership 1 9 10 3 1 1 15 3 1 8 6 58
Public Agencies 8 3 1 11 12 10 0 2 0 0 0 47
Citizens 7 39 22 8 9 3 17 16 6 6 16 149
Businesses 0 2 5 0 1 1 0 0 14 11 1 35
Life support 7 31 20 10 8 5 16 16 4 2 15 134
Business support 8 11 9 9 13 9 1 3 12 11 2 88
Industrial support 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 4 0 8
Healthy living 0 1 16 14 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 35
Security and safety 3 40 3 1 21 13 0 0 0 2 2 85
Community service 11 1 9 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 27
Education 0 0 0 0 0 0 16 1 0 1 0 18
Economy 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 17 14 0 36
Leisure and culture 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 17 3 0 7 28
Living 0 1 17 3 13 3 1 1 0 0 5 44
Working 15 7 10 15 8 11 16 3 19 17 4 125
Moving 0 34 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 34
Playing 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 15 1 0 6 24
Cybering 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 2
Common services 15 29 9 15 17 10 5 0 1 5 0 106
Specialized services 0 13 19 4 4 4 17 13 19 12 17 119
285
Education
Tourism & Sports
Logistics
Labor & Employ
Other
Service total
Total
228
230
228
231
230
229
231
228

286

Explaining the eGovernment Paradox:
An analysis of two decades of evidence from scientific
literature and practice on barriers to eGovernment
Alberto Savoldelli
Independent Consultant
C/ Via Piolti de Bianchi, 48, Milan, Italy
+39 335 1309287
savoldellia@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Despite the plethora of research, policy analysis and practice
works produced in the last two decades for explaining the
potential of eGovernment and its impact on society, there is still
very limited evidence that the promised productivity gains have
been achieved. To date, its potential remains hypothetical. This
eGovernment paradox contrasts the level of investments with the
little impact produced and/or demonstrated so far. In this paper we
attempt to provide an interpretation of this paradox, looking
specifically at the sharp mismatch between the supply of online
public services (deployment) and their usage (adoption), which
we define as the “Adoption paradox”. The paper on the bases of a
systematic review of the adoption barriers uncovered by almost
twenty years of scientific and practitioner-generated analysis and
evidence, rises the conclusions that, in most mature governments,
the key barriers to real take up of eGovernment are those related
to the lack of both a structured policy evaluation process and an
effective stakeholders' engagement. The paper suggests that the
critical success factor for eGovernment adoption is a transparent
and trustworthy policy decision making process and that its key
prerequisite is the definition and implementation of a well
organized and fully participatory evaluation framework.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J4 Social and behavioural sciences; K.4 Computers and Society;
K.6 Management of Computers and Information Systems
General Terms
Management, Measurement, Performance, Economics,
Evaluation.
Keywords
eGovernment adoption, Barriers, Drivers, Participation, Trust,
Public Value, Policy Making, Digital Society
1. INTRODUCTION
We are now well into the second decade of Information and
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Cristiano Codagnone
Milan State University
Via Conservatorio, 7, Milan, Italy
+39 02 50321247
cristiano.codagnone@unimi.it
287
Gianluca Misuraca
European Commission, JRC-IPTS
C/ Inca Garcilaso, 3, Seville, Spain
+34 954 480 572
gianluca.misuraca@ec.europa.eu
Communication Technology (ICT) usage in public administration
service delivery. First evidence of this can be found in the
“reinventing government” movement launched in 1992-1993
through the well-known writing of Osborne & Gablear [1-2]. As a
result, a large body of inter-disciplinary scientific literature has
accumulated and been critically reviewed [2-6]. Alongside this
scientific literature, there is also a growing body of institutional
and policy-oriented reports [7-12] and of practitioner-generated
analysis, case studies, and measurement efforts [13-27].
As yet, however, there is very limited evidence that these gains
have been achieved and eGovernment’s potential remains
hypothetical [7]; [13]; [14]; [28]; [29]. Not surprisingly, some
authors have started to talk about the “eGovernment Paradox”
[30]; [31]. This follows the more famous “IT Productivity
Paradox” summarised in Robert Solow’s quip that “you can see
computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics” [32];
[33].
It was not until the mid '90s that the large investments made by
firms into ICT produced productivity gains. The reasons for this
paradox were mainly: a) measurement error (input and output not
properly measured); b) lag time (ICT take time before having an
effect); c) redistribution of profit (the effect can be positive for
some and negative for others leading to a zero sum where no
aggregate effect can be demonstrated); d) mismanagement of ICT
(ineffective deployment not matching ICT with complementary
initiatives such as re-organisation).
In the case of eGovernment, the paradox can be seen in the
contrast between the level of investments and the little impact
produced and/or demonstrated so far [30]. It may also be due to
the fact that delivering citizen-centric eGovernment does not
necessarily reduce costs [29]; [34]. Our view is that the most
evident and straightforward “eGovernment Paradox” is the sharp
mismatch between the supply of online public services
(deployment) and their usage (adoption). In Europe, for instance,
the traditional benchmarking of eGovernment services shows that
supply has reached saturation for most common online services in
a majority of countries [14]. Yet, citizens (and to a lesser extent
companies) are still more likely to use traditional methods (e.g.,
phone calls or in-person visits) than the Web to interact with the
government [14]; [35].
For Europe, a simple description (both longitudinal and crosssectional)
of eGovernment benchmarking data and a look at
Eurostat statistics about usage of eGovernment services clearly
show this mismatch, The supply-side index stands at 70% on
average and the average usage percentage is below 30% of the

adult population. A recent more sophisticated statistical analysis
of this data concluded that there is no statistically significant
correlation between the level of supply of eGovernment services
and the level of usage [29]; [36]. The “Adoption Paradox”
encompasses, in our view, several of the reasons cited by the
authors who introduced the concept of the “eGovernment
Paradox” and those who explained the more famous “IT
Productivity Paradox”. It is almost self-explanatory that if
adoption does not reach significant levels then the financial
resources invested in eGovernment simply creates a stratification
of costs and no benefits, either internal or external (as was the
case at the beginning of Internet banking). So, it is strategic to
investigate in depth the reasons for non-adoption, as they will
include related issues such as the lack of restructuring of policy
making and implementation processes, measurement problems, all
of which explain the excessive time lag between the
implementation of eGovernment and the delivery of its promises.
In Section 2, we illustrate the method and conceptualisation used
and in Section 3 we report the results of the systematic analysis of
the adoption barriers uncovered by about twenty years of
scientific and practitioner-generated analysis and evidence. In
Section 4, we discuss in depth the key findings of our analysis.
These show that in the most mature public administrations, the
key barriers to a real take up of eGovernment are those related to
the lack of a structured policy evaluation process and a lack of
stakeholders' participation in the decision making process. Finally,
Section 5 offers the conclusions and directions for future research.
2. METHOD AND CONCEPTUALISATION
The systematic and diachronic analysis of eGovernment adoption
barriers is based on an extensive literature review of a wide range
of scientific journals and papers published in the last two decades,
as well as practitioner-generated analysis 1 . The results of the
literature review have been classified by re-elaborating the model
proposed in [37], to which we have added one more dimension of
analysis that we have called “Political/Institutional”. This has
been done in order to highlight specific barriers related to the
public policy management process. In order to make the results of
our analysis more intelligible and also actionable in terms of
future redesign of the eGovernment policy design and
implementation processes, we have further developed from the
original and well known work of Layne & Lee, [38, further
improved by Andersen [39] in 2006], our own version of the
Maturity Model (MM) against which the barriers have been
mapped. This re-elaboration integrated the original model with
key characteristics of eGovernment that have been identified by
several scholars in literature [6]; [13]; [16]; [18]; [40]; [41]; [42];
[43]. Our conceptualisation of the MM is illustrated in Figure 1
and it is explained here below. It must be stressed that this model
is a hybrid conceptual mix of empirical and prescriptive elements
in that the later stages of the model are based on very rare best
practices rather than widely observed empirical experiments.
The Maturity Model has two conceptual dimensions:
• Process orientation. This dimension is defined as a
combination of the following variables: a) level of
1 The literature review includes journals such as Government Information
Quarterly; Strategic Information Systems; Business Process Management
Journal; Journal of Global Information Management; Information Polity;
International Journal of Public Sector Management; International
Journal of Public Information System; Public Administration Review).
288
integration within each single public administration [42]; b)
level of integration across public administrations, in jargon
“joined-up government” [40]; [42]; [44]; and c) degree of
processes’ outcomes orientation [16].
• Citizens centricity. This dimension is defined as a
combination of the following variables: a) degree of civil
servants acceptance of, and support to, eGovernment [45];
and b) level of citizen involvement in eGovernment services
design and development [18]; [46]; [47].
Figure 1 – eGovernment Maturity Model Source: Authors
elaboration on [38]; [39].
In the space defined by the two axes, as illustrated in Figure 1, the
Maturity Model is shaped by two key drivers:
• People and Organization driver. This driver concerns: a)
the depth of the cultural changes in relation to eGovernment
both inside the administration and among citizens; and b) the
level of digital divide within which eGovernment is
embedded.
• Technology and Information driver. It helps to determine
which technological stage has been achieved by a given
public organization and the level of integration and openness
of public information and data to civil servants and citizens.
As a result of combining the two dimensions and the two drivers,
the following six stages of maturity can be identified:
• Stage 1 – Web presence through a simple online
transposition of administrative processes without a clear
orientation to outcomes. Typical eGovernment initiatives at
this stage focus on infrastructural projects aimed at bundling
the territory with ICT networks.
• Stage 2 – Communication backbones are laid down and wide
local area networks are completed. At this stage integration
initiatives at both organizational and technological level are
promoted within (among departments) and across public
administrations.
• Stage 3 – At this stage, transaction services are deployed
together with privacy and security solutions to support these
transactions. Dematerialization initiatives are largely adopted
together with significant back office simplification.
Management changes are introduced inside public
administrations. Civil servants’ and public managers’
performance evaluation is largely based upon their capability
to achieve simplification targets.
• Stage 4 – Outcome-oriented processes are widely
implemented thanks to ICT adoption. Actions aimed at
reducing digital divide and stimulating adoption of

eGovernment services to a large extent of the population are
also deployed. Some significant examples of information,
data sharing and data integration among public organizations
are also evident. Measurement systems of public values of
eGovernment services are significantly implemented even if
not fully integrated with policy decision-making processes.
The evaluation of public administration managers is largely
based on their capability to achieve outcome related
objectives.
• Stage 5 – A large extent of data and information are made
available for all and some significant business initiatives
based upon public sector information usage are in place.
Cloud computing infrastructures and cloud repositories for
public administrations data are also largely available and
empowering actions aimed at stimulating citizens and civil
servants towards ICT and eco-sustainability of eGovernment
services are conducted. Measurement systems are fully
implemented and linked with policy decision making
processes.
• Stage 6 – ICT is not anymore a barrier to the take up of
eGovernment services and the behaviour for continuous
improvement is pervasive in public administration also
unleashing social innovation [48] is widely diffuse in
designing and developing public services.
It is clear that the MM applied to eGovernment is not independent
from the broader level of maturity of the Digital Society [49]
within which eGovernment deployment and adoption is embedded
[29]. Yet, the process of digital maturation of a given society or
local community is never as linear as the MM would suggest [6];
[50]; [51]; [52]. Therefore for a long-term sustainability of
eGovernment services we have also to understand the needed
efforts that each public administration has to make for reaching
the required level of maturity suitable for deploying and rollingout
a given eGovernment product/service and, then, supporting its
effective adoption and long-term sustainability [29]; [52].
However in most mature administrations neither the level of
digital divide nor the lack of ICT infrastructures seem to be
among the most constraining barriers to eGovernment adoption. It
is rather the lack of a structured and trustworthy decision making
process, effectively involving citizens and stakeholders that slow
down adoption, which in turn weaken the capability to effectively
and timely absorb and use public funds [53]. In this respect the
lack of formal methods for managing and monitoring
eGovernment initiatives further compound the challenges of
successful adoption of eGovernment services [37 - 54]. These
barriers are more and more evident at local level [4], where there
is still an high variance in performances as commented for
instance in [14]; [55]. At the same time the local government
represents the most favourable ground for enhancing citizen
centred eGovernment services with a real engagement of
stakeholders and beneficiaries and an effective empowerment of
the local community [13]; [19]; [43]; [47]; [56], [57] as discussed
in the next chapters.
3. RESULTS
In this section we first apply a synchronic perspective to better
interpret the evolution of adoption barriers and then extract the
key lessons learned. The synchronic perspective we adopted,
foresees the following three periods of implementation of
eGovernment: 1994-2004; 2005-2009; 2010-2012. The choice of
analysing time periods that have different length is due to the need
289
of observing the eGovernment phenomenon of mature public
administrations in their evolutionary pathways that were quite
slow at the beginning as mainly related to deployment of ICT
infrastructures and awareness actions (see MM in Figure 1) and
faster as much as the pathways were related to deployment and
take-up of eGovernment services:
• 1994-2004: this period ranges from the start-up of the
“reinventing government” [1]; [2]; movement, to the first
review of the Lisbon Strategy [58] launched by the European
Union in the year 2000 with the aim to promote ICT in all
competitive domains, including public administration. The
optimistic view on ICT performance and the Internet
diffusion has led to emphasize the lack of telecommunication
infrastructures [8] and their communication capacity [38] as
key barriers to eGovernment adoption. Both of which in turn
have been associated to the lack of institutional support and
standards [8] as a source of “Political/Institutional” barrier.
The concept of “trust in eServices usage by citizens” is often
associated with the concept of “security in transactions”
and “trust in government in preserving personal data
privacy, once the citizens provided them for using an
eService” [38]; [59]. “Managerial/Organizational” barriers
were also important to overcome with particular reference to
“shortage of ICT skills” in public administration [41], while
[8] sees as important barriers the “information
mismanagement and reluctance to share information among
departments”.
• 2005-2009: the period of implementation of the i2010
strategy in the European Union [60]. ICT infrastructural
problems are still considered relevant and in particular
operational costs and maintenance of eGovernment systems
are considered as crucial obstacle [4]; [9]; [20]; [40]; [44],
especially at the local level where the lack of financial
resources is more evident [4]; [9]; [42]; [55]. Technological
and operational barriers are still mentioned, and the most
noteworthy are the “lack of integration across government
systems”, the “lack of knowledge regarding eGovernment
interoperability”, together with the “lack of citizens’ trust
about eGovernment services privacy and security”. Lack of
ICT skills in governmental organization and lack of
cooperation amongst departments together with resistance to
change of the civil servants are also still mentioned [4]; [9];
[40]; [42]; [43]. During this period, however, the most
important barriers affecting eGovernment adoption are the
lack of “evaluation and measurement of eGovernment
services” [4]; [10]; [39], the “difficulties in establishing a
firm connection between ICT innovation, benefits and
outcomes” [3]; [9] and the “digital divide” [9]. Even if still in
embryonic terms, during this period start to be considerd
important barriers the “lack of demand side involvement in
the eGovernment decision making process” [10], the “lack of
trust on government and on government reform” [45] and the
“cost of the services for the users and their perception of
benefits” [4]; [62]; [63], together with the “lack of
eGovernent policy framework that can be applied at local
level” [4]; [42].
• 2010-2012: this period starts from the launch of the so called:
“Digital Agenda for Europe” [66] until today. Most recently
the “political/institutional” barriers have been seemingly
singled out as the most important obstacle for the full take up
of eGovernment services, with particular reference to “lack

of citizens' participation to the policy making process” and
“lack of measurement system on eGovernment process
performances and outcomes” [7]; [51]; [64]; [65]. According
to the authors discussing them, these barriers have the side
effects of producing a “lack of transparency and trust on
political decisions” [64]; [65]; [66], together with a “lack of
trust and empowerment of the citizens” [13]. Such authors
suggest a possible way for overcoming these barriers by both
tackling the “lack of eGovernment policy framework that can
be applied at local level” [14] and the “lack of formal
methods for supporting eGovernment decision making
process” [5]; [52]; [53]; [65]; [67]. An initial attemp of
analising barriers related to the “lack of sustainability of
eGovernment initiatives” is presented in [51]. At the same
time “technological/operational” barriers seem less
important for the scientific community except for the “lack of
open sources and open data standards” [67] and the
“shortage of financial resources in public sector
organizations” [14]; while the “managerial/organizational”
barriers are considered still important with particular
reference to the behaviour of policy makers and civil servants
in supporting actions enhancing trustworthiness of the
citizens, by reducing “lack of trust in the government
willingness to allow citizens to have their say if their views
contradict official policy”, “lack of transparency and trust in
government” and “lack of personalized and secure services”
[18].
In coherence with the MM (Figure 1), if we make a cross-analysis
of the evolution of the barriers to eGovernment, we can say that in
the last twenty years for the most mature public administrations,
the technological barriers have been significantly reduced but
eGovernment services adoption is far to be effective and there is
no clear evidence of which benefits ICT offer to citizens. This
situation is not so different from what private organizations met at
the early stages of ICT introduction - between the ’80s and the
’90s - where ICT has produced significant expectations. Also in
the private sector at the very beginning of the technological
revolution, ICT possibilities were overestimated [68], and the
“manifesto” of Hammer and Champy [69] in 1993 was considered
the ultimate solution for improving performance and
competitiveness in any private organization. Just few years later
(see [51]; amongst several other authors) ICT assumed the role of
enabling factor for supporting organisational changes and
business process integration [70], and the role of both “change
management” and “customer satisfaction” became central for
competitiveness. No more than fifteen years later similar ICT
adoption pathways and pit-falls have been followed by the public
sector, unfortunately without learning too much from mistakes
and failed experiences occurred in the past in the private sector
[42]; [45]. An evidence of such argumentation can be found by a
comparison of the position papers that Accenture has written on
eGovernment services adoption at the beginnings of the years
2000 and what the same organization has recently considered as
the best approach to the take up of eGovernment services. In the
Accenture’s position paper of 2001 “multichannel delivery and
CRM” were identified as “the key issues government had to
consider to improve the level of online services provided to
citizens and business” [15]; ten years later the same organization
recognized that “only cultural changes in public sector workers
and collaborative learning between citizens and civil servants,
together with ICT as enabling factors, could support an effective
eGovernment adoption” [21]. Therefore it seems now evident that
290
eGovernment adoption in mature public administrations is
affected by the lack of trust on both government behaviour and on
possible misuse of digital information provided by citizens to civil
servants. These two aspects of the problem are more related to the
stakeholders’ and citizens’ perception of the policy making
process and their expectation on eGovernment services [28]; [71].
As Van de Walle [54] says: “achieving good performances in
public services by governments is only a partial way to achieve
citizens satisfaction and to improve trust in government”, only a
transparent and participative policy making process can close the
gap [10]; [47]; [65], as shown in Figure 2, where only a well
structured policy planning process fully integrated with a
performance management system and truly participated by
stakeholders and citizens, can support a wide adoption of
eGovernment services and creating a well established Digital
Society.
But, what does it mean “better Policy Planning Process”? Which
are its key components? Which are main barriers to its adoption
and which are the real benefits gained by its use in public
governance?
Possible answers to these questions are discussed in the following
section, where we have gone deeper in understanding the
meanings and usefulness of Policy Planning Process in
eGovernment adoption.
Figure 2 – eGovernment services adoption virtuous cycle
4. DISCUSSION
From the findings of our review as presented in the previous
section we identified the Policy Planning Process as the core area
where public administrations must make improvements in order to
support eGovernment adoption and the overall development of the
Digital Society. In this section we go a step further discussing key
barriers that hinder an efficient and effective Policy Planning
Process. Before doing that we have to define such process and its
main components.
The Policy planning process. As Heeks [10] says: “Policy
Planning Process has a circular lifecycle”. It starts from needs
arising from the community where the policy makers have been
elected and it follows several stages that describes a policy cycle
as shown in Figure 3, that we have adapted from [10]; [72].
• Step 1 – Policy Strategy Formulation. It is the key step
because it provides motivations and justifications of why a
certain Policy Programme has to be implemented.
Unfortunately, policy makers often begin to formulate a

policy agenda, as Heeks [10] says, based on “poor
comparative benchmark performances” and “scarcely
quantified good news/benefits” of previous eGovernment
initiatives done by the same administration and/or others in
previous Policy cycles. Lack of impact evaluation of past
policies [4]; [39] is certainly one of the main reasons
justifying difficulties of policy makers in defining correct
long-term strategic plans. Another negative effect of lack of
impacts evaluation of past policies is the scarce public
confidence in the results of policy decisions. Citizens
perceive this as lack of transparency of Policy Planning
Process, thus the distance between policy makers and civil
servants on one side and citizens on the other increases [29];
[57]; [65]. In this regard, it is common opinion among
several authors [10]; [13]; [42]; [47] that Policies have
serious difficulties in being adopted without an effective
engagement of beneficiaries and stakeholders since the very
beginning of the Policy Planning Process.
• Step 2 – Policy Guidelines Definition and Approval,
where Policy makers define the strategic objectives of their
policy agenda. To be effective, these objectives, more
commonly called “Outcomes” [6], should be based upon
both citizens’ expectations and needs of stakeholders and
beneficiaries. Unfortunately, often policy makers and public
managers have serious difficulties in linking decisions on
policy strategy (Step1), with outcomes definition (Step 2)
[3]; [9]. On the contrary this link is very powerful for Public
Administrations. Once more this problem is due to a Policy
Planning Process scarcely supported by quantified data and
information on previous policy impacts [21]; [42]. The
consequence of this lack of information is that Policy Plans
are driven by contingencies and constraints, rather than midlong
term strategy and well grounded digital policy.
• Step 3 – Policy Implementation Plan Design and
Approval. Public managers, together with stakeholders,
produce an Implementation Plan of possible eGovernment
initiatives that should be coherent with Policy Guidelines
defined in “Step 2”. Usually such initiatives take the form of
a “Project Idea”, subjected to budget constraints and targeted
project objectives. Often risk assessment actions, together
with possible countermeasures, are also provided at this Step
[11]. The most common problem that usually affects Policy
Implementation Plan design and, then, the success of the
entire Policy Planning Process, is the mismatch between
policy outcomes (as defined in “Step 2”) and project
objectives [12]; [73]. More often civil servants in charge of
Policy Implementation Plan and Stakeholders interested to
promote a given “project idea” are used to describe it in a
quite optimistic way, overestimating challenges and without
considering budget constraints that could reduce the breath of
the project’s impacts. Another important barrier is the lack of
a preventive sustainability assessment of the eGovernment
service to be deployed [46], which quite often mines
eGovernment project's uptaking.
• Step 4 – Policy Implementation through Projects.
eGovernment projects are selected in coherence with the
Implementation Plan and then deployed on the territory
through Projects. Starting from the “project ideas” approved
in the previous “Step 3”, public administrations in charge for
funding the projects launch procurement processes based on
291
technical and administrative specifications. Selected
providers cooperate with beneficiaries and stakeholders for
achieving the expected objectives and for producing the
agreed project’s outputs. Project management capabilities of
Civil servants are required together with good ICT skills and
organizational knowledge [54]; [74]. Once more a key
success factor of this step is the effective involvement of
stakeholders and beneficiaries in project development and
deployment [42]; [67]. To this regard some scholars believe
this involvement would be more effective if anticipated at the
initial stage of Planning Process (“Step 1”), thus citizens’
trust [65] is increased and co-production initiatives [44]; [47]
could have better chances to succeed. More common barriers
are “the resistance to change of the civil servants” [64] and
the “lack of motivation of public managers in sharing and
opening data amongst organization and to the public” [7].
Figure 3, Policy Planning Process Cycle (our elaboration from
Heeks [10].
• Step 5 – Policy and Projects monitoring. This is a
fundamental stage for a successful policy cycle
implementation. Unfortunately, quite often this step mainly
addresses the in-itinere evaluation of on-going eGovernment
initiatives, with a very limited and superficial evaluation of
the outcomes/impacts produced by the policy plan [17]. This
is because eGovernment projects, as all other public
investments, need to demonstrate that the public money
produced the output specified in the legal documents signed
with providers. Usually no specific legal constraints are
agreed between administrations and providers in relation to
impacts on beneficiaries that a given project should obtain.
Moreover, the cost of an effective measurement system of
the impacts of the Policy Plan and the long time frame when
these should be achieved, discourage administrations,
especially local ones, to emphasize this step [7]; [51]. On the
contrary this has to be considered a fundamental step of the
Policy Plan, without which the level of trust between citizens
[65] and Public Administration would be significantly
reduces, further penalising eGovernment adoption.
• Step 6 – Gap Analysis of the Policy Implementation
Plan. This step is aimed at supporting policy makers to move
on to a new cycle, with a new policy based upon key results
of the previous one [10]. However, more often the
importance of this step is underestimated because usually

very poor impact assessment activities are made by public
administrations in the previous “Step 5” [4]; [39].
In theory, policy makers can start policy planning life cycle once a
policy cycle is completed and move on to a new one with new
strategic objectives [10]. In practice this might not happen
because the Policy Planning Process is highly context-dependent
and extremely affected by contingencies and needs that might be
present on the territory and that have a high degree of urgency.
Unfortunately cases from unsuccessful adoption of eGovernment
tell us how difficult it is to define a structured and comprehensive
implementation of such process and its maintenance over time
[60]. Table 2 shows the key barriers to an effective execution of a
Policy Planning Cycle. This is particularly true at the local level
where Policy Makers and Civil Servants are very close to citizens
and stakeholders [13]; [76], and the presence of a well organized
Policy Evaluation Process could produce more direct and
trustworthy effects on eGovernment adoption [4]; [14]; [42]; [55].
Table 2 – Barriers to eGovernment Policy Planning Cycle
execution
eGovernment
Policy
Planning
Cycle
Policy
Strategy
Formulation
Policy
Guidelines
Definition and
Approval
Policy
Implementatio
n Plan (∑ i-n=
Project ideas)
Design and
Approval
Policy
implementatio
n through
Projects
Barriers
• lack of evaluation and measurement of policy
strategy [4]; [39];
• lack of stakeholders and beneficiary involvement
in needs identification [10]; [13]; [43]; [47];
• lack of comprehensiveness and continuity of
policies and programmes [8];
• lack of clear vision [42]; [44];
• lack of exAnte evaluation approach [12];
• lack of a structured evaluation process circle with
an effective engagement of stakeholders and
beneficiaries [22]; [46];
• difficulties in linking policy decision with
outcomes objectives [3]; [9]; [76]
• lack of stakeholders and beneficiary participation
in policy objectives definition [10]; [7]; [43];
• unclear policy management strategy [42]; [44];
• mismatching between policy outcomes (if
•
defined) and project objectives [12]; [74];
project selected on expected outputs and not on
expected outcomes [17];
• lack of stakeholders and beneficiary involvement
in projects design and specification [13]; [43];
[47];
• lack of coordination and/or strategic planning
[8];
• lack of coordination and cooperation between
departments and among administrations [40];
[42]; [44];
• lack of structured risk management procedures
[11];
• lack of stakeholders and beneficiary involvement
in project development [18] [43]; [47]; [54]; [66];
[68];
• lack of project management expertise [54; [74];
• lack of knowledge and skills for assessing the
risk and making contingency plan [7]; [68];
• resistance to change [65];
• Government departments failing to agree and
implement common procedures and standards to
provide shared networked eGovernmnet services
Policy and
Projects
monitoring
and Gap
Analysis
[9];
• Lack of motivation of public managers in sharing
and opening data amongst organization and to
public [7];
• project monitored on achieved outputs and not on
achieved outcomes [17];
• Lack of evaluation and measurement procedure
[4]; [39];
• Lack of measurement system on eGovernment
process performances and outcomes [7]; [52];
[65]; [66];
• Lack of involvement of citizens and stakeholders
in monitoring projects and policies and for
supporting their sustainability [23];
• Lack of transparency of the monitoring process
and its results on project impacts [23]; [66].
5. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH
Our analysis underlines how in the mature government (see the
MM described in Figure 1) technological barriers to eGovernment
adoption have been significantly reduced, but eGovernment
services are far away to be adopted and there are no clear
evidences of which benefits ICT can offer to citizens. Resistance
to change by civil servants and policy makers are now considered
the most important barriers, causing an evident lack of
trustworthiness in the citizens towards political institutions. The
consequences of these barriers is an unstructured and
untrustworthy decision making process, that slow down adoption,
which in turn weaken the capability to effectively and timely
absorb and use public funds.
292
Two fundamental barriers emerge from our study:
� lack of full involvement of stakeholders and beneficiaries
since the very beginning of the Planning Process;
� lack of an evaluation process that should be conducted in
parallel with each step of the Policy Planning Process itself.
This is especially true at the local level that on the contrary might
benefit more thanks to the proximity among Policy decision
makers, civil servants and citizens [14]; [55]; [57]. However as
[65] and [71] clarify, the two key barriers to an effective Policy
Planning Process are not independent from each other, but rather,
they are the two faces of the same coin:
Good Governance implies stakeholders and citizens participation
that cannot be guaranteed without transparency in the decision
making process; high level of transparency cannot be achieved
without a trusted and robust evaluation process.
Figure 4 shows the circularity of both planning and evaluation
processes and their interaction with the stakeholders and
beneficiaries. As described in the figure, the inner circle
represents the Policy Planning Process, while the outer one
describes the Evaluation Process where the ex-Ante evaluation
receives as input the results of the ex-Post evaluation of the
previous Policy Planning Cycle and then, it produces as output the
objectives of the new Policy Planning, that will be subject to both
an in-itinere evaluation and a new ex-Post one. The middle circle
defines the links between the two other circles. The two processes
run in parallel and the key aspect of both is the active involvement
of stakeholders [23]. Moreover the evaluation process that has the
aim to assess the Public Value of a given Policy Strategy, by
measuring the degree of achievement of the Policy

Implementation Plan’s outcomes and the quality 2 of
eGovernment products and services, in the most transparent and
participatory way as possible [11]; [24]; [86], presents the still
unresolved problem of measuring these values in each step of the
Policy Planning Cycle, maintaining the coherence of each
measure and preserving the characteristics of transparency and
reproducibility of the measurement. In this regard, scientific
literature provides several examples of metrics which can be
utilized for quantifying public value to a given eGovernment
Project [81 - 82]. Some of them have been defined also by the
authors of this article in the EU funded eGovernment Economics
Project (eGEP) [83 – 85]. However the majority of them have
been developed to benchmark eGovernment initiatives once they
are already in place and none of them has the capability to
evaluate a Policy Implementation Plan and, at the same time, the
eGovernment projects it underlines. Finally in Figure 5 we have
defined the key drivers for eGovernment adoption that in our
opinion have to be considered to overcome the barriers identified
in our analysis.
Figure 4 – Circular nature of the Evaluation Process and its
relationship with Policy Planning Circle
Figure 5 defines the relationships among key drivers of
eGovernment adoption, starting from the Parasuraman & Grewal
model [87]: eGovernment adoption depends on both high service
and product quality, together with a meaningful Public Value of a
given service [17]; [44]; [61]; [73]; [85]. However, these drivers
are filtered by public opinion’s perceptions on both the value of
service/product deployed and the level of transparency of the
related decision making process [65]; [66]; [76]. Positive
perception of value of both the eGovernment initiatives and
transparency of the decision making process, increases the
citizen’s trust in policy makers and public administration and it
stimulates eGovernment adoption.
2 Measure of the quality of the outputs of eGovernment projects can be
addressed under different perspectives [78-79]. However in our opinion,
the quality of eGovernment Projects should be mainly measured in respect
to the contribution of eGovernment services to increase participation and
co-production (see Figure 1 - eGovernment adoption Maturity Model),
thus the quality dimension should help to understand which is the
capability of a given project to prevent lock in situations and to promote
open technologies/services [80].
293
A higher level of public participation in the decision making
process can improve the quality of the product and services and
their public values and thus it can increase both citizen’s positive
perception and trust of policy makers and public administration
[20]; [26]. The scientific community has already proposed several
approaches to assess citizens perceptions on a given policy
making process [13]; [43]; [65]; [87]; and many have attempted to
explore how to stimulate public participation for a better quality
of eGovernment services and their adoption [39]; [22]; [26]; [27];
[57]; [66]. There are also some examples of practical usage of
citizens satisfaction surveys for create better eGovernment Policy
Programmes, like the “Common Measurement Tool” developed
by the Canadian Government that defined specific guidelines for
assessing the citizens’ satisfactions on eGovernment services
performances [88]. However several authors agree that still exist a
lack of measurement systems in eGovernment process
performance and outcomes [7]; [29]; [51]; [64]; [65]; [87].
Figure 5 – Key drivers of eGovernment adoption: authors'
adaptation from Parasuraman&Grewal [87].
This is particularly true at local level where there is little evidence
of Policy Evaluation Frameworks suitable for supporting Policy
Making Processes [14]; [29]; [55]; [56]; [88]. The scope of this
paper was therefore to contribute closing this gap and identifying
the key barriers and drivers aimed at supporting the full adoption
of eGovernment services towards the realisation of a well
established Digital Society. In future research we aim at further
enhancing the findings of this analysis contributing to the
development of policy evaluation methodologies, frameworks and
related models that can effectively assess the policy planning
process and the impact of eGovernment, including in particular
the ''openness dimension'' that underlines a transparent and
trustworthy participatory policy-planning process.
Disclaimer
The views expressed in this paper are purely those of the authors
and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an
official position of the European Commission.
6. REFERENCES
[1] Osborne, D., Gablear, T. (1992). Reinventing
Government: how the entrepreneurial spirit is transforming
the public sector. Published by Addison-Wesley.
[2] Osborne, D., (1993). “Reinventing
Government”. In Public Productivity & Management
Review, 16(4), pp:349-356.

[3] Titah, R., Barki, H., (2005). eGovernmnet
Adoption and Acceptance: a LiteratureReview, Chaire de la
Chaire du Canada en implementation et gestion des
technologies des information. HEC Montreal.
[4] Lofstedt, U., (2005). “eGovernment:
Assessment of current research an some proposal for future
directions”. InInternational Journal of Public Information
System. 1, pp: 39-52.
[5] Yildiz, M., (2007). “eGovernmnet research.
Reviewing the literature, limitation and ways forward”. In
Government Information Quarterly, 24( ), pp: 646-665.
[6] Hassan, H., S., Shehab, E., Peppard, J.,
(2011). “Recent advances in e-services in the public sector:
state of the art and future trend”. In Business Process
Management Journal. 17(3), pp: 526-545.
[7] UN – DESA (United Nations Department of
Economic and Social Affairs), (2010). eGovernmnet survey
2010: leveraging eGovernmnet at a time of financial and
economic crisis.
[8] UN – DESA (United Nations Department of
Economic and Social Affairs), (2003). Benchmarking
eGovernment: A global perspective: Assessing the progress
of the UN member states.
[9] European Commission DG Information
Society and Media Modinis Study, (2006). Breacking
Barriers to eGovernment: Overcoming obstacles to
improving European public services.
[10] Heeks, R., (2006). Understanding and
Measuring eGovernment: International Benchmarking
Studies. Paper prepared for UNDESA workshop on
“eParticipation and eGovernment: Understanding the
Present and Creating the Future”. 27-28 July, Budapest,
Hungary.
[11] OECD, (2007). eGovernment for better
Government. OECD eGovernment Studies.
[12] OECD, (2009), Implementation guidelines on
evaluation and capacity building for local and micro
regional level – “the Hungary case”, OECD publication
[13] Pratchett, L., Durose, C., Lowndes, V., Smith,
G., Stoker, G., & Wales, C., (2009). Empowering
Communities to influence Local Decision Making: a
Systematic Review of the Evidence. London: Department for
Communities and Local Government.
[14] Capgemini, (2010). Digitizing Public Service
In Europe: Putting Ambition into Action, 9th Benchmark
Measurement, (2010). Delivered for the European
Commission, DG Information Society: Brussels.
[15] Accenture, (2001). eGovernment Leadership:
Rhetoric vs Reality – Closing the Gap. Company position
paper.
[16] Gupta, M., P., & Jana, D., (2003).
“eGovernment evaluation: a framework and case study”.
InGovernment Information Quarterly, 20, pp: 365-387.
[17] Perrin, B., (2006). Moving from Outputs to
Outcomes: Practical Advice from Governments Around the
World. Managing for performances and results series.
Report sponsored by World Bank and the IBM Center for
the Business of Government.
294
[18] Kolsker, A., Lee-Kelley, L., (2008).
“Citizens’ attitudes towards eGovernment and eGovernance:
a UK study”. In International Journal of Public Sector
Management. 21(7), pp: 723-738.
[19] Norris, D., F., (2006).Electronic Government
at the Grassroots: the State of the practice. In A. V.
Anttiroiko and M. Malkis (Eds.): Enciclopedia of Digital
Government. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Reference.
[20] Horst, M., Kuttschreuter, M., Gutteling, M.,
J., (2007). “Perceived usefulness, personal experiences, risk
perception and trust as determinants of adoption of
eGovernment services in The Netherlands”. In Computers in
Human Behaviour, 23( ), pp: 1838 -1852.
[21] Accenture, (2011). Driving Public
Enterpreneurship: Governmnet as a catalyst for innovation
and growth in Europe. Company position paper in
conjunction with Oxford Economics.
[22] Jones, S., Irani, Z., Sharif, A., Themistocleus,
M., (2006). eGovernment evaluation: reflection on two
organizational studies. In Proceesings of the 39 th Hawaii
International Conferences on System Science.
[23] Sutton, K., (2004). Local Citizens
Participation: Case Study of a Community Development
Board.
[24] Codagnone, C., Undheim, T.,
(2008).“Government Efficiency and Effectiveness: The
Theory and Practice of Evaluation and Measurment”. In
European Journal of ePractice.1(4), pp: 1-15.
[25] Johnsen, A., (2004), The politics of
performances measurement: what does 25 years of
experiences tell us about the state of performance
measurement in public management, European Group of
Public Administration Conference, Lublijana.
[26] Wang, X., Wan Wart, M., (2007). “When
Public Participation in Administration Lead to Trust: An
Empirical Assessment of Managers’Perceptions: Essays on
Citizens Participation and Governance”. In Public
Administration Review. (2), pp: 265-278.
[27] Reddic. C., G., (2004). “A two stage model of
eGovernment: Theories and empirical evidences for U.S.
cities”. In Government Information Quarterly, 21(1), pp:
51-64.
[28] Dawes, S., S., (2008). An Exploratory
Framework for Future eGovernment Research Investments.
Proceedings of the 41 st Hawaii International Conference on
Systems Science.
[29] Misuraca G. and Rossel, P., (2011).
Reflexivity, modelling and weak signals of transformational
tracks to support both micro- and macro-measuring of
Information society services. In Proceedings of the 5th
International Conference on Theory and Practice of
Electronic Governance (ICEGOV2011), Tallinn, Estonia,
26-28 September 2011 - ACM International Conference
Proceedings Series, ACM Press.
[30] Bertot, J. C., Jaeger, P. T. (2008). The E-
Government paradox: Better customer service doesn't
necessarily cost less. In Government Information Quarterly,
25(2), 149-154.
[31] Castelnovo, W. (2010). Is there an eGovernment Paradox?
In D. O’Donnel (Ed.), 10th European eGovernment

Conference on eGovernment (pp. 90-98). Limerick, Ireland:
Academic Publishing.
[32] Solow, R. (1987). We'd better watch out. New York Times,
July 12, p. 36.
[33] Solow, R. (1998). The productivity paradox.
Issues in Science and Technology, 15(1), 9-10.
[34] Misuraca, G., and Rossel, P., (2011).
Measuring and Meta-measuring; in search of new Pathways
for Modelling Impacts of ICT-enabled services on the
Information Society, (2011). In Proceedings of the IFIP
2011 eGovernment Conference (Delft, Netherland, 28
August – 2 September 2011 - http://www.egovconference.org/egov-2011.
[35] Chabrow, (2004) E., Survey Says Citizens
Want More Than eGovernment.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/21100103.
Retrieved on January 24 2012.
[36] Fernández-i-Marín, X. (2011). The Impact of e-Government
Promotion in Europe: Internet Dependence and Critical
Mass. In Policy & Internet, 3(4).
[37] Kunstelj, M., Vintar, M., (2004). “Evaluating
the progress of eGovernmnet development: A critical
analysis”. In Information Policy, 9(3-4). pp: 131-148.
[38] Layne, K., Lee, J., W., (2001). “Developing
fully functional e-government: a four stage model”. In
Government Information Quarterly, 9(2), pp: 122-136.
[39] Andersen, K., V., Henrisken, H., Z., (2006).
“eGovernment maturity model: extension of the Layne and
Lee model”. In Government Information Quarterly, 23 (2),
pp: 236-238.
[40] Gil-Garcia, J., R., & Pardo, T., A., (2005).
“eGovernment success factors: mapping practical tool to
theoretical foundations”. In Government Information
Quarterly, 22(2), pp: 187-216.
[41] Moon, M., J., (2002). “The evolution of
eGovernment among Municipalities: Rhetoric or Reality”.
In Public Administration Review. 62(4), pp: 424-433.
[42] Norris, D., F., Moon, M., C., (2005).
Advancing eGovernment at the grassoots: tortoise or hare.
In Public Administration Review, 65(1), pp: 64-75.
[43] Pekka, K., (2010). Co-production: a new
concept in evaluation. Paper presented at the 9 th European
Evaluation Society International Conference. October 6 – 8.
Prague, Czech Republic.
[44] Ebrahim, Z., Irani, Z., (2005). “eGovernmnet
adoption: architecture and barriers”. In Business Process
Management Journal, 11(5), p: 589-611.
[45] Kramer, K. L., King. L., (2006). “Information
Technology and Administrative Reform: will the time after
eGovernment be different?” In International Journal of
Electronic Government Research. 2(1), pp: 1-20.
[46] Grimsley, M., Meehan, A., Tan, A.,
(2005).Capital Accounting: Evaluation eGovernment
projects from a Community Development Perspective.
eGovernment Workshop ’05 (eGOV05), September 13,
Brunel University, West London, UK.
[47] Bovaird, T., (2007), “Beyond Engagement
and Participation: User and Community Coproduction of
295
Public Services”. In Public Administration Review. 5, pp:
846–860.
[48] Hochgerner, J., (2011). The Analysis of
Social Innovation as Social Practice.
[49] European Commission, (2010).
Communication from the Commission to the European
Parliament, the Council, the European Economic an Social
Committe and the Committe of the Regions: a Digital
Agenda for Europe. COM(2010) 245. Brussels 19.05.2010.
[50] Cursey, D., Norris, D., F., (2008). “Models of
eGovernmnet: Are They Correct? An empirical
Assessment”. In Public Administration Review. (3). pp:523-
536.
[51] Esteves, J., Rhoda, C. J., (2008). ”A
comprehensive framework for the assessment of
eGovernmnet projects”. In Governmnet Information
Quarterly, 25, pp: 118 -132.
[52] Kunstelj, M., Vintar, M., (2009). Evaluating
One-stop Government: critical analysis of the concept and
its implementation in the selected countries. NISPAcee
Annual Conference, Budva, Montenegro.
[53] Sarantis, D., Charabilidis, Y., Askounis, D.,
(2011). “A goal-driven management framework for
electronic government transformation project
implementation”. In Government Information Quarterly, 28,
pp: 117-128.
[54] Sarantis, D., Smithson, S., Charabilidis, Y.,
Askounis, D., (2010). “A critical assessment of project
management methods with respect to electronic government
implementation challenges”. In Systemic Practices and
Action Research, 23(4), pp: 301-321.
[55] Misuraca, G., Ferro, E. Caroleo, B (2010)
Assessing emerging ICT-enabled governance models in
European cities: results from a mapping survey. In
proceedings of the IFIP 8.5 eGOV2010 Conference,
Lausanne, 29 August – 3 September 2010, IFIP, Springer
Publisher, LNCS 6228 (pp. 168-179).
[56] Grimsley, M., Meehan, A. Tan, A., (2004).
Evaluative Design of eGovernmnet Projects: a Community
Development Perspective.Twelfth American Conference on
Informatics Systems, Acapulco, Mexico.
[57] Misuraca, G., Broster, D. and Centeno, C.,
(2011) Digital Europe 2030: Designing scenarios for ICT in
future governance and policy making, in Government
Information Quarterly, Special Issue 10/2011, Elsevier
Publishing.
[58] Blanake, J., Lopez-Claros, A., (2004). The
Lisbon Review 2004: an assessment of policies and reforms
in Europe. Published by the World Economic Forum.
[59] Pavlou, P., A., Chai, L., (2002). ”What drives
electronic commerce across cultures? A cross-cultural
empirical investigation of the theory of planned behaviour”.
InJournal of Electronic Commerce Research. 3(4), pp: 240
– 253.
[60] European Commission, (2005). “i2010 – A
European Information Society for growth and employment”.
Communication from the Commission to the Council, the
European Parliament, the European Economic and Social
Committee and the Committee of the Regions.

[61] Gilbert, D., Balestrini, P., Littleboy, D.,
(2004). “Barriers and benefits in the adoption of
eGovernment”. In Governmnet Information Quarterly, 20,
pp: 365-387.
[62] Van Ryzin, G., (2006). Piece of a puzzle:
linking government performances, citizens satisfaction and
trust. A performing Public Sector: the Second Transatlantic
Dialogue. June, Leuven, Belgium.
[63] European Council, (2010). European Council
conclusion on Europe 2020 strategy inclusive Digital
Agenda. Conclusion of the European Council.
[64] Fugini, M., Maggiolini, P., Krysnaia, N.,
Boselli, R., Cesarini, M., Mezzamanica, M, (2008). Why is
True eGovernment still difficult to be achieved? In IFIP –
International Federation for Information Processing,
Volume 280: “eGovernment; ICT Professionalism and
Competence; Service Science”; Antonino Mazzeo, Roberto
Bellini, Gianmario Motta (Ed. Boston: Springler). pp: 11-
20.
[65] Van Ryzin, G., (2009). Outcome, Process and
citizens’ trust of the civil services. Paper prepared for the
10 th National Management Research Conference, October 1-
4. Ohio State University, John Glenn School of Public
Affairs, Columbus, USA.
[66] Belanger, F., Carter, L., (2008). “Trust and
risk in eGovernment adoption”. In Strategic Information
Systems, 17( ), pp: 165-176.
[67] Anttiroiko, A-V., (2008). Local eGovernment
for Development: preliminary remarks.
[68] Teicholz, E., (1984). “Computer Integrated
manufacturing”.InDatamation. 30(3), pp: 169-170.
[69] Hammer, M., Champy, J., (1993).
Reengineering the Corporation. New York: Harper Collins
Publisher.
[70] Peppard, J., Rowland, P., (1995).The essence
of Business Process Reengineering. Series Edition: Adrian
Buckley.
[71] Van de Walle, S., (2002). Public services
performance and trust in government: the problem of
causality. Paper prepared for the Annual Conference of the
European Group of Public Administration Study. Group 2:
Productivity and Quality in the Public Sector. September 4-
7. Potsdam.
[72] Janssen, D., Rotthier, S., Snijkers, K., (2004).
“If you measure it they will score: an assessment of
international eGovernmnet benchmarking”. In Information
Policy. 9(3/4), pp:121-130.
[73] Heeks R., Molla A., (2009), Impact
assessment of ICT development projects: a compendium of
approaches, Manchester University Institute for
development policy and management, Ed. Development
Informatics Group.
[74] Arnaboldi, M., Azzone, G. Savoldelli, A.
(2004) “Managing a public sector project: the case of the
Italian Treasury Ministry”. In: International Journal of
Project Management 22: 213–223.
[75] Bekkers, V., Homburg, V., (2007). “The
myths of eGovernment: looking beyond the assumptions of
296
a new better government”. In The Information Society,
23(5), pp: 373-382.
[76] Holzer M., Kloby K., (2005), “Sustaining
citizen-driven performances improvement: models for
adaptation and issues of sustainability”. In The Public
Sector Innovation Journal, Vol. 10, No, 1.
[77] Kearns, I., (2004), “Public Value and
Electronic Service Delivery: The UK Experience”. In
eGovernment Reconsidered: Renewal of Governence for the
Knowledge Age. Edited by E. L. Oliver & L. Sanders,
Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina.
[78] Omar, K., Scheepers, H., Stockdale, R.,
(2011), eGovernment Services Quality Assessment through
the Public Value Lens., In proceedings of the 10 th IFIP WG
8.5 International Conference, EGOV 2011, Delft, The
Netherlands, August/September, pp:431-440.
[79] Shah, R., C., Kesan, J., P., (2010). “Software
Governance”, in eGovernment Information, Technology and
Transformation, Ed H. J. Scholl. AMIIS – Advances in
Management Information Systems, Vladimir Zwass Series
Editor. Chapter 8, pp: 125-140.
[80] Foley, K., (2006). Using the value measuring
methodology to evaluate government initiatives.
Proceedings of the 2006 Crystal Ball User Conference. May
1-3. Denver. Colorado.
[81] US Chief Information Office (US CIO), Value
Measuring Methodology. How to Guide, 2002, US CIO:
Washington DC.
[82] UK Office for Government Commerce,
Measuring the Expected Benefits of E-Government, 2003,
OGC: London.
[83] SDAE (2005), MAREVA Méthode d’Analyse et de
REmontée de la Valeur. Available at
https://www.ateliers.modernisation.gouv.fr/ministeres/doma
ines_d_expertise/budget_et_controle_d/public/foire-auxquestions/downloadFile/file/09.%20FAQ.zip?nocache=1195
568309.47
[84] Codagnone C. (2007). Measuring
eGovernment: Reflections from eGEP Measurement
Framework Experience. European Review of Political
Technologies, 4, 89-106.
[85] Codagnone, C. (2008). eGEP 2.0. Brussels:
Delivered for the European Commission, DG Information
Society.
[86] Parasuraman, A., Grewal, D., (2000). “The
Impact of Technology on the Quality-Value-Loyalty Chain:
a Research Agenda”. In Journal of the Academy of
Marketing Science. 28(1), pp: 168-174.
[87] Dawes, S., S., Pardo, T., (2002). Building
collaborative digital government system. In W.J. McIver, &
A.K. Elmagarmid (Eds.), Advances in digital government.
Technology, human factors and policy. Norwell, MA.
Kluwer Academic Publisher.
[88] Treasury Board of Canada (2004). Performance
Measurement for the Government online Initiative. This
document is available in alternative formats and on the
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat’s Web site at the
following address:www.tbs-sct.gc.ca

Investigating the Relationships between Accountability
and Governments’ Transformation to eGovernment
ABSTRACT
Many countries are moving towards eGovernment for ensuring
higher efficiency, transparency and accountability in the public
administration. Accountability, the obligation to justify one’s
conduct, has been widely discussed in the social, public and
political spheres. However, it is not so well understood how and
to what extent Government’s accountability is affected with the
transformation to eGovernment. This paper focuses on this aspect
by means of literature review and analyzing indexes related to
eGovernment and the factors associated with accountability
available during the period 2005 -2010. The findings show that
the relationship between accountability and eGovernment among
the countries as whole is not straightforward as it depends on the
characteristics of the individual governance. However, evidence
in general shows that strong accountability, which is measured
here through a level of integrity, influences the government to
adopt eGovernment as it helps to open up the government and its
policy process to its citizens and other stakeholders.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4 [Computers and Society]: General, Public Policy Issues
General Terms
Management, Measurement, Performance, Human Factors
Keywords
eGovernment, Democracy, Accountability, Integrity
1. INTRODUCTION
Accountability is a distinct feature of social life [1] that refers to
that “an actor feels an obligation to explain and to justify his or
her conduct to some significant other” [2]. Accountability has
been much talked in sphere of our lives especially for ordered
social, public and political conducts.
In this contemporary knowledge based society where the
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
M. Sirajul Islam and Åke Grönlund
Örebro University
School of Business (Informatics)
Fakultetsgatan 1, SE-70182, Sweden
+46 76 17 17 193, +46 70 58 51 790
{sirajul.islam, ake.gronlund }@oru.se
297
influence of technologies and human values are unavoidable,
accountability is treated as not only a moral obligation or sense of
responsibilities [3][4] but also as one of the key indicators for
performance measurement which is very evident in the
contemporary public administrations. The United Nations (UN)
defines accountability in public administration as an obligation of
the government officials regarding handling of public resources
and answerability on deviating from any stated performance
objectives [5]. According to this definition, the key
responsibilities of the public administration include not only to
work for operational efficiency and effectiveness, but also to
ensure operational transparency and establishing trust internally
and externally. In a democratic environment, the government
officials are held accountable explicitly as well as implicitly for
their deeds and actions to the society in general and the citizens in
particular. Appropriate use of Information and Communication
Technologies (ICTs) in the public administration is expected to
enhance operational efficiencies and thus paves the way for
improved accountability and administrative effectiveness.
The World Bank [6] defines eGovernment as the use of ICTs by
the government agencies “that have the ability to transform
relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government.
These technologies can serve a variety of different ends: better
delivery of government services to citizens, improved interactions
with business and industry, citizen empowerment through access
to information, or more efficient government management. The
resulting benefits can be less corruption, increased transparency,
greater convenience, revenue growth, and/or cost reductions.”
Supplement to this definition, the UN [7] describes eGovernment
as a powerful tool for enhancing the public sector together with
citizens that can address particular development issues in a
transformative society. Nowadays, eGovernment has been a way
of realizing the vision of a global information society as “many
countries are experiencing its transformative power in revitalizing
public administration, overhauling public management, fostering
inclusive leadership and moving civil service towards higher
efficiency, transparency and accountability” [7]. Therefore,
governments of those countries are inclined to transform their
governance to eGovernment gradually. However, research shows
that considering eGovernment as an automatic means of dramatic
change in the public sector accountability is a ‘myth’ [8]. In fact
there is a lack of clarity regarding to what extent and how the
transparency, accountability and eGovernment are associated to
each other [9]. This paper therefore aims at investigating ‘how is
accountability affected when governments transform to
eGovernment?’ by means of literature review and analyzing

available indexes and factors of eGovernment and accountability
of the last five years.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
“Accountability is a fundamental but underdeveloped concept
[...]” [10]. It comes through a sense of moral responsibility at both
the supply (i.e. the government) and demand (i.e. the citizens)
ends. According to Smith et al. [4], responsibility is a concept that
emerges in a social relationship in the causes of actions and
events, which in turns depends on the person’s knowledge,
capacity, ability to act appropriately as well as access to the
appropriate resources. In addition to human values and qualities,
discretion is an inseparable element of accountability that
ultimately decides whether a particular action from an agent will
be exposed or not in a given situation [4]. Accountability in public
administration is varied depending on the functional spaces and
nature of relationships among the internal as well as the external
stakeholders. Romzek and Dubnick [10] describe four alternative
systems of public administration (Figure 1), each of which is
based on two critical factors – sources of agency control and
degree of control over agency actions.
Figure 1. Types of Accountability Systems [10]
Among these alternatives (Figure 1), bureaucratic accountability
systems are widely used mechanisms that depend on the
organized and legitimate relationship between a superior and a
subordinate as well as close supervision on a stated administrative
rules and regulations. Legal accountability, which is closely
related to bureaucratic accountability, is associated with frequent
application of control to the administrative activities. Such a
controlling application is depended on the relationships between
the internal and external agencies, where external agency is
considered as the ‘lawmaker’ and the internal agency (i.e. the
public administrator) as the ‘executor’. Professional
accountability involves an obligated responsibility of sincerely
meeting the expected performance by the assigned employee with
the expertise or special skills. Finally, political accountability is
related to the democratic pressure that mainly concerns about the
representation of the public administrator to certain
constituencies, such as general public, elected officials, clients
and heads of the agencies, special interests groups and future
generations. Romzek and Dubnick argue that political
accountability is seen on ethical dimension as such systems may
promote favoritism and even corruption in the public
administration. They further state that “the urge for political
accountability, for example, is reflected in open meeting laws,
freedom of information acts, and ‘government in the sunshine’
statutes passed by many states and local governments [in the
US].” [10]
298
Within the systems [10], the processes of accountability can be
evident in three stages – (i) the information provision stage, (ii)
the debating stage, and (iii) the judgment stage. The validity of
information is enquired in the information provision stage, while
it subsequently goes to debating stage for appropriateness of
actions followed by rewarding or sanctioning of the taken actions
in the judgment stage [4]. In this case, ICTs based
communication has potential role over the information provision
stage as such communication and data processing facilities can
make the information easily accessible to wide audience. This
explains that eGovernment is an essential enabler for enhancing or
improving administrative integrity, transparency and
accountability on an ethical dimension. However, there are some
arguments that contradict the positive views on eGovernment in
relation to accountability [8][9][11][12]. According to Kraemer
and Dedrick [11], “In general, computing [in organizations] tends
to reinforce existing tendencies, and by itself is not likely to affect
organizational structure in significant ways”. In this regard, Wong
and Welch [8] argue that the relationship between eGovernment
and accountability is a conditional one as change in the
accountability level depends on the context and characteristics of
the public administration or the kind of bureaucracy.
3. METHOD
This study relies on the arguments on accountabilities in relation
to ICTs available through on-line reports and research papers. In
order to determine the relationship between accountability and
eGovernment, three kinds of indexes are used, these are – UN
global eGovernment indexes, Global Integrity indicators and
EIU’s index of global democracy. There are so far no explicit
indicators that would explain a comparative accountability status
of a country. The 2010 Global Integrity indicators (GII) [13]
scorecard assesses the existence, effectiveness, and citizen access
to key governance and anti-corruption mechanisms through more
than 300 actionable indicators, including some indicators related
to country level accountability. The indicators, which are
associated with the major issues of accountability, are fairly
related to the accountability systems as discussed by Romzek and
Dubnick [10] in the literature study as above. For example,
bureaucratic systems can be related to the third category of GII
(i.e. Government Conflicts of Interest Safeguards & Checks and
Balances), while legal and professional systems can be fitted to
the sixth category of GII (i.e Anti-Corruption Legal Framework,
Judicial Impartiality, and Law Enforcement Professionalism).
‘Public requests for government information’ is one of the
indicators of GII that is close linked to the political accountability
systems. As for an indicative comparison, a table (Appendix 2
available at http://tinyurl.com/cp8ua6m) has been formulated that
shows various performance indications during the period between
2005 and 2010. The list of countries (40 in this study), as shown
in the table, are chosen based on availability of Integrity data of
the last three surveys covering 2006 to 2010 conducted by the
Global Integrity [13].
4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The integrity indicator is closely associated with accountability
systems of the respective countries. Accountability performance
in an environment of transformative governance cannot only be
understood by the various parameters of Integrity [13], but also by
the structure of bureaucracy which can also be well perceived by
the characteristics of a regime, such as full or flawed democracy,

hybrid or authoritarian regime. Bovens [2] in this regard contends
that “public accountability is not just the hallmark of democratic
governance, it is also a sine qua non for democratic governance”
Several regression analyses (Appendix 1 available at
http://tinyurl.com/cp8ua6m) have been done in order to find
relationships among the three variables - eGovernment,
democracy and integrity. Results show that there are positive
correlations exist among these variables, although the strengths of
coefficient of the correlation varied under certain situation. The
multiple regression tests indicates that 37% change in country’s
eGovernment initiatives can be explained by the changes of
democracy and integrity. On the other side, simple regression
shows that democracy and integrity are both strongly correlated.
However, while it comes with eGovernment (Y), country’s levels
of democracy (democratic, flawed, hybrid and authoritarian) are
weakly related. Furthermore, integrity (Y) is strongly correlated
with eGovernment (X).
According to data exhibited in Appendix 2 (available at
http://tinyurl.com/cp8ua6m), determining relationship between the
performances of country’s eGovernment (i.e. 40 countries in this
study) and the other accountability indicators or vice-versa over
the years (2005 to 2010) is not so straightforward. In general,
USA, Canada and Japan demonstrate optimistic association
among these three indicators – eGov, integrity and democracy.
Bulgaria and South Africa have ‘strong integrity’ performance,
but comparatively shown low rankings. One of the explanations
could be that these two countries are quite new in converging to
democracy in comparison to the latter three countries. Except
Kazakhstan, countries with ‘moderate’ integrity either have
flawed democracy or combination of both democratic and
authoritative (i.e. hybrid) structures. According to eGovernment
rankings, their status are highly diverged, for example – Colombia
is the 31 st , while Ghana is at the 147 th position. The case of
Kazakhstan seems interesting as the country is governed by an
authoritarian regime [14], but ranks at the top 50 of global
eGovernment index and holds a ‘fairly moderate’ integrity over
the years. Kazakhstan’s integrity scorecards of the last three
surveys [13] show that they have better performances in anticorruption
measures, election integrity with voting and citizen
participation, procurement process, government oversights and
controls, and rule of laws. However, they are weak in facilitating
public access to information and media, civil service regulations
and ensuring government accountability at the executive,
legislative, judiciary and budgetary processes. Except this, all the
(forty) countries with authoritarian regimes have either ‘week’ or
‘very weak’ integrities and most of them are placed at bottom half
of the eGovernment indexes. Countries like Cameroon, Nigeria,
and Yemen are far away in the ranking of integrity, eGovernment
and democratic representations. Moldova and Bangladesh are
weak in democracy, but demonstrate linear progresses in both
integrity indexes and transforming to eGovernment. Bangladesh is
progressing in the eGovernment indexes within the ‘weak
integrity’ and hybrid structure of regime.
Therefore, it appears that there is a relationship between the
nature or characteristic of regimes and their transformation to
eGovernment. But, how is the integrity affected that could
determine accountability of a country? If we take USA as a bestcase
example, we can see from their integrity scorecards that they
have strong performance in some key areas of governments’
integrity. These are [13], media and access to information, citizen
299
participation in the election, executive, legislative and budgetary
accountabilities, audit institutions, anti-corruption, rule of law and
law enforcement. On the other-side, they have weak presence over
the national ombudsman.
The above results also indicate that we cannot draw a straight line
among the countries as whole in order to determine the
relationship between eGovernment and integrity (as a proxy to
accountability) or eGovernment and democracy. A good
conclusion can be derived at just by analyzing individual country
level performance in those indicators. According to this study, we
found that out of 40 countries, only 9 of them have same level of
indicators irrespective of their eGovernment status. For example,
USA is 4 in all indicators and Yemen is 1 in all. 22 countries
(55%) have similar association between their integrity and
democracy indicators (for example, Argentina and Nepal).
However, the relationship between eGovernment and integrity or
eGovernment and democracy cannot be generalized as it is
interestingly varied among the countries. 17 countries (43%) have
same level of eGovernment and democracy indicators; whereas 13
countries (33%) are with similar level of eGovernment and
integrity (for example, Azerbaijan and Nicaragua).
According to the above discussions and as for the research
question of this paper is concerned, this cannot be so certain as to
how and to what extent the elements of integrity in general and
accountability in particular determine governments’
transformation to eGovernment. Nevertheless, one thing is quite
indicative that strong accountability provokes governments for
strong transformation to eGovernment, whereas strong
accountability depends on the strong democracy that at least
comprises of congenial, transparent and result-oriented
bureaucracy and strong judicial systems (for example USA,
Canada and Japan). In this case, accountability is affected by the
well-defined legal systems and the pressure coming from the open
civil society due to strong presence of IC-based communications.
5. CONCLUSIONS
This paper addresses apparently an unexplored issue as how is
accountability affected when governments transform to
eGovernment. In doing so, it discusses the notion and
characteristics of accountability in a special reference to ICTbased
public administration and communications. The paper uses
indexes of UN global surveys on eGovernment [7], global
integrity [13] and EIU’s global democracy [14] published during
the last five years (2005 -2010). The major finding is that
accountability does influence the governments for transformation
to eGovernment as it helps to open up the government and its
policy process to internal as well as external stakeholders. More
the transformation to eGovernment is, better indication for a
democratic environment and administrative integrity. The study
also indicates that to determine the influence of accountability to
eGovernment transformation or vice-versa requires individual
country level analysis. In fact the answer is not straightforward.
The major limitation of this paper is that it attempts to address a
complicated issue within a brief discussion. However, the findings
can be used mainly for indicative purposes by the government
officials and the researchers concerned about modernizing public
administration and eGovernment. There are many unexplored
elements in the integrity indicators [13] that need to be thoroughly
investigated in order to better understand about the relationship

etween accountability and eGovernment. This suggestion can be
treated as a call for future research as well.
6. REFERENCES
[1] Willmott, H. Thinking Accountability : Accounting for the
Disciplined production of Self. In R. Munro J. Mouritsen
(eds.), Accountability: Power, Ethos and the technologies of
managing. London: International Thompson Business Press,
1996.
[2] Bovens, M. Public accountability. In The Oxford handbook
of public management, ed. E. Ferlie, L. Lynne, and C. Pollitt,
Oxford University Press, 2005, 182–208.
[3] Johnssén, G. Accountability and Responsibility in e-
Government. Presented at the 1 st Scandinavian Workshop on
e-Government, Örebro, Sweden, 2004.
[4] Smith, M., Noorman, M.E., Martin, A.K. Accountabilities,
automations, Dysfunctions, and Values: ICTs in the public
sector. London School of Economics, Working paper series
169, 2008.
[5] Armstrong, E. Integrity, Transparency and Accountability in
Public Administration: Recent Trends, Regional and
International Developments and Emerging Issues. United
Nations Public Administration Network (UN-PAN), 2005.
[6] World Bank. Definition of e-Government. 2005 Available at
http://go.worldbank.org/M1JHE0Z280
300
[7] United Nations E-Government Survey 2010. United Nations
Public Administration Network (UN-PAN), 2010.
[8] Wong, W., Welch, E. Does E-Government Promote
Accountability? A Comparative Analysis of Website
Openness and Government Accountability. Governance, 17,
2, 2004, 275-297
[9] Orelli R.L., Padovani, E., Scorsone E. E-Government,
Accountability, and Performance : A Comparative Analysis
Between European Governments. EGPA 2009 Conference,
Malta September 2-4, 2009.
[10] Romzek, B. S., & Dubnick, M. J. Accountability in the
public sector: Lessons from the challenger tragedy. Public
Administration Review, 47, 3, 1987.
[11] Kraemer, K., Dedrick, J. Computing and Public
Organizations. Journal of Public Administration Research
and Theory, 7, 1997, 89–112.
[12] Heintze, T., Bretschneider, S. Information Technology and
Restructuring in Public Organizations: Does Adoption of
Information Technology Affect Organizational Structures,
Communications, and Decision-Making. Journal of Public
Administration Theory and Research, 10, 2000, 801–830.
[13] Global Integrity Report- 2010. Global Integrity, Washington
DC, USA, 2010.
[14] Democracy Index -2010. Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU),
2010.

Technologies, Tools and Web 2.0 in Support of Public
Administration Workplace Communications
ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to investigate which are the technologies,
tools and web 2.0 applications that support public administration
workplace communications. The paper begins with e-
Administration and web 2.0 uses in the context of public
administration 2.0. Then the attention is focused on workplace
communications review and technologies, and tools, which
influence their efficiency and effectiveness. For the purpose of
detailing the used public administration technologies and tools,
O*NET database is investigated in terms of the governance and
public management and administration occupations. In order to
determine, to what extent the identified technologies, tools and
web 2.0 applications are used in practice, an empirical survey is
developed and carried out in “Information services and
technologies” Directorate at Sofia Municipality. The paper
concludes with a proposed PA 2.0 workplace communications
model.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.3.5 [Online Information Services]: Data Sharing, Web-Based
Services; H.4.1 [Office Automation]: Groupware, Spreadsheets,
Time Management, Workflow Management; K.4.3
[Organizational Impacts Automation]: Computer-Supported
Collaborative Work
General Terms
Management, Performance, Economics, Human Factors
Keywords
ICT, Web 2.0, Public Administration, Communications
1. INTRODUCTION
“E-Government” refers to the use by government agencies of
information technologies that have the ability to transform
relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government.
These technologies can serve a variety of different ends: better
delivery of government services to citizens, improved interactions
with business and industry, citizen empowerment through access
to information, or more efficient government management,
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
Milena Krumova
Technical University – Sofia, Bulgaria
Sofia 1000, bul. Kl. Ohridski 8
+359 899 283987
mkrumova@tu-sofia.bg
301
increasing revenue or re-structuring of administrative processes.
[27]. The use of ICTs reflects on: (1) simplify and improve the
internal administrative operations of government and their
relations with other bodies involved in public management and
service delivery; (2) facilitate public service interaction between
government, citizens and other stakeholders, thus enabling better
citizen participation and overall monitoring and evaluation of
decision-making processes and their implementation; and (3)
ensure inclusiveness and equal opportunity for all [14].
According to M.Batorski and D.Hadden, e-Government did not
achieve expected results because enabling technology was Web
1.0 oriented. Social networking provides governments with a new
paradigm: knowledge release rather than knowledge control.
Government software technology can be categorized with the
following framework [1]:
o Internal: internal by governments
o External: external to government with government
involvement
o Structural: follow government structure and mandate
o Social: enable collaboration.
eGovernment, both in practice and in concept, has been one of the
important developments in public administration. The dynamic
changes within the e-government reflect on the public
administration internal and external communications and the
services. The changes are strongly related to the people - public
administrators and working requirements to them. Are they
prepared to use technologies, tools and web 2.0 at their daily
activities and communications?
1.1 Research Objectives
Fundamental and vital to public administration (PA) workplace
communications is the information transmitting and making
oneself understood by another or others. Communications are one
of major challenges because they are a key for providing
information, which results in efficient and effective performance
in PA. The main goal of this study is to examine what are the
main technologies, tools, in particular web 2.0 applications that
support PA workplace communication? It seeks to increase the
understanding that the effective use of technologies, tools and web
2.0 (TTW2.0) possesses potential for communications
improvement.
1.2 Research Questions
What are the major characteristics of e-Administration and PA 2.0
in the context of TTW2.0?; How can PA workplace
communications be improved by TTW2.0?; What are TTW 2.0

that the PA employees need to be well prepared for to work
with?/How are TTW2.0 related to PA occupations according to
O*NET?; In terms of workplace communications, is there a gap
between TTW2.0 within O*NET and the used ones in it and a real
working environment (Sofia Municipality “Information services
and technologies” Directorate)?
1.3 Research Method
In order to meet the research goal, various methodologies were
applied, such as, literature review, a desk-based review,
interviews, web search and a web survey. The survey has been
designed as a blend qualitative and in a small scale quantitative
research technique.
1.4 Structure of the Paper
The paper i) starts with review about e-Administration and PA
2.0. The advantages of technologies usage are outlined. The
workplace communications and the communication itself are
presented in the context of PA. Then, ii) it continues with O*NET
database research related to the Government & Public
Administration occupations. iii) The identified TTW2.0s are
summarized. iv) Based on identified TTW2.0, a survey has been
designed and empirically applied at Sofia Municipality
“Information services and technologies” Directorate. The survey
aimed to identify: “Where are the TTW2.0 used at and how
communications can be improved? Is there a gap between
necessary knowledge, skills and competencies to work with
TTW2.0 and a real working environment in regards to workplace
communications“. The results are presented and discussed. v) The
paper ends with TTW2.0 uses for PA and a proposed abstract PA
2.0 workplace communications model.
2. E-ADMINISTRATION
Electronic public administration or e-Administration is one of the
main eGovernment domains: eSociety; eAdministration; eCitizens
& eServices (Figure 1) [7]. e-Administration is the effective
management of the coordination and control of processes and the
electronic information they create. It has two fundamental
objectives: to increase the efficiency of administrative processes
within institutions and to lessen the administrative burden faced
by all staff during this process [11].
eGovernment domains
1
Building
external
interaction:
eSociety
2
Improving
government
processes:
eAdministration
1
Connecting
citizens:
eCitizens and
eServices
Creating empowerment
Making strategic
connections in government
Managing process
performance
Effective and efficient
communication processes
Improving time
management
Cutting process costs
Figure 1. eGovernment domains
e-Administration is also viewed as an Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT) and tools, with the goal
302
being to improve productivity and performance. It expresses a
mechanism that transforms: traditional offices into paperless
offices, paper processes into electronic processes, internal
communications with other offices and organizations and public
organisms with initiative and transparency. e-Administration
brings many advantages: interoperability, with the administration
and citizens; integration of services that allow total and horizontal
access to information; teleprocessing, telecommunications,
official and administration communication is carried out
electronically; bidirectional communications system; email,
sending documents via email; electronic signature and validation.
e-Administration brings the administration closer to citizens,
integrates administrations, offers the private sector and
associations complete electronic services. It offers citizens and
public administrators 1 new communication channels. A key
purpose of the e-administration is to improve the internal
workings of the public sector by cutting process costs, managing
process performance, creating strategic connections within
government bodies, and creating empowerment (Wikipedia). e-
Administration can encompass both intra-office and inter-office
communication.
JRC study about ICT- driven models of eGovernment, including
eAdministration, tried to provide input for longer-term strategic
planning. A list of technologies was prepared, focusing on the
disruptive potential of the technologies themselves: mobile
devices (PDAs, wearable computers, MP3-players, mobile
phones) intelligent agents (and robotics), sensors, language
processing and semantic technologies, serious games, RFID and
biometrics, ICT infrastructures (WiFi, WiMAX, Broadband), web
technologies (social software) and GRID [8].
3. PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 2.0
Social computing (also known as Web2.0) is spreading in all
spheres of life including government and public administration. A
research named “Web 2.0 in Government: Why and How?”
addresses the general issues about web 2.0 applications relevance
for the government context: what way web 2.0 is likely to have an
impact on government; how significant could this impact be and
how web 2.0 applications are implemented in the government
context [19].
Definition (Wikipedia): Web 2.0 is web application features that
facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, usercantered
design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Web
2.0 allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a
social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a
virtual community, in contrast to websites where users
(consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was
created for them. It has been also described as: “a fusion of
sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one-tomany)
into dialogues (many-to-many) and is the democratization
of information, transforming people from content readers into
publishers.” Web 2.0 is created to actively communicate and
participate on the Internet, [16] not just to read a content, listen to
or observe. Much of web 2.0 activities involve individual users
coordinating with others, through many to many communication
channels (Figure 2). Web 2.0 promotes many to many interaction
1 Public administrators are public servants working in public departments
and agencies, municipality, at all levels of government. A civil servant
or public servant is a person in the public sector employed for a
government department or agency.

with resources, peers and experts within and beyond the
organization area. Public servants can use blogs and wikis,
participated in web conferencing and developed podcasts and
videos and become more efficient in their workplace
communications thus indirect influence over quality of public
services.
Wikis
Tagging
Social
networking
Media
sharing
Social
bookmarking
Blogging
Media
manipulation
Many to many
communications
channels
Web 2.0
activities
Figure 2. Web 2.0 activities
Collaborative
editing
Recommender
systems
Conversational
arenas
Virtual
worlds
Syndication
An important shift was seen not just as the use of particular tools
or techniques, but to the fostering of digital engagement. This
involves:
o dialogue: moving from broadcast to conversation;
o not only listening but responding;
o two-way collaboration sharing information, data, discussion;
o opening spaces for peers to interact - facilitating communities;
o moving audience from awareness to action.
Web 2.0 covers a range of technologies. The most widely used are
blogs, wikis, podcasts, information tagging, prediction markets,
and social networks [3] (Figure 3).
303
Web 2.0
technologies
Wikis, commenting,
shared workspaces
Blogs, podcasts,
videocasts, peer to
peer
Prediction markets,
information
markets, polling
Tagging, social
bookmarking/
filtering,
user tracking,
ratings, RSS
Social networking,
network mapping
Figure 3. Web 2.0 technologies
Broad
collaboration
Broad
communication
Collective
estimation
Metadata creation
Social graphing
Broadly discussed in e-Administration field, web 2.0 technologies
enable communication, collaboration and content creation,
individually or together, and then publish to a workplace
community. PA 2.0 can link familiar productivity tools to intranet
publishing and search capabilities, thus public administrators can
communicate and collaborate more efficiently with greater
flexibility and access to information [11]. There are three key
characteristics of web 2.0 applicable to PA: open - accessible and
transparent; social-based on people and contacts/communications
between them and user-oriented [2].
Many initiatives have adopted web 2.0 applications in the
government context. There are relevant applications in the private
sector, which could be transferred to the government context.
According to “E-Government Survey 2012” there has been a
drastic rise of social media at the public administration [26].
Web 2.0 affects different domains of public administrators’
activities. While the debate is mostly focused on the impact in
citizen-government relations (the so-called front-office) at
present, analysis show that web 2.0 applications are also relevant
for the back office activities of public administration [19].
4. PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
WORKPLACE COMMUNICATIONS
Definition (Wikipedia): Communication is the exchange of
thoughts, messages, or information, as by speech, visuals, signals,
writing, or behavior. According to Herbert A. Simon, who is
known for his theory of administrative behavior “without
communication there can be no organization”. In the context of
internal communication, there are four tasks: categorize the types
of information necessary to be communicated to employees for
the effective functioning of the institution; identify the current
delivery methods for communicating internal information; assess
the effectiveness of the current methods, and recommend
guidelines for effective communication [10]. The PA
communications can be inter-relationship of public servants with
the citizen and “extra-organizational”, communications with
institutions [13]. There are a number of PA communications:
formal and informal; vertical and lateral; verbal and non-verbal.
They can be also viewed as occurring at intranet, extranet or
internet environment [21] (Figure 4).
Category of technology

Without any regards to the form of communication, the
communication itself plays a very important role in the PA. A
number of variables influence the PA effectiveness of
communications. Some are found in the environment, intranet
environment, extranet or internet in which communications take
place, some in the personalities of the sender and the receiver, and
some in the relationship that exists between sender and receiver.
In the present context, PA communications are discussed within
intranet environment. In the literature, there exist many studies
concerning PA communications effectiveness and efficiency.
INTRANET
Workplace
Communications
EXTRANET
Communications
INTERNET
Figure 4. Intranet (workplace) communications
In his study, F. Petru examines the role of communication for the
managerial process effectiveness of public administration [20].
D.Špaček and J.Špalek analyze the relationship between
electronic public administration and the present public
administration model as developed within the reform of public
administration in the Czech Republic, which has a significant
impact on the information flows (communication) and certainly
on the electronic public administration in the Czech context. The
authors argue that, the quality of communication can be
significantly influenced by utilization of modern ICT [25].
“Digital Communities” study accent on wikis or similar tools,
such as Microsoft’s SharePoint or others, that could be used to
standardize business processes, functions and terms across an
entire government. Web 2.0 and social networking preparedness is
also discussed [5].
In the next part of the current research, O*NET database will be
investigated. O*NET is identified as a benchmark database for
occupations [22, 23]. It contains information about hundreds of
standardized and occupation-specific descriptors, including
required technologies and tools for public administration related
occupations.
5. O*NET - TECHNOLOGIES AND TOOLS
@ PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
OCCUPATIONS
Occupational Information Network (O*NET) 2 is a comprehensive
database of worker attributes and job characteristics [17]. O*NET
is the replacement for the Dictionary of Occupational Titles
(DOT). O*NET is being developed as a timely, easy-to-use
resource that supports public and private sector efforts to identify
and develop the skills of the American workforce. It provides a
2 Occupational Information Network, http://www.onetonline.org/
304
common language for defining and describing occupations. Its
flexible design also captures rapidly changing job requirements.
O*NET database can serve as the engine that drives value-added
applications designed around core information. It provides the
essential foundation for facilitating career counseling, education,
employment, and training activities [18]. The database, is
available to the public at no cost, is continually updated by
surveying a broad range of workers from each occupation. The
database also provides the basis for Career Exploration Tools, a
set of valuable assessment instruments for workers and students
looking to find or change careers. Content Model, is the
conceptual foundation of O*NET (Figure 5).
Figure 5. O*NET Content model
The Content Model embodies a view that reflects the character of
occupations (via job-oriented descriptors) and people (via workeroriented
descriptors). The Content Model also allows occupational
information to be applied across jobs, sectors, or industries (crossoccupational
descriptors) and within occupations (occupationalspecific
descriptors). These descriptors are organized into six
major domains: worker characteristic; worker requirements;
experience requirements; occupational requirements; workforce
characteristics and occupation-specific information. It provides a
framework that identifies the most important types of information
about work and integrates them into a theoretically and
empirically sound system.
Figure 6 shows the occupations related to information:
knowledge, skills, abilities, and interests, general work activities,
work context, including technologies and tools. Figure 6 shows
the investigation path of the current research.
The domains enable the user to focus on areas of information that
specify the key attributes and characteristics of workers and
occupations. Occupation-Specific Information is one of the
domains. It consists of tasks - occupation-specific Tasks and tools
and technology - Machines, equipment, tools, software, and
information technology workers may use for optimal functioning
in a high performance workplace. O*NET advanced search
options allows users to browse by data or career cluster.
Government and public administration career cluster includes:
governance; national security; regulation; planning; revenue and
taxation; public management and administration. In the current
context, government and public management and administration
career cluster are investigated. A number of occupations are
included in each career cluster within O*NET. The investigated
occupations within Public Management and Administration career

cluster were: Court Clerks; Court, Municipal, and License Clerks;
Eligibility Interviewers, Government Programs; License Clerks;
Managers, Municipal Clerks; Postal Service Clerks; Postal
Service Mail Carriers; Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors,
and Processing Machine Operators; Postmasters and Mail
Superintendents; Social and Community Service Managers. The
investigated occupations within Governance career cluster were:
Administrative Services Managers; Broadcast News Analysts;
Chief Executives; Communications Teachers, Postsecondary;
Eligibility Interviewers, Government Programs; Emergency
Management Directors; General and Operations Managers;
Legislators; Managers; Mapping Technicians; Postmasters and
Mail Superintendents; Public Relations Specialists; Reporters and
Correspondents; Social and Community Service Managers;
Storage and Distribution Managers; Surveying and Mapping
Technicians; Surveying Technicians; Transportation Managers.
O*NET
Bright
outlook
Job Zone
Job family
Career
cluster
Green
economy
sector
Industry
STEM
Discipline
Marketing, sales and services
Education & training
Architecture & construction
Agriculture, food and natural resources
Business, Management & Administration
Art, audio/video technology & communications
Health services
Government & Public
administration
Law, public safety, corrections and security
Human services
Manufacturing
Transportation, distribution & logistics
Finance
Hospitality & tourism
Science, technologies, engineering and
mathematics
Information Technology
The summarized technologies, tools and web 2.0 applications
within O*NET database are as follows:
o Tools: Computer/laptop; Calculators, printers; USB flash
drives; Personal digital assistants PDA; Mobile phones —
smartphones; Scanner; Electronic charts or maps or atlases;
etc.
o Technologies: Spreadsheet software: Microsoft excel; IBM
lotus 1-2-3; Word processing software: Microsoft word;
Electronic mail software: e-mail; Microsoft outlook;
Microsoft project; Presentation software: Microsoft
PowerPoint; Map creation software: mapping software; etc.
Regulation
National Security
Public
Management and
Administration
Governance
Revenue and
taxation
Planning
Figure 6. O*NET – Government & Public administration career cluster
o Web: Web page creation and editing software: Facebook;
Social media software; Blogging software; MySpace;
Podcasting software; Website management software; etc.
It can be concluded that even the fact that technologies and tools
are in the core of e-governance and e-administration, in some
governance and PA within O*NET database, there are no
technologies and tools used. For example, the main activities of
Municipal Clerks are: draft agendas and bylaws for town or city
council; record minutes of council meetings; answer official
305
Skills
Knowledge
Education
Abilities
Interests
Tools and
technologies
Work values
Work styles
Work context
Work activities
Tasks
Wages &
employment
correspondence; keep fiscal records and accounts; prepare reports
on civic needs, where no technologies and tools are used. The
Web page creation and editing exists only in few governance and
public management, and administration occupations, such as
Public Relations Specialists or Reporters and Correspondents.
6. EMPIRICAL SURVEY
Technologies, tools and web 2.0 used in the survey are based on
O*NET investigation. The aim of the survey was to establish

whether there is a gap and what Technologies, Tools and Web 2.0
(TTW2.0) are used in workplace and how they can support
workplace communications. The methodology for empirical
survey was as follows:
1) The questionnaire for the survey was designed. It includes
four groups of questions regarding: (a) public administration
workplace communications; (b) technologies, tools and web
2.0 usages within workplace; (c) benefits from better
communications on the workplace; (d) willingness to learn,
to improve knowledge, skills and competencies to work with
new technologies, tools & Web 2.0. The Technologies and
Tools which are used in the survey are based on the O*NET
investigation. Web 2.0 applications are chosen as a result of
the literary research and discussions with experts in the field.
Particular focus is given to respondents` willingness to learn
about Technologies and Tools and Web 2.0, in order to
improve their knowledge, skills and competencies.
2) Some meetings and interviews were done with representative
from the Sofia Municipality Directorate “Information
services and technologies” which is the main administrative
and territorial unit in Sofia. Based on discussions with the
representatives a decision about which directorate will best
correspond to the goal of the research was made. Most of the
occupations within the Directorate of “Information services
and technologies” are strongly linked to the technologies and
tools.
3) PA staff, who work in the Sofia Municipality Directorate
“Information services and technologies”, were asked to
respond to the survey and about more than half of them
agreed to give their responds. This questionnaire asked each
respondent question about his/her subjective impression of
the technologies and tools used at the workplace. The given
responses were for more than 90% of the questions.
4) The results of the study are presented into four parts: Part 1:
PA workplace communications; Part 2: Technologies, tools
and web 2.0 usage within workplace; Part 3: Benefits from
better communications on the workplace; Part 4: Willingness
to learn how to work with new technologies, tools & Web
2.0.
5) Data collection period: March 2012 – April 2012.
Responding to this survey was not mandatory. Data are
collected directly from survey respondents. The gathering of
responses was done by a free web based surveying tool. It
allowed automatically responses collection and analysis. For
some of the questions five point Likert scale was used.
6) The results are discussed, summarizing the most important
relations between the groups of questions. The study was
conducted to find answers about: what is the usage of
technologies, tools and web 2.0; are there link between
communications efficiency and TTW2.0 usage; are there gap
in TTW2.0 at the public administration workplace; how
many public employees and professionals are ready and
willing to learn for TTW2.0 for improving their knowledge,
skills and competencies.
Many initiatives are conducted for the e-government development
on a national level in Bulgaria. In December 2011, a start was
given to the electronic exchange of documents between five state
administrations, Ministry of Transport, Information Technology
306
and Communications (MTITC), Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
Ministry of Economy, Energy and Tourism, Road Infrastructure
Agency and BULATSA, by sending and receiving documents
electronically until today [12]. These administrations use the same
document management system. The electronic exchange of
documents today saves time, increases efficiency and reduces
administration costs of departments. Sofia Municipality takes an
active role in e-Government development projects, and it is
planned to be a pilot Lot 3 beneficiary Municipality. Currently,
Sofia Municipality use Document Management Software
“АКСТЪР ОФИС” and most of workplace communications are
done by electronic tools and technologies [24].
6.1 Part 1 - Better Communications at
Workplace
This part of the survey includes 18 questions. The starting point is
to identify how each one of the staff communicates at work, what
does he/she think about personal barriers and what does the
information depend on. At the begging the questions are focused
on indirect factors which influence workplace communications.
The survey data showed that all of the respondents like their job,
and about 69,3% of respondents like to be connected during
working time. The data showed that the majority of the
respondents (77%) agree that the communication itself depends on
the Internet and the net and that two side of the communication,
sender and receiver, are equally important (92,3%). Most of the
respondents (84,6%) communicate more often when they are at
work than when they are at home. The respondents who prefer to
receive information in communication verbally are 46,2%, but
those who prefers to receive information by mail are 38,5 %, no
one prefers using Skype. Next question is about how do
employees prefer to communicate. The responses are similar to
the previous ones: 7,7% prefer to communicate online, 30,8%
Face to Face (F2F), 46,2% F2F&online and 15,4% said that it
doesn’t matter. This comes to the conclusion that most of the
respondents prefer to receive information and to communicate by
using electronic technologies. But, in regards to communication
with some colleagues, 53,8% of the respondents said that they
prefer to communicate more via mail than F2F, about 30,8% can`t
say, 15,4% don’t prefer to communicate via mail more than via
F2F.
It can be concluded that the team working environment is not so
good and there is a presence of bad workplace relationships
concerning some of the staff. Most of the respondents (84,6%)
agree that “Better communication will improve time to finish
work, quality of work and his/her labor cost”. “How often do you
contact someone daily?”, 72,7% of the respondents need to
contact someone at least 5 to 19 times per day. About 18,2% of
them need to contact someone at work more than 50 times, which
leads to the conclusion that about ¼ of the respondents dependent
on communicating with other colleagues at work. The survey data
showed that 92,3% feel happy to take part in community events
and are always ready to support someone in her/his work. 61,5%
of respondents said that his/her competency of working with tool
and technology is extremely important to communicate effectively
and for 38,5% they are important. The result is that technologies
have the potential to improve communications at the workplace.
6.2 Part 2 - Technologies, Tools and Web 2.0
This part of the survey contains three subparts. The first subpart
includes technologies (7 questions), the second one includes tools

(8 questions) and the third subpart includes web 2.0 (10
questions).
6.2.1 Technologies
The point is to identify whether the administrators are familiar
with technologies or not. The data showed that the majority of the
respondents are familiar with the technologies. Map creation
software is the least one that is being used at work (no one uses
it), Microsoft Project (9,1%). Word processing software is used at
work (36,4%) and 66,7% of the respondents use it at work & at
home equally. The most used at work is electronic mail software
and spreadsheet software, out of total 63,6% use electronic mail
software at work and 36,4% use it equally at work and at home.
6.2.2 Tools
“How often do you use the tool in your work activities: during the
whole day, half of the day, ¼ of the day, less than an hour or don’t
use it?”. All respondents said that they use computer/laptop durind
the whole day. 18,2% of total respondents said that they use
mobile phones and Smartphones whole day, 9,1% of respondents
use scaners actively. Less used are calculators, USB flash,
electronic charts, map or attlases
6.2.3 Web 2.0
In this subpart of the survey, the questions are related to web 2.0.
Are the employees familiar with web 2.0, do they use web 2.0 at
work or do they not use it? The data shows that, some of them are
well familiar, whereas others are not. 10% of respondent know
about the Blogging, Online virtual games and worlds, Media
sharing and social media software. Most of respondents are
familiar with blogging and social media software but do not use
them. Social networking (Facebook; LinkedIn; My space) is the
most used by the respondents. Out of the total 41,7% use social
networking at home. No one has blog. The survey data shows that
most of the respondents are familiar with web 2.0 applications
but, don`t use them at work. Despite that some of Web 2.0
applications are not allowed to be used at the workplace, the
respondents know about them and used some of them for years.
33,3% of respondents declare that they have Skype account since
3 to 4 years, 33,3% have Skype account for more than 5 years.
Out of the total, 16,4% of the respondents have Facebook account
for more than 5 years.
307
6.3 Part 3 – Technologies, Tools and Web 2.0
Use at the Workplace Communications
Third part of the survey (7 questions) point the effect of
communications based on the technologies, tools and web 2.0
uses. 33,3% of respondents strongly agree, that better
communications will improve mostly working community and
team working (25%). 75% of respondents declare they agree that
the information flows transparency will be improved, 83,3% agree
that information exchange difficulties will be diminished. Out of
the total, 58,3% agree that better communications affect personal
fulfillment, 66,7% agree that misunderstanding along the
communications channels will decrease. 50% of employees
declare that team working will be improved. Only 8,3% of them
strongly disagree that better communications will improve
personal fulfillment.
6.4 Part 4 - Willingness to Learn
Fourth part of the survey includes 8 questions. The survey data
shows that the majority of the respondents strongly agree to learn
in order to improve their knowledge, skills and competencies. The
respondents agree that knowledge and competencies about new
technologies, tools and web 2.0 will indirectly influence work
efficiency. All respondents agree that they would spend time to
learn, no negative response. Of the total, 16,7% are interested in
learning about technologies, 8,3% are interested in tools, 8,3%
are interested in web 2.0. Most of respondents (58,3%) would
spend 6 hours weekly to learn, 16,7% would spend 2 hours
weekly, 16,7% would spend 10hours, and only 8,3% would
spend more than 10 hours weekly. “In case that you enroll in a
learning course for technology, tools and Web 2.0, who will
benefit from it?” 60% of respondents said that the benefit will be
for him/her personally and the organization, 40% said that the
benefit will be for him/her, organization and services.
7. CONCLUSION
This research paper tried to identify technologies, tools and web
2.0 which support public administration communications, while
focusing on the people in the process (Figure 7). Additionally to
the eAdministration and public administration 2.0 literary review,
an investigation within O*NET database was done. The paper
looks at the key issue that the public administrators need not only
to be knowledgeable, highly qualified, skilled and competent for
doing their job, but much more to be familiar and prepared for
using technologies, tools and mostly web 2.0 applications,
relevant to his/her occupation at workplace.

Figure 7. Public Administration 2.0 workplace communications model
Based on the technologies, tools and web 2.0 investigated in
O*NET, an empirical survey was conducted at “Information
services and technologies” Directorate at Sofia Municipality. The
survey showed that the employees apply in their daily
communications most of the analyzed technologies and tools. But
it is identified a little gap in the knowledge of web 2.0
applications. The employees agree that the efficient
communications are a key gateway to success in their work. One
of the most important conclusions is that there exists a potential
for improving communications and that the staff is willing to learn
in order to acquire new knowledge, new skills and develop
competencies in the field of technologies, tools and web 2.0
related to his/her occupation. The survey results do not tend to be
a representative for all public administration offices. The results
are related only to a particular administrative office, “Information
services and technologies” Directorate at Sofia Municipality,
where it was held, but they are a good base for more complex
study at a district or a national level.
8. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Research laboratory "Technologies and standards for elearning"
TU-Sofia for support in this research. Thanks to Sofia
Municipality, “Information services and technologies” directorate
for support in the research implementation and respond to the
request to participate in this study.
9. REFERENCES
[1] Batorski, M., D.Hadden, Embracing Government 2.0:
Leading transformative change in the public sector, Grant
Thornton LLP, 2010,
http://grantthornton.com/staticfiles/GTCom/Public%20sector
/Gov20Jan2010.pdf
[2] Berlo, D., Civil Servant 2.0 New ideas and practical tips for
working in government 2.0, Civil Servant 2.0 beta Action
steps towards government 2.0, Programma Ambtenaar 2.0,
2008,
http://api.ning.com/files/j8isrYTD1gKgWBE7i2qmYhTXlW
d45ExM*v7-
308
8uXVfuOMwo8kjaOW9sascpHM*IkbLkhb9KchUvIe5gxyo
GROF-CuU0b*SnPe/CivilServant2.0.pdf
[3] Chui, M., A.Miller, and R.Roberts, McKinsey Quarterly: Six
Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work, 2009,
http://www.scribd.com/doc/12599205/McKinsey-Quarterly-
Six-Ways-to-Make-Web-20-Work-Feb-2009-Issue
[4] Constantinides, E., The Web 2.0 as Marketing Tool:
Opportunities for SMEs, The 16th Annual High Technology
Small Firms Conference, 2008,
http://proceedings.utwente.nl/96/1/Constantinides.pdf
[5] Digital Communities, Government 2.0: Building
Communities with Web 2.0 and Social Networking, 2008,
http://media.govtech.net/Digital_Communities/assets/DC08_
PAPER_CIO_TASK_10.27.pdf
[6] Dovey,T., W. Eggers, Deloitte Research – Web 2.0: The
future of collaborative government, Discussion Summary
Washington, DC, 2009,
http://www.deloitte.com/assets/Dcom-
UnitedStates/Local%20Assets/Documents/us_ps_web20gove
rnment_March2009.PDF
[7] eGov4Dev, "eGovernment for Development Information
Exchange" Project, University of Manchester's Institute for
Development Policy and Management,
http://www.egov4dev.org/success/definitions.shtml
[8] Frissen, V., et al., The Future of eGovernment. An
exploration of ICT-driven models of eGovernment for the
EU in 2020, European Communities, Joint Research Centre
Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, 2007,
http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/eur22897en.pdf
[9] Huijboom, N., et al., Public Services 2.0: The Impact of
Social Computing on Public Services, 2009,
http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/JRC54203.pdf
[10] Internal Communications Survey, Brookdale Community
College, 2006,

http://ux.brookdalecc.edu/governance/Governance%20Gazett
e%20Page_files/2005-2006/ColLifeSurv.pdf
[11] Joint Information Systems Committee,
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/eadministration.aspx
[12] Ministry of Transport, Information Technology and
Communications Bulgaria, Available from:
http://www.mtitc.government.bg/page.php?category=454
[13] Miron, L., D.Ţicu, The Communication in Public
Administration in Urban Areas, European Integration -
Realities and Perspectives, 2012,
http://www.proceedings.univdanubius.ro/index.php/eirp/article/view/1275/1250
[14] Misuraca, G., A. Reid & M. Deakin, Exploring emerging
ICT-enabled governance models in European cities, Analysis
of the Mapping Survey to identify the key city governance
policy areas most impacted by ICTs, EU European
Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for Prospective
Technological Studies, 2011
[15] Musaraj, A., Communication processes, public
administration and performance evaluation, University
Pavaresia, Albania, Academicus International Scientific
Journal, http://www.academicus.edu.al/nr3/Academicus-
MMXI-3-028-037.pdf
[16] NETCOACH,
http://www.netcoach.eu.com/index.php?id=233
[17] O*NET OnLine,
http://www.onetonline.org/find/career?c=4&g=Go
[18] Occupational Information Network,
https://onetmxdev.rti.org/about.cfm
[19] Osimo, D, Web 2.0 in Government: Why and How?,
European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for
309
Prospective Technological Studies, © European
Communities, 2008, http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/JRC45269.pdf
[20] Petru, F., The role of communication for the managerial
process effectiveness of public administration, 2007,
http://steconomice.uoradea.ro/anale/volume/2007/v1economics-and-business-administration/64.pdf
[21] Ruskov, P., Groupware, Edited by “UNWE” Sofia, Bulgaria,
ISBN 954-494-324-2, p.16-17, 1998 (in Bulgarian)
[22] Shoikova, E., M.Krumova, O*NET and Competency Based
Education, Annual journal of electronics, ISSN 1313-1842,
p.145-151, 2010
[23] Shoikova, E., M.Krumova, Overview of the Occupational
Information Network, Annual journal of electronics, ISSN
1313-1842, p.152-156, 2010
[24] Sofia Municipality, http://www.sofia.bg/en/index_en.as
[25] Špaèek, D., J. Špalek, Communication and Electronic Public
Administration: Some Issues in the Context of the Czech
System of Public Administration,
http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/nispa
cee/unpan027501.pdf
[26] United Nations E-Government Survey 2012 E-Government
for the People, United Nations, 2012, p.3, p.29, Available
from:
http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/un
pan048065.pdf, p.7-8
[27] World Bank,
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/E
XTINFORMATIONANDCOMMUNICATIONANDTECH
NOLOGIES/EXTEGOVERNMENT/0,,contentMDK:205071
53~menuPK:702592~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSite
PK:702586,00.html

Transforming City Government: A Case Study of Philly311
Taewoo Nam
Center for Technology in Government
University at Albany, SUNY
187 Wolf Road, Suite 301
Albany, NY12205, United States
+1-518-442-3892
tnam@ctg.albany.edu
ABSTRACT
This paper describes the transformation of a city government led
by a 311 program, which provides a consolidated channel for nonemergency
services and information. The paper first discusses the
concept of “smart city” as a foundation for the examination of the
311 program as a practice of government innovation. The paper
then presents the details of the 311 program as instantiated in the
City of Philadelphia. In-depth interviews with Philadelphia City
government officials and managers responsible for creating and
operating the City’s 311 system (Philly311) offer insights into the
contributions the system is making to a more efficient, effective,
transparent, accountable, and collaborative city government.
Performance data provided by Philly311 enables more efficient
resource allocation and informed decision making. Philly311 is
credited with making the process of service delivery more
transparent to the public, and providing traceability of requested
services which imbues service departments with a sense of
accountability. Service level agreements are providing measurable
standards of municipal services and are used to support
accountability in terms of service status. Regular reviews of
service level agreements and content of the system are also
recognized as promoting interdepartmental collaboration. 311
systems are broadly recognized as powerful tools to engage
residents in improving their neighborhoods. Institutionalizing
interdepartmental collaborations emerged from the interviews as a
critical capability in advancing from the initiation stage of
Philly311-like systems to operations and refinement.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.4.2 [Information Systems Applications]: Type of systems —
e-government applications.
General Terms
Management, Performance, Human Factors, Theory.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
310
Theresa A. Pardo
Center for Technology in Government
University at Albany, SUNY
187 Wolf Road, Suite 301
Albany, NY12205, United States
+1-518-442-3892
tpardo@ctg.albany.edu
Keywords
311, Non-emergency service, Contact center, Customer service,
Smart city, Service level agreement, E-government, City
government.
1. INTRODUCTION
The phrase “smart city” is used more and more regularly by
elected officials, civil society, the private sector, and academia.
Regardless of this emerging trend, there is no agreed-upon
description of what “smart” implies in the context of a single city.
Some recent conceptual studies have discussed a city’s smartness
[1,4,6,17,20,21]. In these studies, a smart city is broadly
understood as improvements in city infrastructure including
information and communication infrastructures, and physical
infrastructures such as roads, bridges, and buildings, services such
as utilities, social services, and transportation, and a variety of
resources such as natural resources, financial resources, cultural
resources, and human capital. However, the concept of a smart
city is still abstract and even ambiguous.
There is another reason for the lack of agreement around the
“smart city” concept. A smart city often comes across as a
normative claim. People want the cities they are living in to be
smarter; they want to close the gap between their current status
and their expectations. Smart city strategies—e.g., integrating
critical infrastructures and services, consolidating systems, and
interconnecting networks—are emerging as responses to a variety
of complex problems such as crime, health concerns, pollution,
aging populations, deteriorating infrastructure, and traffic
congestion, that cities are currently facing due to dense
congregations of people in spatially limited areas [24]. The
desirable status of being “smart” is an outcome sought by the
public and city officials alike. In this sense, increasing attention is
being paid to those city governments who are successful in
transforming their cities through “smart city” initiatives.
Discussions of and certainly research about smart cities must pay
attention to the characteristics of the city governments that make
their city smarter. Previous studies of smart cities emphasize
smartness of government, administration, and public management
as core factors in the creation of a smart city [6,20,21].
Adopting the view of a smart city as one that has more innovative,
more efficient, and more effective government, this paper
employs a case study of Philly311, the City of Philadelphia’s 311
non-emergency contact program, among a variety of current and
best practice examples of government efforts to make cities
smarter. The concept of “smart city” is used as a foundation for

the examination of the 311 program as a practice of government
innovation, based on a review of current thinking about the
dimensions and components of smart cities. Philly311 is,
according to the Mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, one of
his flagship initiatives being carried out to make the City smarter.
A case study based on qualitative data from semi-structured
interviews with the City’s executives, Philly311 staff, and
managers of other related departments allows for a close
examination of how the Philly311 service is helping make
Philadelphia a smarter city.
The remainder of this paper is structured into six sections. Section
2 draws on recent research to outline the characteristics of a smart
city and a smart government. Section 3 presents the methodology
used in the study and introduces the case. Section 4 presents the
case analysis with a particular focus on changes observed in city
management and service delivery in the City of Philadelphia and
considered to be consequences of the implementation of
Philly311. Section 5 discusses challenges the City is facing in
operating Philly311 and also opportunities Philly311 offers.
Section 6 further discusses the impacts made by Philly311 as one
instance of smart city initiatives. Section 7 concludes this paper.
2. CONCEPTUALIZING SMART CITY
AND GOVERNMENT
Since we consider a smart city as transformation and innovation in
city government, we use the “smart city” concept as a foundation
to describe a practice of government innovation—in this paper,
Philly311. This section introduces and discusses a set of working
definitions of a smart city, followed by a review of the core
components constituting the concept of a smart city derived from
both academic and practical research. Finally, we discuss how a
smart government is recognized as one of the core capabilities of
a smart city.
Table 1. Working definitions of a smart city
� “An urban area functioning and articulated by modern
information and communication technologies in its various
verticals, providing ongoing efficient services to its population”
[2].
� “A city well performing in a forward-looking way in economy,
people, governance, mobility, environment, and living, built on
the smart combination of endowments and activities of selfdecisive,
independent and aware citizens” [12: p. 11].
� The foundational concepts are instrumented, interconnected,
and intelligent city. “Instrumented refers to sources of near-realtime
real-world data from both physical and virtual sensors.
Interconnected means the integration of those data into an
enterprise computing platform and the communication of such
information among the various city services. Intelligent refers to
the inclusion of complex analytics, modeling, optimization, and
visualization in the operational business processes to make
better operational decisions” [15: p. 1].
� “A city striving to make itself ‘smarter’ (more efficient,
sustainable, equitable, and livable)” [Natural Resources
Defense Council: smartercities.nrdc.org]
� “The use of Smart Computing technologies to make the critical
infrastructure components and services of a city––which
include city administration, education, healthcare, public safety,
real estate, transportation, and utilities––more intelligent,
interconnected, and efficient” [24: p. 2].
311
Several working definitions of a smart city can be found in the
literature (see Table 1). They share some features as well as have
some unique aspects. For example, while Giffinger et al. [12]
view a smart city as one performing in a “forward-looking” way,
the Natural Resources Defense Council considers “smarter” as
more efficient, sustainable, equitable, and livable. Harrison et al.
[15] conceptualize a smart city in a technological sense as
instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. Similarly,
Washburn et al. [24] see a smart city as intelligent,
interconnected, and efficient.
The definitions from Anavitarte and Tratz-Ryan [2], Harrison et
al. [9], and Washburn et al. [24] each emphasize the role of
information and communication technologies (ICTs). The
technologies include smart computing [24] and a range of
instruments such as sensors, kiosks, meters, personal devices,
appliances, cameras, and smart phones [15]. In sum, a smart city
is defined with some key elements including meanings of
smartness in the urban context, the role of technologies in making
a city smarter, domains that need to be smart, and infrastructures
and services that are provided to the population.
The definitions taken together provide a roadmap for cities
seeking to become smarter. Washburn et al. [24] highlight seven
key areas where cities are investing in becoming “smarter”
including city administration, education, healthcare, public safety,
real estate, transportation, and utilities. Giffinger et al. [12]
identifies six key aspects of a city where smart cities are seeking
to have an impact from their investments: economy, people,
governance, mobility, environment, and living. Chourabi et al. [6]
put forth eight components of a smart city: technology,
management and organization, governance, policy, people and
communities, economy, built infrastructure, and natural
environment.
The components of a smart city included in the definitions are
further specified in both academic literature and practical reports.
Recent studies discuss definitional components and conceptual
dimensions of a smart city. Nam and Pardo [20] suggest three
conceptual dimensions of a smart city—i.e., technological
artifacts, people and communities, and institutional
arrangements—by exploring a wide array of recent research
focusing on a smart city and/or similar (often interchangeably
used) labels such as an intelligent city, innovative city,
information city, knowledge city, and creative city, among others.
Nam and Pardo [20] consider a smart city as a more
comprehensive concept comprising such diverse similar labels.
Technology is central to defining a smart city, but a smart city
cannot be built simply through the use of technology. Importantly,
technology is a means to enable social, environmental, economic,
and cultural progress. Smart cities thus must be capable of
sustaining such progress across the diversity of components and
conceptual dimensions [1,17]. Along with this view, smart city
initiatives driven by municipal governments can be characterized
as innovation in multiple dimensions—i.e., technology,
management, and policy [21].
Three smart city ranking tools and frameworks merit attention as
comprehensive sets of components of smart cities. The ranking
system to score European medium-sized (population between
100,000 to 500,000) cities (www.smart-cities.eu) includes six
categories of smart city evaluation indicators: economy
(competitiveness), people (social and human capital), governance
(participation, transparent governance, the functioning of the

administration), mobility (transportation and ICT), environment
(natural resources, environmental protection, sustainable resource
management), and living (quality of life, cultural facilities, health,
safety) [12]. IBM’s core city systems are categorized into three
systems: operating systems (city services system comprising
public service management and local government administration),
user systems (citizens system comprising health, education and
public safety, and business system), and infrastructure systems
(transport system, communication system, water system, and
energy system) [8,9]. In IBM’s framework, city governance and
city strategy connect across the seven systems. Forrester
Research’s white paper [24] suggests seven critical infrastructure
components and services of a smart city including city
administration, education, healthcare, public safety, real estate,
transportation, and utilities.
Table 2 compares the comprehensive sets of smart city
components suggested by Chourabi et al. [6], European mid-sized
city evaluation tool [12], IBM [8,9], and Forrester [24]. While
each includes technology and government as components (public
service management and local government administration), each
model also stresses unique components.
Table 2. Components of a smart city
Chourabi et
al. [6]
European
mid-sized
cities [12]
IBM [8,9] Forrester
[24]
Technology √ √ √ √
Management &
administration
√ √ √ √
Governance √ √ √
City services √ √ √
People and
communities
√ √
Economy √ √
Built
environment
√ √
Natural
√ √
environment
Note. City services broadly include transportation, safety, heath, water,
energy, housing, and culture.
As shown in Table 2, one of core components of a smart city is a
smart government because a city government is a central actor
that plays a pivotal role to lead and coordinate smart city
initiatives and efforts. In the IBM core city system that Dirks et al.
[9] suggested, the concept of a smart government comprises
public service management and local government administration
as key components. Thus city management and city services can
be identified as two main dimensions of a smart government.
Some previous conceptual studies defined the dimensions of
management and service in smart city activities. Since a smart city
is considered urban innovation, smart city initiatives can be
characterized as government innovation in management and
services [21]. Nam and Pardo [21] considered a smart city in the
aspect of government management as enhancing efficient,
effective management both in front-office and back-office
operations of city government. They also defined managerial
innovation of a smart government as “a mechanism to create
managerial and organizational capabilities for effective use of
technological tools and conditions” [21: p. 187]. On the other
hand, Dirks et al. [8] defined a city services system as “the
312
operational activities and coordination of service delivery
provided by the city authority” (p. 5). In particular, smart service
means “tailoring services to the needs of individual citizens” and
“using technology to integrate the information systems of
different service delivery agencies to enable better services for
citizens [8: p. 11].
In line to these concepts of management and service as smart
government dimensions, many discussions of a smart government
have been recently made. According to Chourabi et al. [6],
management and organization of a city government and its
governance with other actors are key success factors of smart city
initiatives. The smart city model suggested by Giffinger et al. [12]
underscores smart governance as a larger category including a
smart government. The smart governance component comprises
participation in decision making and transparent governance. In
the model of Giffinger et al. [12], the quantifiable measure of
transparent governance represents citizen satisfaction with
transparency of bureaucracy and with fight against corruption.
Washburn et al. [24] saw efficient management of city operations
and effective delivery of city services as key to smart government:
An efficient city administration that provides services to
its citizens and fosters businesses is essential to
today’s service-based economy. A smart government
service is informed about its city’s condition and is able
to reach its citizens effectively. A core component of
this function is using communication and collaboration
technologies to manage city operations. … Moreover, it
uses data and scientific analysis in all phases of the
decision-making process to improve the economy and
quality of life. (p. 5–6)
Thus smart city administration should contribute to greater
efficiency, effectiveness, and the improvement in decision
making. Dirks et al. [9] identify local government expenditure and
staff as prerequisites of a smart government. Elements of the
smart system for management and operation include coordinated
service delivery, e-government application, and the use of ICT for
service delivery. Outcomes of a smart government appear as
increased efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery [9: p. 5].
To sum, a smart government is expected to increase efficiency,
effectiveness, and transparency in organizational management and
service delivery. A smart government also may promote
coordination and collaboration among city departments and with
other external organizations and citizens. Thus a smart
government can facilitate non-governmental entities’ participation
in decision making and monitoring of service delivery. In this
sense, a smart government should include governance with both
internal (within government) and external actors.
Reflecting on this discussion, we create the metrics of assessing a
smart government and will use it to the case of Philly311, as
exhibited in Table 3.
Efficiency
Table 3. Metrics for assessing a smart government
Effectiveness
Transparency
Governance
Management Service

3. CASE STUDY METHOD
This study uses case study methodology to understand why and
how a social phenomenon of interest occurs [25]. The method
helps develop preliminary understanding. Given the emerging
nature of 311 contact centers and the paucity of academic research
on the service centers, case study methodology is an appropriate
approach to conducting this exploratory research [25]. This study
is also inductive so that it contributes to building new
understanding. This section describes data collection, data
analysis, and the case of Philly311 non-emergency contact center.
3.1 Data Collection
In order to identify the relevant interview participants, purposive
sampling was employed. Because of the relative newness of the
research theme, the sampling technique is needed to identify and
target individuals who could provide important information to
understand the social phenomenon [11]. The director of Philly311
as an initial informant was asked to recommend others who have
sufficient information and knowledge in various aspects of 311
operation. Interview participants were selected to avoid redundant
knowledge and maximize new knowledge. Interviewees from
different levels and functions include executive-level officials (the
mayor, the managing director, and the deputy director), Philly311
staff members (director, operation manager, and technology
expert), and representatives of other service departments
(commissioner and chief of staff) related to 311 operations.
In December 2011, the authors conducted 16 semi-structured
interviews with city government officials and managers with
responsibility for managing and operating the City of
Philadelphia’s 311 service center, Philly311. Each face-to-face
interview lasted approximately one hour, and additional
information was collected through follow-up email
communication.
Data was collected using the protocol jointly developed by the
multinational “Smart Cities Service Integration” research team,
which aims to explore the processes of smart city initiatives and
their impacts on cities, people, and city governments. The study of
Chourabi et al. [6] provides a conceptual background of the
interview protocol. Table 4 presents a summary of interview
questions included in the interview protocol.
Table 4. Sample interview questions
Categories Questions
Case
description
� How did Philly311 start?
� What are the main goals of Philly311?
� What organizations are involved and how?
Smart city � What does it mean for a city to be smart?
� What are characteristics of a smart city?
Management
and
organization
� How is Philly311 organized and managed?
(probes: organizational structure, business
process, workflow, progress tracking, staffing,
training, funding, etc.)
� What organizational challenges is Philly311 facing
in achieving its objectives?
� How are those challenges being overcome?
Technology � How is information and communication technology
being used for Philly311? (probes: service
channels, data analysis tools, system integration,
social media use, etc.)
313
� What are the barriers or challenges to using
technologies for Philly311?
Governance � How is Philly311 governed? (probes: governing
body, governance model, decision making
process, and conflict resolution process)
� What’s the authority and role of staff, partners,
and stakeholders?
� How are citizens and other organizations involved
in Philly311?
Policy � What is the relationship between Philly311 and the
policy environment?
Context � How does the larger environment of Philly311
influence Philly311? (e.g., cultural, social, political,
economic, demographic contexts)
People and
communities
� How does Philly311 affect and is affected by the
population and communities of the City?
Economy � What is the impact of Philly311 on the City’s
economy?
Natural
environment
� How does Philly311 affect the City’s natural
environment?
The team also established criteria for case selection including a
focus on service provision, transportation, and human services and
selected cases must have a service integration component that
crosses the boundaries of agencies within a city. Philly311 as a
direct service delivery project and with a focus on city-level
service integration met the selection criteria.
3.2 Case Analysis
Interviews were transcribed and analyzed following an inductive
logic approach and using grounded theory techniques. Employing
a qualitative analysis software tool (Atals-ti), we did a systematic
iterative process of joint coding and analysis to minimize personal
bias. Grounded theory refers to theory that is developed
inductively from empirical data, and the grounded theory
approach is a method of using empirical data without
preconceived theories to generate or discover a theory [13,22].
For this research, coding refers to a process of labeling,
separating, compiling, categorizing, and organizing qualitative
data [5,7,18]. Descriptive codes are used so that interview
transcripts were coded in sentence or multi-sentence chunks.
Glaser and Strauss [13] suggested the four stages of grounded
theory analysis as follows:
• Codes: identifying anchors that allow the key points of the
data to be gathered
• Concepts: collections of codes of similar content that allows
the data to be grouped
• Categories: broad groups of similar concepts that are used
to generate a theory
• Theory: a collection of explanations that explain the subject
of research
Corresponding to the research logic, Table 5 describes the scheme
of this grounded theory analysis.
Table 5. The scheme for the grounded theory analysis
Categories Concepts Codes emergent from the data

Smart
management
Smart service
delivery
Technological
factors
Organizational
factors
Governance
factors
Efficient
management
Effective
management
Transparent
management
Managerial
governance
Efficient service
delivery
Effective service
delivery
Transparent
service delivery
Governance in
service delivery
Technological
challenges
Technological
opportunities
Organizational
challenges
Technological
opportunities
Governance
challenges
Governance
opportunities
Efficient resource allocation; saving
budget; saving human resource;
business process change
Informed decision making; datadriven
management; performance
management; business process
change
Anti-corruption; integrity;
transparency; open government;
service level agreement
Interdepartmental collaboration;
external partnership; service level
agreement
Service integration; channel
consolidation; shared service
capability
Customer-oriented service;
professionalism; internal customers;
external customers
External accountability; internal
accountability; service level
agreement
Citizen engagement; neighborhood
engagement; community
engagement; neighborhood liaison
Under-equipping; cost of upgrading
back-office technologies; timing of
investment of the right technology at
the right time; the digital divide
Channel diversification; emerging
technologies; smart phone
Limited funding; limited operation;
limited staffing; cultural conflict;
interdepartmental difference
Business process change; datadriven
culture; performance-driven
culture; customer-oriented culture
Interdepartmental conflict; the lack
of a formal governing body; informal
interdepartmental collaboration;
more burden for extensive data
analysis
Relational governance; mutual
understanding; citizen engagement
3.3 Case Description
Philadelphia is one of the last cities of its size to activate a 311
non-emergency toll-free number. On the last day of 2008, the
mayor and the managing director of the City opened Philly311 as
a concrete step toward the administration’s strategic goal of
smarter, faster, and better government through customer service,
government efficiency, and accountability. The basic idea—
giving the public a direct way to request services or complain and
using their feedback to hold government accountable—was not
entirely new to Philadelphia. The City already had customer
hotlines, but there was no single, consolidated contact point. The
new 311 contact center absorbed the City Hall Switchboard, the
Mayor’s Action Center, the Department of Licenses and
Inspections’ customer line, and part of the Department of Streets’
customer line. Philly311 offers various ways to contact the City:
phone, in person (Philadelphia is one of a few cities with a walk-
314
in center), email, short message service (SMS), and social media
(Twitter).
4. PHILLY311 AND TRANSFORMING
GOVERNMENT
This section shares some of the finding from the interviews with
Philly311 officials. Overall we heard about two kinds of changes
in resulting in part from the Philly311 initiative; changes in
management and service delivery. The 311-driven changes
discussed below are expounded first in terms of efficiency,
effectiveness, transparency, and governance (See Table 6).
Table 6. Philly311: driving innovation
Efficiency � Efficient use and
allocation of resources
Effectiveness � Informed decision
making
� Data-driven
management
Transparency � Anti-corruption and
integrity
Governance � Internal collaboration
� External partnership
Management Service Delivery
� Frontline service
integration
� Shared services
� Customer-oriented
service
� Professionalism
� Internal and external
accountability
� Citizen engagement
� Neighborhood
engagement
4.1 311-Driven Changes in Management
The 311 service center is recognized as helping other departments
use their resources more efficiently and effectively. One of
Philly311’s objectives involves allowing agencies and
departments to focus on their core mission and manage their
workload efficiently (see www.phila.gov/311). Just as Baltimore’s
original motive for launching its 311 was to reduce the crush of
calls flooding into 911, Philly311 allows Philadelphia’s 911
center to devote their resources to life-threatening and urgent
situations. Philly311 also enables the City Council (the City’s
legislative body) to use their resources more effectively, by saving
their budget and staff time spent on facilitating constituent
services. According to interviewees, this has freed Council
resources, primarily the time of Council members, to other
important needs of city residents.
Furthermore, the information Philly311 provides to other
departments is driving internal business process changes. One
Philly311staff person gave an example of how Philly311 is
contributing to informed decision making in the departments by
helping them easily find hot spots.
[XX department] had a fairly random process in how
they prioritize replacement of street lights. Once we
provide data, we are able to provide GIS map. That
shows where the calls come from—hot spots. They can
visually see the clusters. Now they have a data source.
The data source actually gave them an opportunity to
say “we need to do this.” Always right places.
Interviewees consider Philly311 as crucial to their larger citywide
performance management efforts. Data pulled from Philly311 can
expose what residents care about most. This data is used to

discuss departmental performance at PhillyStat meetings, where
the mayor, the managing director, relevant deputy mayors, and
representatives from the departments and agencies meet regularly
to track and monitor operational performance. The City’s
performance management program now relies heavily on data
from Philly311 and this type of data-driven management changes
the roles of public managers. With the data provided by Philly311,
they act as data managers and process managers as much as direct
problem solvers.
Philly311’s contribution to a smart government involves raising
transparency and integrity in government processes. “[People]
don’t need to know anybody anymore to get services,” said one of
the executive-level interviewees. “Just call 311!” Other
interviewees also agreed that Philly311 transforms the way the
City does its business. Before 311, many citizens did not know
where they should start to request a service. For service requests,
some took advantages of contacting a council person as a
representative of their community. Philly311 has become an
equalizing strategy. Since its launch, citizens can see more clearly
how their government works through Philly311. One interviewee
said,
People didn’t understand the process. The internal
process was mystery. For example, we got a request—
fix that property. We can say here is the process.
Philly311 does that. That’s transparency. Now people
can see what’s happening in the government.
From a managerial perspective becoming a smarter city involves
interdepartmental collaboration. In the case of Philly311, this
takes the form of written service level agreements that codify each
function of the City’s key service departments (i.e., Streets,
Licenses and Inspections, Police, Water, Parks and Recreation,
and Fairmount Park) with a specific timeframe for completion. A
service level agreement refers to “an agreement between the
provider of a service and its customers which quantifies the
minimum quality of service which meets the business need” [16:
p. 14]. It is also considered a formal contract between a service
provider and its customers [14]. Philly311 staff collaborate on
reviewing, updating, and revising both the formal contracts
between Philly311 and other departments and the knowledgebase
for readily available responses to service and information
requests, through regular meetings with internal partners who are
key to citizen service (the departments on service level
agreements).
The review and revision process allows those departments to learn
about Philly311 operations and in turn allows Philly311 to learn
about other departments’ jobs. Philly311 staff listen to them and
work to understand their concerns. The partnership for the service
level agreements increases transparency across city departments.
“We get everybody’s input. People bring their concerns into the
table,” said one Philly311 staff person. “We own the system and
they own the content.” Hence the partnership of Philly311 with
other departments is built, in part, on the integration of the
departmental knowledge (content) into the 311 system.
The management of Philly311 has been supported by strategic
partnerships with external organizations. In the early stages of
Philly311, private sector partners helped finalize a detailed
strategy and implementation plan. They also contributed to
relieving the burden on Philly311 caused by under-staffing,
providing some of their experienced agents (on-loan call agents).
Philly311 call agents benefited from private sector best practices,
315
and in turn the on-loan agents from private call centers learned
more about how the City works. From the preparation period of
Philly311 through its kick off to the present, the partnerships with
the private sector has offered a mentoring opportunity for
Philly311 agents and supervisors.
4.2 311-Driven Changes in Service Delivery
The 311 service center serves both as a front-line contact center
and as a shared service center. Not only does it integrate frontline
services by providing quick and easy access to non-emergency
municipal services and information through a single, consolidated
channel, but it also creates capabilities for shared service, which
denotes “a generic service that is jointly developed by public
agencies and can be used many times in different business
processes of various government agencies” [19: p. 32]. Services,
including the development costs of such services, can be shared
by multiple agencies to avoid the redundant investments in similar
functionality. Philly311 provides shared services to city
departments through its consolidated channel for service requests
and complaints. Shared services promise chiefly three benefits:
reduced costs, improved quality of services, and fewer distractions
[3,10,23]. One interviewee addressed Philly311’s moderate (but
not as much as expected) effect in saving the City’s administrative
costs.
Shared services strategies are based on service level agreements.
The agreements stipulate service standards that are measurable
and can be used to support accountability (e.g., response times).
For instance, a residential property that is not being maintained
must be investigated by the Department of Licenses and
Inspections within forty-five days. A dead animal must be
removed by the Department of Streets in three days and an
abandoned vehicle within thirty days. Similar to this, if a
department has agreed in its service level agreements to deal with
a citizen’s service task in X number of days, the customer should
be informed of that service standard. The department is held
accountable to complete the service in that amount of time or
provide information back to Philly311 as to why the service could
not be completed in the agreed-upon amount of time. City
agencies perform hundreds of tasks, but Philly311 only handles
the ones for which it can hold an agency accountable to the
previously agreed upon service standard and timing.
The 311 system serves for customers as an effective contact point.
One of executive-level interviewees viewed Philly311 as an
interaction tool, by saying “[Philly311] connects people to
government as much as possible. It is interactive to see what’s on
people’s minds.” Through integration of multiple channels for
municipal services and information, Philly311 serves as a main
gate to residents, businesses, and visitors of the City. As well,
Philly311 becomes a front line of service agents reachable via the
toll-free phone line and often digital media. One of the Philly311
launch project team members said:
311 is a front door. Before 311, Philadelphia had
hundreds of front doors. Most were blocked, not open
at all. The City created the best face of the front door
for the City.
The interviews highlighted the agreement among Philly311 staff
that everybody is their customer—not just citizens, businesses and
visitors to the City but other city departments as well. As evidence
of this commitment, the mayor created a unique position among
311 programs; the Chief Customer Service Officer. This role is

currently filled by Philly311’s Director. Given the Director’s dual
roles, organizational responsibility for Philly311 extends to
inspiring all city government officials to view themselves as city
ambassadors who play a major role in building and maintaining
the relationship with those who live in or do business with the
City. Philly311 as a city agency also invests in building customer
service skills through its Customer Service Leadership Academy,
training customer service agents throughout city government. The
program imbues them with customer service professionalism.
Philly311, according to city officials, also serves an accountability
role. For external accountability, callers, senders of emails and
text messages, and walk-in customers receive a tracking number
for their service request. This number allows requestors to followup
either by calling back to the Philly311 Center or visiting the
311 homepage. One executive-level interviewee said, “People
want to see government working in a more connected through
technology.”
For internal accountability, data collected from Philly311 is used
in conjunction with the PhillyStat process to track, evaluate, and,
if necessary, correct service patterns in the departments. PhillyStat
is the City’s performance review program in which the top
leadership members participate. 1 During each regular meeting for
performance management of PhillyStat, city leaders review
departmental performance metrics and progress toward the
mayor’s strategic goals, and each department has the
responsibility to account for their performance in front of the
City’s executives with respect to service standards put forth in the
service level agreements. The guidelines described in the service
level agreements and their use by departments, Philly311 and the
PhillyStat process create a holistic accountability program that
was noticeably absent before 311.
The consolidated channel for non-emergency service and
information requests enables and empowers people to engage in
their communities. As one Philly311 staff member said “311
enables citizens to become involved in their neighborhood by
reporting a problem they see.” Respondents discussed how
citizens are seeing how reporting a problem can impact the
neighborhood—for example, requests for removing graffiti from a
local park or clearing up a vacant property that can be potentially
a place for crime—they are further inspired to become involved in
improving the neighborhood they live in. They talked about the
relationship between 311 services and citizen engagement in
neighborhood environments around such issues as built
infrastructure, public safety, and public facilities. With Philly311,
according to city officials, citizens are seeing in a new way the
connection between their efforts and the quality of life in their
community.
One of Philly311’s unique characteristics is its neighborhood
liaison program. A neighborhood liaison serves their community
by reporting issues directly to the Philly311 system (oftentimes on
behalf of their neighbors) and provides the community with
progress reports. Becoming a Philly311 liaison is open to any
1 There are two types of PhillyStat meetings. PhillyStat Outcomes a
high-level review of the Mayor’s goals and outcomes. PhillyStat
Ops is an operational review of one department or agency, where
performance targets are assessed in five key areas—operations,
human resources, finance and budget, technology, and customer
service within the individual department.
316
residents willing to participate in a two-hour training session,
through which they are made familiar with various city
departments and the electronic reporting system. Neighborhood
liaisons have become important actors in the community by
combining their new training with what they know about their
neighborhoods and the wants and needs of the community more
and better than outsiders. One Philly311 staff person said:
The liaisons are community leaders. We train them to
use our system. They have ability to put information
directly into our system. That’s our strong connection in
a different way of outreach. Multiple sources of
information are embedded in neighborhoods.
The neighborhood liaisons have become contact points for
capturing and integrating service requests. They are critical to
connecting the 311-enabled integrated services with the service
needy, often poor, technology-illiterate, and living in distressed
neighborhoods.
5. CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES
Philly311 was established under a very tight timeframe—11
months from February to December in 2008. No other city of
Philadelphia’s size launched a 311 center operation under such
time pressure. The aggressive timeline itself was not a serious
problem alone, but early challenges arose from unexpected global
financial crisis. The subsequent budget crisis experienced by the
whole city meant scaling back or postponing key elements of the
project. The budget gap created two severe challenges: understaffing—six
agents short of the operational goal of 57 agents and
recruitment based on internal transfers of inexperienced agents
from other departments—and under-equipping—the use of old
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
These challenges continued through to the present, but according
to interviewees, the first year of Philly311 still provided a set of
practical lessons about how a city with similar challenges could
launch and operate a 311 system. They spoke of the critical role of
strong executive support, strategic partnership with external
organizations, and adaptation and flexibility in staffing and
equipping in mitigating these challenges. One Philly311 founding
official noted:
We clearly could not move forward with upgrading with
our CRM, and we didn’t change our recruitment
strategies. The budget crisis impacted us in a
significant way, but we were still able to achieve a
majority of outcomes.
These outcomes are the changes made by Philly311 in
management and service delivery, as discussed in the preceding
section. The major challenges and concerns faced in Philadelphia
as they worked to transform their city government through 311 are
introduced and discussed below followed by a discussion of new
opportunities for change being uncovered in the current phase.
5.1 Technology
The technological challenges identified were primarily related to
under-equipping. In particular, Philly311 wanted to upgrade back
office software such as the CRM and database systems for
information sharing. One Philly311 staff claimed, “We need the
right technology at the right time.” Interviewees discussed how
the City is recognizing an increasing number of Internet users
accessing Philly311 through their smart phones instead of desktop

or laptop computers. Internet connection through mobile phones is
increasingly being viewed as a strategy for closing the digital
divide in the City. The extension of the 311 system to smart
phones was considered by interviewees as a way to further
promote citizen engagement and active feedback of 311 services
from citizens, while also reaching out to a new segment of the
community.
5.2 Management and Organization
Budgetary constraints generated organizational challenges in
recruiting qualified call center agents and keeping call center
operations open for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. While these
staffing challenges have continued since the launch of Philly311,
the interviews revealed a new and related challenge. Philly311 as
a city agency has a unique organizational culture distinguishable
from other departments and agencies, because it serves as a leader
and pioneer of customer services in the City government.
According to one Philly311 staff person, call center agents may
feel that they have to comply with a more rigorous internal
standard for excellence in customer services, which is not required
in other departments.
Philly311 may offer government employees a new opportunity to
see their job differently. The way service departments do their
business changes due to the 311 center. Directors and managers in
the city departments are seeing their job in a more efficient,
effective, and transparent way. For example, one of Philly311’s
missions is to “provide recommendations into ways to improve
City government through accurate, consistent measurement and
analysis of service delivery citywide” (see www.phila.gov/311).
By the measurement and analysis, Philly311 helps city
departments have better understanding of what they are doing and
what others are doing. According to one executive-level
interviewee, Philly311 is driving a cultural change in the whole
city government to data-based, performance-driven, and
customer-oriented culture, but that isn’t coming at a short horizon,
given the interdepartmental differences in organizational culture.
5.3 Internal and External Governance
Internal governance-related and also cross-organizational
challenges mostly lie in interdepartmental or interagency
collaboration. A formal governance body for such collaboration
does not exist, but instead some staff members of Philly311 meet
key people from the departments on the service level agreements
in a regular basis. Philly311 staff identified this process as
informal. The City government considers expanding the scope of
services and information provided by Philly311 by including more
departments in the service level agreements. The process through
which the current service level agreements were created is based
on interdepartmental collaboration. To establish the
interdepartmental agreements, Philly311 staff identified
potentially high volume customers (departments) and contacted
them. Through the meetings, Philly311 staff decided who has
knowledge of city services and information. This process has been
semi-regularized, but not based on a formal process. With this
informal process, there is a challenge in bringing new service
departments into the service level agreements, because Philly311
does not have a formal governance body for organizing new
interdepartmental collaboration and cooperation. The mechanism
for interdepartmental workings on revising and updating the
service level agreements currently relies on relational
governance, which refers to governance by commitment, mutual
317
dependence, trust, and interpersonal relationships [14].
Interviewees agreed the process has worked well so far, but
recognized that the process needs to be formalized for expansion
of the service level agreements and Philly311 functions.
On the other hand, the interdepartmental governance around
Philly311 allows Philly311 and the departments in the service
level agreements to create mutual understandings of their jobs.
The series of informal meetings have provided those city
departments with a valuable opportunity for mutual learning.
Furthermore, some Philly311 staff said the interagency
relationship has shifted from competitive on customer services to
complementary. At the beginning of Philly311, other departments
and agencies had a concern that Philly311 takes their own jobs.
Now the mutual learning has developed an understanding that
Philly311 does help their jobs. In addition, Philly311’s past three
years have changed the City Council’s early perception of the 311
center and other departments as well. The City Council does not
concentrate their energies any more on routine constituent
services that they dealt with before 311 by receiving service
requests and complaints pertinent to Council districts. Philly311
reports to the City Council about the status of customer service
delivery by Council districts, and the Council members appreciate
data and information pulled from 311 as an effective tool to better
understand their constituents.
Another side of governance formed by Philly311 indicates the
increasing interactions with citizens. Philly311 provides a new
way by which citizens are involved in their neighborhood
concerns. Philly311 receives requests for service, which may be
the reports of community problems residents see: for example,
removing graffiti, clearing up a vacant property, moving a vacant
car, replacing a street light, and so on. Among them, some
requests, despite a small portion in call volumes, reflect concerned
citizens’ ideas and suggestions for improving neighborhood
environments beyond reporting immediate problems. This citizen
engagement category of calls to 311 merits attention from city
managers, but inbound calls are currently analyzed in terms of the
two main categories (information requests and service requests).
Categorizing some calls into citizen engagement and further
analyzing those calls in depth needs additional efforts of
Philly311 agents.
6. DISCUSSIONS
While a growing number of conceptual studies are exploring cities
and the meaning of being a “smart city”, relatively few studies are
engaging in empirical investigations of smart city activities. A
variety of existing theories and theoretical models of urban
innovation are being considered by scholars in terms of their
relevancy to city-level initiatives being carried out in the interest
of becoming “smarter”. A challenge to such efforts is that, as of
Table 7. Challenges and opportunities of Philly311
Technology � Timing in upgrading
software and systems
Management
and
organization
Challenges Opportunities
� Limited funding
� Cultural differences
between 311 and other
departments
� New technologies to
bridge the digital divide
� Business process
change
� Change to data-based,
performance-driven,
and customer-oriented
culture

Internal and
external
governance
� Reliance on informal
processes in
interdepartmental
collaboration
� Additional efforts for
analyzing calls for
citizen engagement
� Strengthening relational
governance in
interdepartmental
collaboration
� Providing a new way to
citizen engagement
yet, there is no consensus on what constitutes a “smart city”.
Grounded in rich evidence from semi-structured interviews, this
study considers Philly311 as a smart city initiative that contributes
to making the city of Philadelphia more efficient, effective, and
transparent and facilitating city-level governance. The study also
suggests a model, grounded on empirical evidence without
preconceived theories [13,22], to understand smart city programs.
Figure 1. A smart city program model
Organizational
factors
Technological
factors
Smart City Program
To Make a City Government Smarter Efficiency
Effectiveness
Smart City
Management
Smart City
Service Delivery
Transparency
Governance
Cross-organizational
factors
This study explored impacts of a smart city initiative in the form
of a 311 non-emergency service program. Philly311 as a smart
city program is enabling more effective and efficient management
while also informing service delivery strategies. It is also deeply
embedded in a set of technological, organizational and managerial,
and internal and external governance-related factors.
The Philly311 service center serves residents, business, and
visitors as a convenient front line of municipal services. Tailoring
frontline services to the needs of individual citizens is a key to
smart city service delivery [8]. Philly311’s back-end functions
enable the city to gain more efficiency and effectiveness by
allocating and using managerial and operational resources in a
smarter way, based on performance data. City management
leveraging these smart cities strategies and capabilities is thus
contributing to efficiency, effectiveness, and the improvement in
decision making [24]. Enhancing transparency and accountability
of service delivery through Philly311 is also one of the ways to
Philadelphia is becoming smarter. Enhanced transparency and
accountability of city administration contributes to smart
governance [12]. Externally, Philly311 allows citizens to engage
more easily in their neighborhoods and communities. Internally,
Philly311 enables and promotes interdepartmental collaboration
and cooperation. Based on the practice in Philly311, this study
suggests that a characteristic of a smart city engages various
internal (city agencies) and external (individual citizens and civic
groups) stakeholders in making community-related decisions [12].
Some positive changes made by Philly311 are not without
challenge, especially in terms of technology, management, and
governance. This finding can be extended to practical implications
for smart city initiatives. Budgetary constraints and under-
318
equipped technical conditions have continued since the launch of
Philly311. While some smart city programs such as the 311 nonemergency
contact centers consume capital budget, others may be
conducted in a resource-saving way. The case of Philly311 offers
various lessons for smart city practitioners. With the growing
importance of Philly311 as a smart city program of the city, the
data-driven and customer service-oriented culture is increasingly
being imbued across the whole city government of Philadelphia.
Mitigating inter-organizational tensions and conflicts is also vital
to smart city management. In the case of Philly311, internal
governance enables interdepartmental efforts toward producing
service level agreements. Current informal governance
mechanisms leave much room for improvement. To gain much
attention and guarantee active participation of all related actors, a
smart city program needs to be formalized and institutionalized by
a city government.
Philly311 also offers new ways to engage even more citizens in
neighborhood issues. The challenge for cities is in understanding
how best to create new policies and administrative processes to
ensure as well as leverage such engagement. While the whole city
government obviously takes benefits from Philly311 by making
operational management and service delivery smarter, the 311
service center exposes both challenges and opportunities.
7. CONCLUSION
Philly311 is being used as crucial part of the city administration’s
strategy to transform the city government into a smarter, faster
and better city. Interviews with key actors in the creation and
operation of Philly311 shed light on its contribution to a smart
government and ultimately a smart city. According to the
interviewees, a smart government involves operating in a more
efficient, effective, transparent, and open governance-facilitating
way. In this paper, we suggested preliminary understanding of
smart city initiatives in the context of the City of Philadelphia and
its 311 non-emergency contact center. The understanding should
be extended and generalized to other smart city programs. Further
research will focus on more diverse cases of 311 contact centers.
We will revisit findings from this study and extend them through
comparative analysis with additional 311 service center cases as
well as service integration efforts more generally.
8. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank the many City of Philadelphia government officials who
spent time with us and openly shared their perspectives and
valuable insights on Philly311, PhillyRising, and PhillyStat
programs. We are also grateful to all members of the multinational
research project titled “Smart Cities Service Integration.”
This study is partially supported by a grant from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada
and the home institutions of researchers who jointly work on the
multi-national research project. The views and conclusions
expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the SSHRC or the home
institutions of other researchers.
9. REFERENCES
[1] Allwinkle, S. and Cruickshank, P. (2011). Creating smart-er
cities: An overview. Journal of Urban Technology, 18(2), 1–
16.

[2] Anavitarte, L. and Tratz-Ryan, B. (2010). Market Insight:
‘Smart Cities’ in Emerging Markets. Gartner. Available at
www.gartner.com/id=1468734.
[3] Bergeron, B. P. (2003). Essentials of Shared Services.
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
[4] Boulton, A., Brunn, S. D., and Devriendt, L. (2011).
Cyberinfrastructures and “smart” world cities: Physical,
human, and soft infrastructures. In P. Taylor, B. Derudder,
M. Hoyler & F. Witlox (Eds.), International Handbook of
Globalization and World Cities. Cheltenham, UK: Edward
Elgar.
[5] Charmaz, K. (1983). The grounded theory methods: An
explication and interpretation. In R. M. Emerson (Ed.)
Contemporary Field Research: A Collection of Readings.
Boston: Little, Brown.
[6] Chourabi, H., Nam, T., Walker, S., Gil-Garcia, J. R.,
Mellouli, S., Nahon, K., Pardo, T. A., and Scholl, H. J.
(2012). Understanding smart cities: An integrative
framework. In Proceedings of the 45th Hawaii International
Conference on System Sciences (pp. 2289–2297), January 4–
7, Maui, Hawaii, USA.
[7] Denzin, N. K. (2007). Grounded theory and the politics of
interpretation. In A. Bryant & K. Charmaz (Eds.), The Sage
Handbook of Grounded Theory. London: Sage.
[8] Dirks, S. and Keeling, M. (2009). A Vision of Smarter Cities:
How Cities Can Lead the Way into a Prosperous and
Sustainable Future. Somers, NY: IBM Global Business
Services.
[9] Dirks, S., Keeling, M., and Dencik, J. (2009). How Smart is
Your City?: Helping Cities Measure Progress. Somers, NY:
IBM Global Business Services.
[10] Dollery, B. and Akimov, A. (2008). Are shared services as a
panacea for Australian local government? A critical note on
Australian and international empirical evidence.
International Review of Public Administration, 12(2), 89–99.
[11] Floersch, J., Longhofer, J., Kranke, D., & Townsend, L.
(2010). Integrating thematic, grounded theory and narrative
analysis. Qualitative Social Work, 9(3), 407–425.
[12] Giffinger, R., Fertner, C., Kramar, H., Kalasek, R., Pichler-
Milanović, N., and Meijers, E. (2007). Smart Cities: Ranking
of European Medium-Sized Cities. Vienna, Austria: Centre of
Regional Science (SRF), Vienna University of Technology.
[13] Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The Discovery of
Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research.
Chicago: Aldine.
319
[14] Goo, J., Kishore, R., Rao, H. R., and Nam, K. (2009). The
role of service level agreements in relational management of
information technology outsourcing: An empirical study.
MIS Quarterly, 33(1), 119–145.
[15] Harrison, C., Eckman, B., Hamilton, R., Hartswick, P.,
Kalagnanam, J., Paraszczak, J., and Williams, P. (2010).
Foundations for Smarter Cities. IBM Journal of Research
and Development, 54(4), 350–365.
[16] Hiles, A. N. (1994). Service level agreements. The TQM
Magazine, 6(2), 14–16.
[17] Hollands, R. G. (2008). Will the real smart city please stand
up? Intelligent, progressive or entrepreneurial. City, 12(3),
303–320.
[18] Holton, J. A. (2007). The coding process and its challenges.
In A. Bryant & K. Charmaz (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of
Grounded Theory. London: Sage.
[19] Janssen, M. and Wagennar, R. (2004). Developing generic
shared services for e-Government. Electronic Journal of e-
Government, 2(1), 31–38.
[20] Nam, T. and Pardo, T. A. (2011a). Conceptualizing smart
city with dimensions of technology, people, and institutions.
In Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Conference
on Digital Government Research, June 12–15, College Park,
MA, USA.
[21] Nam, T. and Pardo, T. A. (2011b). Smart city as urban
innovation: Focusing on management, policy, and context. In
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Theory
and Practice of Electronic Governance, September 26–28,
Tallinn, Estonia.
[22] Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of Qualitative
Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing
Grounded Theory (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
[23] Walsh, P., McGregor-Lowndes, M., and Newton, C. J.
(2008). Shared services: Lessons from the public and private
sectors for the nonprofit sector. The Australian Journal of
Public Administration, 67(2), 200–212.
[24] Washburn, D., Sindhu, U., Balaouras, S., Dines, R. A.,
Hayes, N. M., and Nelson, L. E. (2010). Helping CIOs
Understand “Smart City” Initiatives: Defining the Smart
City, Its Drivers, and the Role of the CIO. Cambridge, MA:
Forrester Research.
[25] Yin, R. K. (2009). Case Study Research: Design and
methods (4th ed.). Thousands Oaks, CA: Sage.

Session 11
IT Governance & Policy

A Literature Review: IT Governance Guidelines and Areas
Ruben Pereira
Instituto Superior Tecnico
Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001 Lisboa
+351 966474901
rubenfspereira@ist.utl.pt
ABSTRACT
Lack of business/IT (BIT) alignment affects e-governance
initiatives success. Information Technology Governance (ITG)
has been recognized as a CIO top-10 issue for more than five
years and has risen in priority between 2007 and 2009. Several
Frameworks exist to help organizations in ITG implementation
but lack scientific viewpoint, are complex, and also overlap each
other. In this paper we make a literature review to leverage the
ITG general guidelines and main ITG areas in order to provide a
scientific viewpoint validation. We also evaluate our artefacts
with expert’s interviews in order to provide practitioner viewpoint
validation, and map our artifact with current theories. Finally, we
conclude our research with main contributions and future work.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.1.0 [Models and Principles]: General.
General Terms
Management, Performance, Design, Standardization, Theory.
Keywords
IT, Governance, Management, IT Governance Guidelines,
Literature Review, IT Governance Areas, e-Governance
1. INTRODUCTION
Many organizations have become totally reliant on IT for success
and recognize that IT is becoming one of their main
organizational assets [34][16]. However, government bodies have
limited expertise in IT and are slow to leverage their potential for
improving governance what can be fatal for organizations wishing
to implement e-Governance solutions [31][23]. BIT alignment
becomes crucial and ITG has been identified as an appropriate
solution to deal with increasing IT changes and complexity. The
purpose of this paper is to examine both the previous and the
current research in ITG so a basis for further research and the
identification of the main ITG guidelines and main ITG and
Management (ITG/M) areas based on literature and experts’
knowledge could be provided in order to help organization in
future ITG implementations. Indeed, there are studies that show
the positive effect of good ITG implementation in organizations
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
320
Miguel Mira da Silva
Instituto Superior Tecnico
Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001 Lisboa
+351 919671425
mms@ist.utl.pt
[50][27], nevertheless, there are also evidences that IT keep being
badly managed and governed [29][14]. Such fact influences the
success of e-Governance initiatives.
Several Frameworks exist to help organizations in ITG
implementation. However, organizations still prefer to design
their own [5]. Such fact is not surprising since most Frameworks
state that there is no single “best” IT organizational structure or
governance arrangement because IT needs to respond to the
unique environments within which exists [29][2] but don’t specify
the factors that can influence each ITG implementation, are seen
as complex [35], too general [32], lacking a theoretical foundation
from a scientific viewpoint [17], and overlap each other [35].
Such statements reinforce the possibility of improvements in the
existing Frameworks.
2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Few researchers attempted to perform empirical studies on ITG
topic [6]. Hence, we constructed and evaluated new and
innovative artifacts following the design research paradigm [21].
Based on the four design artifacts produced by design science
research in information systems - constructs, models, methods and
instantiations - we will focus on constructs (ITG guidelines and
ITG/M areas). Constructs are necessary to describe certain aspects
of a problem domain [37], they provide the language in which
problems and solutions are defined and communicated.
The methodology applied is divided according to the two
processes of design science research (build and evaluate). The
literature review approach used in this paper follows the conceptcentric
methodology of IS literature reviews as outlined in
Webster and Watson [49]. In this article we evaluated our artifacts
through interviews. In addition, by submitting scientific
publications to respected international conferences, we also used
the appraisal of the scientific community as evaluation criteria.
3. LITERATURE REVIEW
Since the 1990s ITG has been a concern. However, good ITG is
no longer a “nice to have”, but a “must have” and can contribute
to higher returns on assets at a time when business is spending
increasing amounts on technology investment [48]. Indeed,
Gartner states that ITG has been recognized as a CIO top-10 issue
for more than five years and has risen in priority during the past
two [16]. ITG potential is also in the fact that the most significant
IT issues, currently and in the future, are not technology-related,
but governance-related [18].
3.1 IT Governance Guidelines
Guidelines have been designed, used, and adopted in several
domains [21][4][43]. As a result, they should be considered an
instrument that ought not to be underestimated since guidelines

are necessary to obtain a uniformity regarding functionality, as
well as a desired quality level [4]. Reviewing available literature
on the subject under study is an essential part of developing
guidelines which can be based on experience - either practical or
theoretical [45]. We summarize our guidelines in Table 1.
3.2 IT Governance/Management Main Areas
Many frameworks exist and each one calls their processes/areas
with different names which culminate in overlap and contribute to
organization confusion as well as waste of resources [35].
Therefore a formalization of ITG and ITM areas is needed. We
summarize the ITG and ITM areas in Table 2.
4. EVALUATION
In order to validate our artefacts, besides the complete literature
review and despite the little empirical work concerning ITG in the
literature, we also mapped the artefacts with current theories and
Table 2. Main ITG/M Areas summary
Main Area Description Topics/subjects Literature Reference
Strategy
Management
Service
Management
Resource
Management
Risk
Management
Development
Management
Architecture
Management
Project
Management
Quality
Management
Investment
Management
Outsourcing
Management
Support
Management
Compliance
Management
Improvement &
Innovation
Management
Table 1. ITG Guidelines Summary
Guidelines About what? What do we need? Literature Reference
1 Where do we want to be? BIT objectives and vision
BIT strategies
BIT goals
[34][41][27][48][16][12][43]
[38][15][46][33]
2 Where are we now?
BIT alignment, maturity,
BIT strategic plan
Core competences, assess IT department and maturity,
assess enterprise, assess BIT alignment
[34][41][27][48] [16][12][43]
[38][15][46][33]
3 What do we need to get there?
Structures, processes, and
mechanisms
Collect information about contingency factors of the
organization, define the necessary mechanisms
[1][13][9][29] [8][46][33] [2][22]
4 How do we get where we want to be? IT processes Materialize the plan defined in the previous step [41][48][12] [44][43][15] [46][2]
5
How do we know we have arrived
there?
Metrics
Measurements
IT Balance Scorecard
Enterprise Balance Scorecard
[1][41][27][48] [44][8][39]
[46][33][30]
6
Are we following the market’s best
practices?
Best practices
Frameworks
Be aware of best practices frameworks and standards [28][17][12] [8][11]
7
How do we know we are doing it
right?
Compliance
Audit
Audit regularly
Internal and external compliance
[41][36][24]
8 How do we keep it on track?
Improvement
Innovation
Collect information to I&I in order to prepare organization
for current and future challenges
[16][38][15] [2][24][19]
Responsible for business/IT objectives and alignment, contingency
factors, and other reasons pointed out as possible differentiators of ITGI.
Responsible for service definition, service catalogue, service portfolio,
service levels, and other subjects about provided services.
Accountable for the correct management of the organization’s resources,
like people, technology, applications, etc. Training is included.
Responsible for the correct assurance of the business’ continuity by
anticipating and preventing possible risks of the IT department, which are
correlated with business risk.
Responsible for the design and development of software as well as its
maintenance.
Responsible for the design of the necessary architectures for the good
functioning of the IT department.
Accountable for the management of the entire cross IT department
project, all kinds of projects.
Responsible for the assurance of the required procedures to guarantee
functionality and provide services and products with the required quality.
In charge of assuring the correct financial functioning of the IT
department and of providing budget, costs, and financial plans.
Manages all the aspects concerning outsourcers, as contracts, service
levels, relations, etc.
Responsible for user interaction and mainly keeps user satisfaction
Accountable for the control of internal and external regulations, as well as
report and measurement.
Responsible for the management of the improvements and innovations
that can be required or provided by the entire IT department.
321
also used the results of a series of experts interviews.
We used structured interviews covering a diverse sample of
organization types, sizes, and roles. By space limitations we won’t
present interviewees details. The respondents have a lot of
experience in the area. To support the interviews, we designed a
questionnaire to lead the discussion. In the interviews, the
majority of the questions weren’t open-response questions
because of the nature of the information we need to elicit. The
interviews were conducted over a one month period. Each session
lasted from 60 to 90 minutes and was transcribed into digital data.
We performed nine interviews with ITG experts who have
strategic alignment and ITG knowledge in their organizations.
Seven interviews were performed in Portugal and two in Ireland
by Skype. The interviewees were 3 consultant organizations (1, 2
and 7) and 6 non-consultant (3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9) organizations.
Table 3 shows a summary of the results. We used “yes/no” to
Demand Management, Market analyze,
IT/Business strategy plan/definition/alignment
Service Level Management
Service Portfolio
Human resource, Hardware, Software, Capacity
and Configuration Mngt., Information Mngt.
Disaster recovery, Backups and security
Management, Business continuity, Identity and
access Management
Application Management
Application maintenance
IT architecture and engineering
Infrastructure Management
Project Portfolio Management
Project Management
Quality control
Product Quality Management
Portfolio and Value Mngt., Define budgets,
Manage costs
Manage contracts
Control outsourcers
Incident and Problem Mngt.
Service desk
[41][28][48][12][47]
[39][15][46][2][11][19]
[30]
[34][24][26]
[13][41][28][47][39][2]
[19][30]
[29][48][15][46][2]
[11][30]
[50][12][2]
[13][41][12][47][39]
[43][15][2]
[13][41][16][12][39]
[15][30]
[42][40][7]
[14][29][48][16][12]
[15][39][46][2][24][30]
[47][39][15][2][24]
[20][3][10][25]
Audit, Policy and Report Mngt., Internal Control [44][15][24]
Analyze reports and options
Prospection, Improvement and Innovation,
Change Mngt
[39][39][15][2][24][19]
[30]

Interviewees
Useful?
Table 3. Interview Results
Guidelines ITG/M Areas
General?
Complete?
Remove step?
Complete?
Remove?
Missing?
1 Yes Yes Yes No No No Yes G G
2 Yes Yes Yes No No No Yes G G
3 Yes Yes No Yes Yes No No G G G G
4 Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No G G
5 No Yes Yes No Yes No No G G G
6 Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No G G
7 Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No G G G
8 Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No G G G
9 Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No G
Strategy
Investment
highlight the positive and negative responses.
The third interviewee was the only one to disagree with the
proposed guidelines. He argued that guidelines 4, 6, and 8 are not
needed and a new one about investment decision making between
guideline 2 and 3 was missing. However, since we have strong
literature support and only one interviewee mentioned this
argument, we decided to keep the guidelines without changes. The
fifth interviewee stated that such guidelines were not useful since
COBIT already has guidelines with such abstraction. However
COBIT has it for each COBIT process and not for general ITG
implementation. Fifth, sixth and seventh interviewees affirmed
that some factors were missing. Fifth, sixth and seventh
interviewees stated that some factors were missing.
Several conclusions could be withdrawn from the interviews:
most of the interviews see the guidelines as useful, compete and
general; Strategy Management and Investment Management are
almost consensual between interviewees as the main ITG areas;
all the areas without any appointment will be assumed as
management areas
This research provided us some important learning in ITG field.
Based on both scientific and practitioner viewpoint with achieved
the formalization of the contingency factors, ITG general
guidelines and ITG/M main areas. Besides the consensual
identification of the Strategy and Investment Management as ITG
areas by practitioners, few other areas still dubiety in
practitioner’s viewpoint.
5. CONCLUSION
Our research provides interesting contributions in a moment
where BIT alignment becomes a crucial issue. The approach
allows for a better understanding of the implementation of ITG in
a corporate environment.
Our artefacts are based on literature review giving them
theoretical foundation. Yet, in order to keep providing practitioner
viewpoint we also performed interviews with ITG experts. Then
we argue that our artefacts were build under both scientific and
practitioner viewpoint.
Since current IT frameworks are complex and lack the correct
initial roadmap with the identification of the general guidelines
that organizations must follow in order to know what must be
implemented or addressed first given the context of each
organization, we argue that our general guidelines add valuable
knowledge to ITG field and community. Moreover, current
frameworks also overlap each other, then the formalization of the
Compliance
Risk
Resource
Architecture
Innovation
322
main ITG/M areas also validated in both scientific and
practitioner viewpoint is added value. Including BIT concerns in
our artefacts we argue that we are proposing important artefacts in
order to increase the e-Governance initiatives success in
organizations.
Future work must pass by the integration of the presented artefacts
in an IT governance framework as well as a research in-deep of
each identified area taking into consideration the most known
frameworks applied in the area. Furthermore, real-world case
studies should be performed.
6. REFERENCES
[1] Adams, C.R., Larson, E.C. and Xia, W. IS/IT Governance
Structure and Alignment: An Apparent Paradox. MISRC,
(2008).
[2] Agarwal, R. and Sambamurthy, V. Principles and Models for
Organizing the IT Function. MISQ 1(1), (2002).
[3] Bartolini, C., Stefanelli, C. and Tortonesi, M. Analysis and
performance improvement of the IT incident management
process. In: TNSM, (2010), 132–144.
[4] Bohl, O., Frankfurth, A., Schelhase, J. and Winand, U.
Guidelines – A Critical Success Factor in the Development
of Web-based Trainings. In: ICCE, (2002), 545–546.
[5] Broussard, F.W. and Tero, V. Configuration and Change
Management for IT Compliance and Risk Management: The
Tripwire Approach. White Paper. IDC, 2007.
[6] Brown, A.E. and Grant, G.G. Framing the Frameworks: A
Review of IT Governance Research. CAIS 15, (2005),696-
712.
[7] Corea, S. and Levy, M. Quality of IT support for corporate
environmental management: A paradigmatic framework. In:
2nd ICDIM, (2007), 424–429.
[8] Dahlberg, T. and Lahdelma, P. IT Governance Maturity and
IT Outsourcing Degree: An Exploratory Study. In: HICSS,
(2007), 236a.
[9] De Haes, S. and Grembergen, W. Analysing the Relationship
between IT Governance and Business/IT Alignment
Maturity. In: 41st HICSS, (2008),428.
[10] Diao, Y., Jamjoom, H. and Loewenstern, D. Rule-Based
Problem Classification in IT Service Management. In:
CLOUD, (2009), 221-228.
[11] Fasanghari, M., NasserEslami, F. and Naghavi, M. IT
Governance Standard Selection Based on Two Phase
Clustering Method. In: 4 th NCM, (2008), 513-518.
[12] Fink, K. and Ploder, K. Decision Support Framework for the
Implementation of IT-Governance. In: HICSS, (2008), 432.
[13] Gallagher, K.P. and Worrel, J.L. Organizing IT to Promote
Agility. Inf. Tech. Manag. 9, 1 (2008),71-88.
[14] Gao, S., Chen, J. and Fang, D. The Influence of IT Capability
on Dimensions of Organization Structure.In: 2 nd FITME,
(2009), 269-273.
[15] Gerrard, M. Defining IT Governance: The Gartner IT
Governance Demand/Supply Model. Gartner ID:G00140091,
2010.
[16] Gerrard, M. IT Governance, a Flawed Concept: It’s Time for
Business Change Governance. GartnerID:G00171658 (2009)

[17] Goeken, M. and Alter, S. Representing IT Governance
Frameworks as Metamodels. In: EEE’08, (2008),48-54.
[18] Guldentops, E., Grembergen V. W. & De Haes, S.: Control
and Governance Maturity Survey: Establishing a Reference
Benchmark and Assessment Tool. ISCJ, 6, (2002), 32-35.
[19] Guney, S. and Cresswell, A.M. IT Governance as
Organizing: Playing the Game. In: 43rd HICSS, (2010), 1-10.
[20] Gupta, R., Prasad, K.H. and Mohania, M. Automating ITSM
Incident Management Process. In: ICAC, (2008), 141-150.
[21] Hevner, A.R., March, S.T., Park, J. and Ram, S. Design
Science in Information Systems Research. MISQ, 2, 1
(2004),75-105.
[22] Hosseinbeig, S., Karimzadgan-Moghadam, D., Vahdat and
D., Moghadam, R.A. IT strategic alignment maturity and IT
governance. In: 4th ICIS, (2011), 67-72.
[23] Iyengar, J. and Gadgil, R. User Centered IT for the Public: A
Corporate Partnership in e-Governance. In: ICTD, (2007), 1-
6.
[24] Jacobson, D.D. Revisiting IT Governance in the Light of
Institutional Theory. In: 42 nd HICSS, (2009), 1-9.
[25] Jun, L., Xiao, Li, L. and Jun, W. A problem classification
approach in business service management. In: ICCASM,
(2010), 354-356.
[26] Lahtela, A., Jantti, M. and Kaukola, J. Implementing an
ITIL-Based IT Service Management Measurement System.
In: 4th ICDS, (2010), 249 - 254.
[27] Lingyu, H., Bingwu, L., Ruiping, Y. and Jianzhang, W. An
IT Governance Framework of ERP System Implementation.
In: CCIE, (2010), 431-434.
[28] Losso, S. and Goeken, M. Application of Best-Practice
Reference Models of IT Governance. In: 18th ECIS (2010).
[29] Lunardi, G.L., Becker, J.L. and Macada, A.C.G. The
Financial Impact of IT Governance Mechanisms' Adoption:
An Empirical Analysis with Brazilian Firms. In: 42 nd HICSS,
(2009).
[30] Maidin, S.S. and Arshad, N.H. IT governance practices
model in IT project approval and implementation in
Malaysian public sector. In: ICEIE, (2010), V1-532 -V1-536.
[31] Marawar, T., Kale, S. and Araspure, K. E-Governance. In:
DSDE, (2010), 183-186.
[32] Morimoto, S. Application of COBIT to Security
Management in Information Systems Development. In: 4 th
FCST, (2009), 625 – 630.
[33] Nabiollahi, A. and Sahibuddin, S. Considering Service
Strategy in ITIL V3 as a Framework for IT Governance. In:
ITSim, (2008), 1-6.
323
[34] Park, H.Y., Jung, S.H., Lee, Y. and Jang, K.C. The Effect of
Improving IT Standard in IT Governance. In: CIMCA,
(2006), 22.
[35] Pereira, R. and Mira da Silva, M. A Maturity Model for
Implementing ITIL V3 in Practice. In: EDOCW, (2011), 259
– 268.
[36] PrinceWaterHouseCoopers. Risk Based Compliance
Monitoring & Compliance Function Effectiveness - A new
approach to managing compliance in the financial services
industry, 2008.
[37] Schermann, M., B¨Ohmann, T. and Krcmar, H. Explicating
Design Theories with Conceptual Models: Towards a
Theoretical Role of Reference Models. In J. Becker, H.
Krcmar & B. Niehaves, (2009).
[38] Shpilberg, D., Berez, S., Puryear, R. and Shah, S. Avoiding
the Alignment Trap in Information Technology. MIT Sloan
Management Review 49, 1(2007), 51-58.
[39] Silva, E. and Chaix, Y. Business and IT Governance
Alignment Simulation Essay on a Business Process and IT
Service Model. In: 41 st HICSS, (2008), 434.
[40] Silva, L.F. and Brito e Abreu, F. An IT Infrastructure
Patterns Approach to Improve IT Service Management
Quality. In: 7 th QUATIC, (2010), 171–176.
[41] Simonsson, M. and Ekstedt, M. Getting the Priorities Right:
Literature vs Practice on IT Governance. In: PICMET,
(2006), 18-26.
[42] Simonsson, M. and Johnson, P. The IT Organization
Modeling and Assessment Tool: Correlating IT Governance
Maturity with the Effect of IT. In: HICSS, pp.431. (2008).
[43] Simonsson, M., Johnson, P. and Ekstedt, M. IT Governance
Decision Support Using the IT Organization Modeling and
Assessment Tool. In: PICMET, (2008), 802-810.
[44] Simonsson, M., Lagerström, R. and Johnson, P. A Bayesian
network for IT governance performance prediction. In:
ICEC, (2008), 1-8.
[45] Smith, S. L. and Mosier, J. N. Guidelines for designing user
interface software. Technical Report ESD-TR-86-278, 1986.
[46] Symons, C.: IT Governance Framework. Forrester (2005).
[47] Tanriverdi, H. Performance Effects of Information
Technology Synergies in Multibusiness Firms. MISQ 30,
1(2006), 57-77.
[48] Webb, P., Pollard, C. and Ridley, G. Attempting to Define IT
Governance: Wisdom or Folly? In: HICSS, (2006), 194a.
[49] Webster, J. and Watson, R.T. Analyzing the Past to Prepare
for the Future: Writing a Literature Review. MISQ, 26,
2(2002), xiii-xxiii.
[50] Weil, P., and Ross J.W. IT Governance: How Top
Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Result.
Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Massachusetts,2004

Assessment of Success Factors of e-Government Project
Implementation: Challenges for the Kosovo e-Government
Perspective
Artan Rexhepi, Blerim Rexha and Agni Dika
Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Prishtina
10000 Prishtina,KOSOVO
+377 44 115 651, +377 44 627 251, +377 44 500 721
artan.rexhepi@uni-pr.edu, blerim.rexha@uni-pr.edu, agni.dika@uni-pr.edu
ABSTRACT
Among European countries, Kosovo is ranked low with respect to
the provision of on-line e-Government services. The challenges in
the introduction of e-Government in Kosovo were largely related
to launching simple service delivery and integration of
governments back offices. There is still a big disparity between
what is being provided and what citizens’ requirements for the e-
Government services are. This study has conducted a survey
regarding the perception of current on-line e-government services
among Kosovo citizens. By analyzing the current situation from
the view of citizens, this paper analyzes the status, requirements
and prerequisites for the implementation of a sustainable egovernment
portal. The objective of this research is to emphasize
the appropriate factors, ranging from information and
communication services, application of electronic forms and
provision of transaction services, electronic management of
documents to the effective administration processes, which could
significantly increase the likelihood of success of such egovernment
projects. Based on the gathered and analyzed
data, the paper discusses action recommendations for an
acceptable and sustainable portal, which would be utilizable by a
majority of citizens in Kosovo.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J.1 [Administrative Data Processing]: Government
General Terms
Management, Documentation, Performance, Human Factors
Keywords
E-Government, Assessment, Kosovo, Electronic Government,
Information and Communication Technology, Digital
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
324
Government
1. INTRODUCTION
There is currently no reliable assessment of the e-government
indicators and parameters required for the measurement of the
present e-government development in Kosovo. As per the UN
DPADM E-country report, Kosovo’s progress to e-government
was rated at its beginning, ranking with this Kosovo low with
respect to provision of e-services to the citizens [1]. However,
over the past few years the understanding of governance and egovernance
by the Kosovo government has been continuously
changed. There are growing pressures and expectations from the
citizens to the public administration aiming for governance with a
modern approach for an efficient and effective administration. In
addition, the transition period has shown that the government
needs to be more transparent and accountable to the public. This
and the need for reorganizing many processes within the public
sector, covering a wide range of tasks and work arrangements,
have been understood and it has lead to initiatives, such as the
Kosovo Strategy for E-Government [2]. Nevertheless, there is still
a big gap evident between the political priorities and agenda on
the one hand and the actual implementation and users
expectations on the other hand.
The initial requirements for the government start with a detailed
remodeling of work processes within the public sector and by
translating them into a digitalized e-service format model for
citizens. The existing relationships between the government and
the citizen will be therefore redefined by introducing new
processes at work in the public sector and by opening new
opportunities.
The Kosovo Government’s E-Government Strategy 2009-2015
has identified the major priorities and objectives that need to be
realized. During the past few years, several projects were
identified and fully or partly implemented as a basis for the
provision of e-services, such as the central register of citizens, the
register of economic entities and various registers of cadastre and
immovable properties for land administration. Besides such
important projects, there is now a need for development and
implementation of new projects that will allow the provision of
specific e-services, on the basis of which the ordinary citizens can
experience the expected benefits of e-government and the
information society.

Despite the fact, that the integration of e-government services in
Kosovo through the governmental portal for both citizens and
businesses is still in its initial phase, there are certain
improvements evident, which were made by some institutions
such as certain Ministries and municipal governments. However,
most of them are primarily offering information to citizens, while
the direct citizen interaction with the government is still in its
development stage.
A fully functional governmental e-portal as a one-stop access to
the most important interactive and transactional e-services,
leading to integrated delivery of all government services to
citizens and businesses is one of the most important challenges in
Kosovo. The development of technological, legal and institutional
infrastructure will enable the development of such services to the
level of performing full e-government transactions by citizens.
However, while the ICT infrastructure remains one of the main
pillars of the e-government, the importance of the technology
aspect is regularly weighted more than importance of new or
revised structures and processes within the public sector. The
introduction of e-Government may show its expected benefits
only if it is properly planned and if it owns a full social, cultural
and political support [3] including the acceptance at the user side.
For assessing the effectiveness and ensuring that the frequent
rhetoric of a successful implementation of e-government is also
matched by reality, the performance of the e-government project
implementation needs to be measured [3]. The growing political
interest for e-Government in Kosovo together with the increased
idea that governments should be more accessible to the citizens
through internet shows a big opportunity and a favorable
momentum which needs to be appropriately exploited for
enhancing the current level of e-government performance and for
setting up new e-government projects. In order to prevent such an
opportunity from disappearing, a quick and tangible success is
required in the implementation of e-government projects for
citizens. The success depends heavily on the simplification and
implementation of information, communication and transaction
processes respectively on the quality of administrative services,
especially those which are fully transactional [4].
With the objective of measuring the success of e-government, the
aim of this study is the assessment the current developments of egovernment
project implementation in Kosovo from the
perspective of users at the demand side.
2. E-GOVERNMENT PERSPECTIVE–
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
The main challenges faced currently by the public sector in
Kosovo mainly relate to the issues of maintenance of databases of
various organizational units, their processing and communication.
These data are recorded and archived in different locations and
media. The communication between specific institutions in the
organizational view is very deficient, which is consequently
causing delayed or wrong decisions and other mistakes in
managing the processes within government institutions and the
service delivery to citizens. There is a great potential to improve
the information exchange by applying the information technology
and communications, and thus directly increase the efficiency of
the e-Governance.
The Kosovo Government’s E-Government Strategy 2009-2015
was released by the Department of Information Technology of
Ministry for Public Services in September 2008 [2]. This paper
325
reflected the introduction of the Information and Communication
Technologies environment, sets out the intentions of the egovernment
programme by 2015, aims to clarify what are the
goals for the e-government service delivery and confirms the
continues commitment of the government for the development of
standards, interoperability and the government enterprise
architecture for achieving the goals of this strategy. It also briefly
outlines the current activities undertaken across some of the
government bodies for the achievement of these goals.
The main goal is to give access to the citizens to government
information and services, participate in the democracy using the
internet and other technologies. The better service improves the
relationships with citizens by achieving convenience and
satisfaction, with this the internal performance of the government
will be more integrated and efficient and the citizens participatory
role in the decision making process will be increased.
The starting point for this study is the fact that despite
considerable investments and a large number of ongoing and
completed technical assistance projects, the e-Government
services in Kosovo have not experienced the anticipated take-up.
A systematic consideration of e-service delivery arrangements is
required, specifications must be drawn up with great care and
therefore the public administration must ensure that particularly
the requirements of citizens are addressed during the
implementation of the e-Government project [5]. The common
requirement for a successful product development and acceptance
by the clients is the analysis of the needs of users and the concrete
definition and detailed documentation and validation of these
requirements [6], however, according to Horan [7], the e-
Government research arena still suffers from a lack of users
satisfaction measurements.
3. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND
DATA COLLECTION
For the e-Government demand side measurement and evaluation
one of the most important questions is the decision what to
measure and how to design the survey. For this reason the most
influencing factors for the success of e-Government are to be
identified.
The first task was to compile the list of factors to be surveyed,
while the success factors have to be determined on an individual
basis [8]. These factors need to be adjusted to the context of this
specific research. The list of factors to be included shall only
consist of qualities, which may have a particular significance for
the information system [9]. It is assumed that there are only a
limited number of success factors that have an impact on the
overall success of information systems [10]. The selected success
factors have to cover various fields of information systems such as
provision of e-services, communication, competence of staff and
the role of the information system [11]. The main objective of the
assessment of success factors is to analyze the contribution of
particular factors and through this to identify the strengths and the
weaknesses in the implementation of ICT systems, which is a
requirement for deriving necessary measures for the improvement
of the overall success and assessment of its urgency [13]. The
selection and evaluation of success factors in this research was
based on the list of success factors and methods defined and used
by Heeks [12], Hoffmann [13] and Salzmann [14].

In view of different theoretical approaches to e-government
demand-side evaluation, a suitable and locally acceptable
evaluation method was to be identified and to be used in this
research for measuring the success of the e-government project
implementation from the users’ point of view. The several egovernment
surveys methods, which are generally used for data
collection for the purpose of reviewing the existing performance
of the e-government implementation, range from direct interviews
with citizens or government officials [15], [16], focus groups [15],
visits to government websites [17] to questionnaire surveys to
citizens [18]. In order to include a large number of respondents
from a broad territory, for practical reasons this survey has
utilized the questionnaire survey method.
An empirical study has been conducted for measuring the success
of the e-Government project implementation. The research
utilized a structured questionnaire used by Hoffmann [13] which
was adjusted to adapt to local conditions. The questionnaire used
for the collection of data included 23 questions classified to
measure the citizens perception of the priority and performance of
selected factors, important for the success of the overall egovernment
information system. Apart from these, the
questionnaire contained additional 20 questions typical to
demographics, internet usage habits, their awareness on the
availability and their expectations for e-government services.
Some questions additionally referred to their opinion regarding
the future development of e-government services. The questions
on the success factors required the responder to assess the priority
of every factor on a scale from 1 (not important) to 4 (most
important) as well as the current performance of the same factor
from 1 (not implemented in practice) to 4 (fully implemented in
practice). (Questionnaire can be provided on request).
The probability method used for the selection of the survey
sample was based on random sampling. A total of 350
questionnaires were used by targeting various citizens and in
order to reflect the entire adult Kosovo population and to ensure a
representative sample in terms of demographic and sociological
structure, the questionnaires were distributed to random citizens
through University students, employers of various private and
public companies and institutions, unemployed and elderly people
throughout 9 different Kosovo municipalities. For practical
reasons the data collection was conducted in only 9 out of 37
Kosovo municipalities. In order to have a adequate statistical
representation of collected data, Prishtina, as the capital city,
together with all six secondary municipalities, where the majority
of the Kosovo population resides, were included in this sample.
Additionally two smaller minority municipalities were also
included of this survey in order to obtain a representative sample
from various municipalities. Out of this number a total of 300
questionnaires were validated and were selected for this empirical
study, representing a sample size with a standard confidence level
of 95% and confidence interval of 5.5%. The data collected
through this survey was digitalized, coded and analyzed using
statistical analysis software for descriptive statistics and
relationships.
The purpose of analyzing success factors is to evaluate the
contribution of specific factors to the overall success of an
information system and with this to determine the specific
strengths and weaknesses in the implementation of information
systems. The direct output is a set of required measures for
326
improvement of the overall success. The results of the study will
be illustrated using available tools for graphical analysis.
The profile diagrams and the portfolio matrix are used for the
graphical evaluation of success factors. The priority and the
perceived implementation of success factors are presented in the
same diagram while their values are marked with corresponding
points on a scale from one to four.
The graphical portfolio matrix is used for the data analysis. This
graphical tool is based on a two dimensional diagram,
which illustrates the research results in a simple and
understandable manner [13]. The portfolio matrix axes show the
features explored, in which the priority/expectation is shown on
the X-axis and the performance/implementation is shown on the
Y-axis. In order to allow a simple evaluation of the results, the
matrix is divided into nine clusters. All factors that are listed in
the portfolio matrix by combining their characteristics fall
into one of these matrix clusters. The clusters are used for
gathering factors with similar characteristics in respective groups,
for which pre-standard recommendations for action will be
defined.
This method is used for analyzing the success of implemented egovernment
projects and to draw specific recommendations
for further action in relation to improvement of the overall success
of specific factors.
4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The target survey population of this study comprised a
representative sample of people residing in various Kosovo
municipalities during 2011. The study population was comprised
of 300 adult persons of various age groups. The Figure 1 outlines
the age groups of the study population by gender: a total of
38.3% of all male and female respondents were under age 25,
31.7% were within the age group interval from 26 through 35,
18% were between 36 through 45, 8.3% between 46 through 55
and 3.7% above 55. In absence of final data from the 2011 census
in Kosovo, for comparison purposes the Figure 2 shows the
estimated population of Kosovo by age groups as assessed
through the results of the 2009 labor force survey conducted by
the Statistical Office of Kosovo.
From the gender perspective, Figure 3 shows that 58.7% of total
respondents were Males and 41.3% were Females and the gender
differences were significant (χ2= 9.01, P=0.03, thus P

Figure 1. The structure of respondents by the age-group and
gender
Figure 2. Estimated Population by age-groups in Kosovo (%),
2009 [19]
Figure 3. The structure of respondents by gender
327
Figure 4. The structure of respondents by their employment
The total percentage of unemployed respondents from this survey
has not exceeded 2%, a figure below the assumed high rate of
unemployment in Kosovo. It is however anticipated that the
responders working in the informal sector have not declared
themselves as on unemployment. As an additional comparison, a
first important labor market indicator is the relative size of the
working age population, e.g., the persons between the ages of 15
and 64, which approximately defines the potential available
manpower. In Kosovo, this figure from the 2009 SOK LFS is
comparatively low with only 64.0%. The reason for this becomes
apparent by looking at the age structure. Kosovo has a relatively
young population, with almost one of the third of age 15 and
under and 7.8% aged 65 or above.
Traditionally the younger generations are more familiar and show
more interest in information technologies and feel more motivated
in using e-government. It shall be noted that such a young
population structure during this survey, with a majority of survey
responders younger than 35, represents a factor which may
heavily shape the results of this study. It is however apparent that
this factor coincides also with the general population structure and
therefore appropriately corresponds to the real situation in the
field.
Table 1. The structure of respondents by education
Level of Education N %
Secondary School 134 44.7
Tertiary/University degree 164 54.7
Total 300 100.0
The Table 1 outlines the structure of respondents by education.
The survey revealed that the general interest in e-government in
Kosovo is very high, since 92% of people questioned have
confirmed that they would prefer to complete all administrative
processes online, while only 7% of them were not interested in
using administrative services online (Figure 4.). The usage
statistics revealed that while 71% of respondents have indicated
that they have visited the Kosovo e-government portal site, the
percentage of internet users who have already used e-services is
low (34%) (Figure 5.). As a comparison, Heeks [20] uses an

approximate figure of 60% of internet users in Europe and other
developed and transition countries that have ever accessed egovernment
e-services, mainly for information purposes, while
only 10-25% of users have undertaken online transactions. On the
other hand, the Kosovo survey revealed that 55% of people
questioned would be interested for the provision of e-government
services at a transaction level (Table 2.).
Figure 5 The results of current use of e-government
Table 2. Preferred level of interaction
N %
Information level 70 23.3
Communication level 63 21.0
Transaction level 167 55.7
Total 300 100.0
Table 3. Statistics of internet access at home
What is the type of your internet access at
home N %
No internet access available 8 3.0
Other modem/other narrow band 57 19.0
Cable modem 230 77.0
No answer 5 2.0
Total 300 100.0
Surprisingly, 95% of respondents have reported to have an
internet access at home (Table 3.). The most reasons for the use of
internet are emailing and communication (80%) and reading news
(62%) while less than 18% of respondents have used the internet
for purchasing products online and lesser for online banking.
328
Table 4. Internet usage statistics
The use of internet N %
Not using or very rarely use 1 0.3
Less than 1 hour/week 15 5.0
1 to 5 hour/week 96 32.0
15 to 40 hours/week 125 41.7
More than 40 hours/week 63 21.0
Total 300 100.0
The Table 4 reveals the current practices on the use of internet,
showing that more than 62% of respondents are intensively using
internet more than 15 hours weekly.
Table 5. Assessment of overall governmental e-services
The overall assessment of the online services
offered by the public administration N %
Nonexistent 65 21.7
Inadequate 191 63.7
Adequate 34 11.3
Excellent 4 1.3
No answer 6 2.0
Total 300 100.0
The Table 5 reveals that the majority of respondents
(21.7%+63.7%) are not satisfied with the current level of
government e-services. This majority’s assessment of e-services
provided by the government is that these do not exist or are
inadequately implemented. This is to some extend consistent with
71% of participants that have visited the governmental portal vs.
85% indicating that the current level of e-services is
unsatisfactory. The individual evaluation of data received from
the questionnaires of the 28% of respondents that have never
visited the e-government portal (Figure 5.) shows that 84.5% of
them have rated the online e-services as unsatisfactory.
Table 6. Main reasons for the use of e-services
N %
Total 300 100.0
Time saving 255 85.0
Performing administrative tasks 243 81.0
from Avoiding home waiting queues 227 75.7
Shorten case processing and
220 73.3
response Immediate time notification about
207 69.0
missing Independence documents from office
132 44.0
working Cost savings hours
130 43.3
Other 4 1.3
The respondents were also asked to provide their most important
reasons for the use of governmental e-services. The main reasons
presented, as shown in Table 6, were related to the time saving
factor (85%), completion of administrative processes from home
(81%), avoiding queuing at administrative offices (75%) and the
quicker response time by the administration (73%). The majority

(69%) has also highlighted the importance of getting personal
feedback from the government in case some documents would be
additionally required during the administrative process.
A more detailed review of the results show that the users are least
satisfied with the communication with public servants by email,
while the visual design, ease of use and navigation scored better
(Figure 6.) (Table 7.). The factor of appointing a public servant as
a contact person appears high in the list of citizens’ requirements
for a successful e-government project implementation. While this
question was unfortunately not detailed further in the
questionnaire, it is most possible that this specific requirement is a
result of the citizens’ overall distrust towards the public
administration and their habits in dealing with the administration
in traditional means through direct contact with the public servant
in the administration office.
The actual requirements for e-government services derive from
the evaluation of citizens’ priorities that were provided for each
success factor listed in the questionnaire. A high priority of a
success factor is a demand for the information system [21].
Figure 6 The average values of the perceived
implementation/performance of success factors (shown in red
color) vs. their priority (shown in blue color)
Table 7. List of success factors that were assessed together
with the calculated difference between their average priority
and implementation values
# Success factor Difference
F-1 Multilingualism 0.3
F-2 Unified appearance 0.8
F-3 Visually attractive design 0.8
329
F-4 Easy to use 1.1
F-5 Easy to navigate 1.2
F-6 Large amount of information 1.3
F-7 Cost saving factor 1.4
F-8 Services supporting specific activities 1.4
F-9 Provision of samples 1.4
F-10 Grouping of services by life situation 1.5
F-11 Client-oriented services 1.5
F-12 Continuously updated content 1.5
F-13 Integration of services between central and local
level
1.5
F-14 Acceptance of digital signatures 1.6
F-15 Large amount of services 1.6
F-16 Support of general processes 1.6
F-17 Simplification of administration processes 1.6
F-18 Time saving factor 1.6
F-19 Support of communication 1.7
F-20 Appointment of a contact person 1.7
F-21 Acceptance of e-mail messages 1.9
F-22 Support for email notifications 1.9
F-23 Rapid response by administration 1.9
The Figure 6 details the average values of assessed
implementation (shown in red color) in a scale from 1 (not
important) to 4 (most important) vs. the average values of their
priorities (shown in blue color) using a similar scale from 1 (not
implemented) to 4 (fully implemented). The Table 7 provides the
list of all measured factors and presents the calculated difference
between the values of assessed implementation and the priority
for each measured factor. The difference figure shows how large
is the discrepancy between the citizens’ priority for a specific
success factor and their assessment of its current implementation
in practice.
Figure 7. Portfolio matrix of implementation/performance vs.
priority of identified success factors
The actual values of success factors implementation and their
priorities are shown with the portfolio matrix (Figure 7),
illustrating that all success factors are located within a grouping
cluster, which requires appropriate adjustment by increasing the
level of their implementation. All success factors are placed just
below the matrix cluster with highest priority and excellent
implementation. Except the success factor F-1 (Multilingualism),
which is considered appropriately implemented due to its slight

difference between its priority and actual implementation and its
location in the edge of the cluster with highest priority and
excellent implementation, all other success factors are located
inside the cluster with high priority and lower implementation
level, requiring immediate adjustment.
5. CONCLUSIONS
The survey conducted with this research presented the citizens’
priorities and perceived performance of the public administration
in the e-government project implementation. The research
concludes with highlighting some key findings and
recommendations as outlined below:
o This study has confirmed that there is a gap between the
citizens’ requirements and interests and the actual
o
implementation of governmental e-services in Kosovo, since
more than two third of respondents, covered in this study,
registered their disappointment that the current online
services offered by the public administration in Kosovo are
deficient and require immediate attention for improvement.
Over 90% of respondents have declared that they regularly
use internet more than 1 hour per week. More than 60% are
using internet for more than 15 hours per week, showing that
in relation to age and gender, the use of internet has rapidly
increased among citizens in Kosovo resulting with a growing
population of possible e-government users, which could
directly benefit from a successful e-government project
implementation.
o The study has shown that the majority of respondents have
expressed their interest for the use of e–services.
o
Remarkably, more than 55% of the respondents would like to
change from the traditional way of dealing with the
administration to a transaction based administration eservices,
in contrast to just downloading or filling the forms
online.
Through the significant discrepancy between the priorities of
citizens and the implementation of e-services in practice, this
study has confirmed that the e-government Kosovo
administration lacks its customer relation in the sense of
tailoring their services towards customers’ needs. It should
be also noted that one of the reasons, why most survey
respondents were classifying the priority of all success
factors fairly high, may be because of the fact that there is
not yet an appropriate e-government practice in Kosovo. It
could be expected that at a later stage the priorities of success
factors may be differently assessed.
o As long the citizens don’t know that e-services are available,
they won’t use them. To deal with this problem, the
government needs to market the available online services
through press releases, flyers, promotional events and public
service announcements [22] in order to approach the
potential users that have not visited the governmental portal
yet.
o It is important to start implementing a generally accepted
online payment modality, which would be accepted by the
public and integrated as a standard tool within all relevant
products developed by the central and local level of the
public administration.
o In absence of its own capacities, the government shall
identify potential partners, who in collaboration with the
330
o
public administration could assist the government in
implementing certain online services for administrative
institutions in the form of a public-private partnership.
However, under a public-private partnership the government
should continue to keep the key driver role for the promotion
of e-government initiatives.
The most critical factors that would contribute to the success
of e-government in Kosovo relate to the change and
simplification of administrative processes and the
establishment of appropriate communication channels
between citizen and administration, which would generate a
sense of accountability and assurance. The political
willingness, an adequate technological infrastructure and an
overall client oriented development strategy remain the most
critical factors for the e-government project implementation.
As a further research it is recommended to conduct such empirical
studies on a regular basis in order to follow up and compare with
different empirical studies addressing comparable success factors.
6. REFERENCES
[1] Public Administration Country Profile for Kosovo, Division
for Public Administration and Development Management,
Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations,
December 2003.
[2] Electronic Government Strategy 2009-2015, Ministry of
Public Services, Department of Information Technology,
October 2008
[3] Asgarkhani M.: The Effectiveness of e-Service in Local
Government: A Case Study, The Electronic Journal of e-
Government Volume 3 Issue 4, 2005, www.ejeg.com
[4] Becker J. et al.: e-Government Success Factors, EGOV
Third International Confererence, Springer, 2004
[5] Leitner C., eGovernment in Europe: The State of Affairs,
EIPA Maastricht, 2004
[6] van der Linden, F., Schmid, K., Rommes, E., Software
Product Lines in Action, Springer Verlag, 2007
[7] Horan, T., Abhichandani, T., Rayalu, R.: Assessing User
Satisfaction of E-Government Services: Development and
Testing of Quality-in-Use Satisfaction with Advanced
Traveller Information Systems, 39th Hawaii International
Conference on System Sciences, 2006
[8] Lehner, F: Die Erfolgsfaktoren Analyse in der Informationsverarbeitung,
Zeitung Betriebs-wirtschaft, 1995
[9] Camp, O. Filipe, J., Hammoudi, S. Piattini, M., Enterprise
Information Systems, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004
[10] Krcmar, H., Informationsmanagement, Springler Verlag,
2005
[11] Heinrich L.: Informationsmanagement, Oldenbourg
Wissenschaftsverlag, 2005
[12] Heeks, R. eGovernment for Development: Causes of
eGovernment Success and Failure: Factor Model, IDPM,
University of Manchester, 2003.
[13] Hoffmann, R., Anforderungs- und Erfolgsanalyse von E-
Government Anwendungen, VDM Verlag, 2008

[14] Salzmann, M. e-Government im Kanton Zuerich – Strategie
und Umsetzung, Paul Haupt Verlag, 2004
[15] Agimo.: E-Government Benefits Study. Australian
Government Information Management Office:
http://www.agimo.gov.au/archive/publications_noie/2004/10
/annrep03-04/part_3_-_performance_report.html.
[16] P. Crook, S. J. Rohleder, and A. Simmonds, CRM in
Government: Bridging the Gaps. Atlantic and Europe,
Accenture, 2003.
[17] UNPAN. (2005, July) Global Readiness Report: From
eGovernment to eInclusion.
http://www2.unpan.org/egovkb/global_reports/05report.htm.
[18] A. Dexter and V. Parr, Government Online Study, Taylor
Nelson Sofres, 2003.
331
[19] Ministry of Public Services:, Series 5: Social Statistics,
Results of the labor force survey 2009, Statistical Office of
Kosovo (SOK) 2010,
[20] Heeks, R.: Benchmarking eGovernment: Improving the
National and International Measurement, Evaluation and
Comparison of eGovernment, IDPM, University of
Manchester, 2006
[21] Scheer, A., ARIS Modellierungsmethoden, Metamodele,
Springer Verlag, 1998
[22] Eggers, W., Boosting E-Government Adoption, FTA Annual
Conference, 2004,
http://taxadmin.org/fta/meet/04am_pres/eggers.pdf

Computer Supported Contractor Selection
for Public Administration Ventures
Zbigniew Paszkiewicz
Department of Information Technology
Poznań University of Economics
6 Mansfelda str., 60-854 Poznań, Poland
+48 61 8480549
zpasz@kti.ue.poznan.pl
ABSTRACT
Ventures undertaken by public administration significantly
contribute to development of economy. Such ventures are usually
complex, so they require effective collaboration of a number of
autonomous organizations. To face the challenge of efficient
cooperation, public administration should adopt the model of
Virtual Organizations (VO). A key phase in each VO life-cycle is
selection of partners which in case of public administration takes
a form of public auctions. In this paper a Collaborative
Contractor Selection method, denoted C-CS, is proposed to
support selection of contractors for a portfolio of public ventures.
In the C-CS method a number of requirements are considered
associated with contractor offer properties, contractor
competences, and social relationships among them. The selection
is performed step by step as successive ventures are performed. If
justified, the selection is done in collaboration between
administrative units and potential contractors. The C-CS method
provides an opportunity for better computer support of public
auctions leading to more efficient and effective realization of
public administration ventures.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J.1 [Computer Applications]: Administrative Data Processing:
Business, Government
K.4.3 [Computers and Society]: Organizational Impacts:
Reengineering, Computer-Supported Collaborative Work
General Terms
Economics, Human Factors, Performance, Design, Algorithms
Keywords
Public Administration, Virtual Organization, Agility, Adaptive
Business Processes, Process Mining
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
332
Wojciech Cellary
Department of Information Technology
Poznań University of Economics
6 Mansfelda str., 60-854 Poznań, Poland
+48 61 8480549
cellary@kti.ue.poznan.pl
1. INTRODUCTION
In every country, public administration is a significant economical
actor, quite often a major one. Ventures undertaken by public
administration are usually complex and cannot be handled by a
single organization but require effective collaboration of a number
of autonomous organizations from both the public and private
sector. Cooperation on complex ventures is usually a challenge for
public administrations. To face this challenge, public
administration should adopt the model of Virtual Organizations
(VO) [1, 2, 3] which permits to deal with complexity, pursuit for
agility, and take advantages of broad use of information
technologies in economic and managerial operations. VO is “a set
of at least two autonomous partners, where at least one of them is
an organization, cooperating within a particular structure of social
and legal relationships in order to carry out a particular venture
due to the demand from virtual organization clients and having a
plan to carry out this venture” [4]. Partners collaborating within a
VO are organizations – enterprises, public administration units,
and non-government organizations – people, and information
systems.
The success of a VO strongly depends on ability of all
participating organizations to efficiently and seamlessly cooperate
via Internet. Good level of cooperation may be achieved by an
appropriate selection of partners. In case of public administration
ventures this selection takes a form of public auctions. In
European Union, approaches to conducting a public auction are
regulated by two main directives 2004/17/EC and 2004/18/EC [5].
Due to importance and complexity of partner selection problem, a
number of computer supported methods has already been
proposed. Modern approaches to modeling cooperation among
organizations are built around the concept of service and the
paradigm of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) [2]. Examples
of methods supporting selection of partners and service for VO
have been described in [6, 7]. In some of the proposed
methods [2, 8] existence of Virtual Organization Breeding
Environment VOBE is assumed. Public administration playing a
role of VOBE is presented in [1]. So far, none of the proposed
methods, has been evaluated for the use in public auctions.
Existing methods have the following shortcoming preventing
them from effective application to contractor selection for public
administration ventures: (a) the aspect of past collaboration
between potential contractors is not included; (b) it is assumed
that the process model of a venture is known in advance and that
it does not change; (c) all the partners are selected before a
venture starts, while in practice new partners may be required
when the venture progress, or some initially selected partners may

appear useless so the evolving aspect of the partner selection is
not addressed.
In this paper a C-CS method is presented in which selection of
contractors based on multi-variant analysis is not seen as a single
act, but as a process conducted in parallel to the public
administration ventures. In the C-CS method legal restrictions
following from the public auctions are taken into account. The C-
CS method takes advantage of process mining techniques for
analysis of past contractor selections and provides
recommendations for ongoing and future contractor selections
processes. The above features make the C-CS method well suited
for big public administration ventures.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2,
the main law regulations concerning public contracts and public
auctions are presented. In Section 3, the approach to selection of
partners to portfolio of projects is justified. In Section 4, the
proposed C-CS method supporting contractor selection is
presented. Finally, Section 4 concludes the paper.
2. PUBLIC AUCTIONS IN EUROPEAN
UNION
The aim of a public auction is to elaborate a public contract
between one or more economic operators and one or more
contracting authorities. Contracting authorities mean here the
state, regional or local authorities, bodies governed by public law
or their groups. An economic operator is understood as any
organization which offers on the market products or services. An
economic operator or a set of economic operators undersigning a
public contract and responsible for its realization is called a
contractor.
European Union directives define five main procedures allowing
contractors to be selected: open procedures, restricted
procedures, competitive dialogue, negotiated procedures, and
design contests. To establish a complex public contract defined as
a one where “the contracting authorities: are not objectively able
to define the technical means, capable of satisfying their needs or
objectives, and/or are not objectively able to specify the legal
and/or financial makeup of a project” competitive dialog or
negotiated procedure procedures are used.
Conduction of the competitive dialog and negotiations is based on
collaboration that takes place on two levels: (1) inside public
administration units, and (2) among public administration and
candidates for contractors. Collaboration inside public
administration units arises during preparation of public auction
and during the interaction with candidate contractors.
Collaboration concerns contractor selection participants
comprising domain experts, public administration unit
representatives, legal and technical advisors, non-government
organizations, etc. Collaboration aims at: (1) definition of the
contract notice content; (2) agreement on the set of economic
contractors invited to take part in selection procedures;
(3) evaluation of offer variants submitted by candidates during
negotiations and dialog. Cooperation on the second level with
economic contractor is the essence of negotiation and competitive
dialog. It relies on exchange of information aiming at
identification and definition of the means best suited to satisfying
the needs of contracting authorities.
333
A basic observation is that public administration usually has to
conduct not just one but a portfolio of projects. A common
approach to management of such projects favored by public
administration is selection of one contractor per project. In this
approach, however, the managerial role of public administration is
reduced to supervision. A contractor manages a network of
specialized organizations executing different tasks comprising the
project. Currently, public administration is focused on selection of
contractors for single ventures in separation from one another,
while paying not enough attention to the holistic view of the
whole portfolio of ventures. As a result, contractor selection for
public administration ventures is not performed effectively and
often leads to non-effective realization of public ventures.
Current approaches to contractor selection for public
administration ventures has the following shortcomings:
(1) limited support for analysis of potential contractors in terms of
relationships existing among them, while these relationships can
have a great impact on efficiency of realization of the portfolio of
projects; (2) limited support for analysis of correlation among
former and ongoing public auctions, while the result or the course
of one public auction should be taken into account during others;
(3) limited support for analysis of sets of economic contractors
involved in many public auctions; (4) limited sharing of good
practices concerning public auctions among public administration
units due to the fact that such practices are difficult to be
identified; such good practices may concern used requirements,
definition of public auction scope, association among auctions and
projects, economic contractors, experts, public administration
units, non-government organizations involved in the selection
process, and invited economic operators for negotiations.
3. CONTRACTOR SELECTION FOR
PORTFOLIO OF VENTURES
To deal with drawbacks of the current selection process, it is
necessary to change the approach to conduction of public auctions
and management of public administration project portfolio. In this
paper we propose to consider a portfolio of projects and apply a
coordinated partner selection process in a number of auctions to
all the projects contained in the portfolio, instead of selecting
independently a contractor per project. The contractors selected
need to be able to mutually communicate, synchronize, and
cooperate to efficiently realize a set of projects. Thus, in the
proposed approach analysis of interrelations among potential
contractors is included. Public administration together with all the
contractors (a contractor per project) constitute a VO within
which they collaborate as partners to conduct a portfolio of
projects. The Collaborative Contractor Selection (C-CS) method
proposed in this paper in Section 4 refers to computer support of
two the most complex cases of public auctions, i.e. competitive
dialog or negotiated procedure.
In the C-CS method the contractor selection for public
administration venture is a process consisting of a set of possibly
overlapping public auctions associated with a set of projects.
These auctions lead to definition of a set of public contracts
associated with the execution of projects comprising project
portfolio. The input for starting a contractor selection process for
public administration is a project portfolio. Contractor selection
process encompasses: (1) definition of a set of public auctions to
be conducted for the project portfolio, relationships existing
among these auctions, and main assumptions of these auctions;

(2) conduction of the public auctions, where each auction is
followed by establishment of a public contract for each project;
(3) if applicable, as contractor selection proceeds (i.e. subsequent
auctions are performed and concluded), redefinition of the set of
auctions, relationships among them, their scope and assumptions.
Step 3 captures the evolving aspect of contractor selection.
Contractor selection is completed when all the projects from the
project portfolio have assigned public contracts.
4. C-CS METHOD
The C-CS method is a refinement of the MAPSS method proposed
in [8]. The refinement of the method encompasses: (1) selection
of contractors for a subset of projects composing a portfolio–
economic operators are not assigned to all the projects at once;
(2) analysis of social relations among contractors selected during
several public auctions; (3) collaborative approach to contractor
selection involving interested parties; (4) support for contractor
selection participant activities by recommendation of good
practices in the form of activity patterns; (5) support for analysis
of various variants of possible assignment of contractors to
projects, where variant evaluation is based on requirements and
preferences of selection process participants including social
aspects.
4.1 C-CS Concept
It is assumed that a contractor selection process consists of a set of
public auctions. he aim of each public auction is to find a
contractor providing the best offer that observes the requirements:
(1) defined in the public notice and (2) imposed on an auction as
a consequence of already completed auctions. Such constraints
usually take a form of social requirements. They follow from a
holistic approach to selection of contractors for a portfolio of
projects. Subsequent auctions may be organized in parallel to
venture proceeding.
A contractor specification is a set of requirements that an
economic operator must satisfy to be assigned to a particular
public contract. An offer specification is a set of requirements that
an offer of an economic operator must satisfy to be assigned to a
particular public contract. Social requirements concern
relationships among contractors. An acceptable contractor is an
economic operator satisfying requirements defined in the
contractor specification. An acceptable offer is an economic
operator offer satisfying requirements defined in the offer
specification.
Public contract specification is a pair: . An acceptable public contract is a pair
. Requirements defined
in a specification may refer to expected experience of contractor,
financial stability, etc. Social requirements express dependencies
among contractors being public auction outputs. Note that each
acceptable contractor can be a VO. Thus, requirements defined in
contractor specification may refer also to internal structure of such
a VO, e.g., a requirement concerning maximum number of
subcontractors. Social relationships may concern: past
cooperation, recognition, former financial exchange, etc.
4.2 Overview of C-CS Phases
In every stage of contractor selection, the C-CS method consists
of four phases and follows the general selection method
334
guidelines presented in [2]: (1) specification of public auctions
envisioned for contractor selection stage – definition of
requirements and associated evaluation criteria (preferences,
fitness function); this phase is performed within public
administration and its output is published in a form of contract
notices; (2) contractor analysis prior negotiations – the set of
acceptable public contracts is created and analyzed internally
within public administration; the aim of the analysis is to define
the best possible contractor group that the public administration
will strive to achieve; such analysis is used for preparation of a set
of economic operators to be invited to participate in negotiations
or a competitive dialog; (3) contractor analysis during
negotiations – the set of acceptable public contracts is created on
the basis of acceptable offers submitted by candidate contractors
during negotiation or competitive dialog; the aim of the analysis is
to identify the group of best acceptable public contracts or
indicate the shortcoming of the acceptable public contracts being
currently negotiated; (4) stage conclusion – selection of the best
acceptable public contract for each public auction envisioned in
this contract selection stage.
All the phases of the C-CS method are performed in a
collaborative manner. Phase 1 assumes collaboration of public
administration units, employees, domain experts and others.
Phases 2-4 include in addition acceptable contractors.
4.3 Information Model and Selection
Technique
The C-CS method is based on the concept of public administration
being a VOBE [1]. It is assumed that public administration
collects information concerning former public auctions and their
results for future reuse. Collected information may include
properly documented former experience of economic operators or
recommendations from former clients. Such information refers
both to single economic operators as well as relationships among
them. Such information is stored in a repository consisting of four
modules: (1) contractor and offer specification module – provides
relevant information concerning economic operators, their
operations and their offers (offer variants) submitted during past
and current public auctions, (2) social network module – provides
information about relationships among contractors and between
contractors and their offers, (3) requirement module – provides
information concerning requirements used in various public
auctions; (4) participant’s activity module – stores information
concerning activities performed by contractor selection process
participants throughout selection processes.
The C-CS method aims at finding a subset of economic
contractors and offers submitted for an ongoing auction and stored
in the repository that are best suited for activities analyzed during
a given contractor selection stage. The contractor selection is
performed on the basis of specification created in Phase 1. As the
result of the specification phase, the formulated public contract
specifications are published in a form of public notices and a set
of requirements concerning social relationships. Requirements
associated with specifications may be selected from the repository
or created for the need of a particular contractor selection stage.
Definition of requirements for contractor selection includes also
definition of: (1) preferred value; (2) fitness functions. In Phase 2
and Phase 3, contractor analysis is divided into two steps: (1)
acceptable public contract analysis, (2) acceptable public contract
group analysis.

In the acceptable public contract analysis step, on the basis of
public contract specifications defined in Phase 1, a set of
acceptable public contracts is created for each public contract
specification. Identified acceptable public contracts are ranked
according to the level of conformance to corresponding
specification. The conformance is calculated on the basis of
preferences and fitness functions defined in Phase 1. Analysis
performed in this step is followed by effective selection of
promising acceptable public contracts and rejection of those that
should be disregarded. The number of potential acceptable public
contract group that may be constituted for the contractor selection
stage with acceptable public contracts identified in the previous
step is usually high. The goal of acceptable public contract group
analysis step is to search for a sorted list of acceptable public
contract group ranked according to a fitness function. This step
takes advantage of technique proposed as a part of the MAPSS
method [8]. Genetic algorithm is used for generation of optimal
acceptable public contract groups ranked according to a fitness
function. In this phase each contractor selection participant may
define his/her own fitness function. Thus, suggestion concerning
best acceptable public contract groups may be different depending
on a participant. In this phase, social relationships among
acceptable contractors are verified and validated.
In the stage conclusion phase, once all public contract
specifications that are defined for contractor selection stage have
assigned acceptable public contracts, this fact is registered in the
repository. If applicable, this stage encompasses redefinition of
the set of planned upcoming auctions, relationships among them,
their scope and assumptions
4.4 Recommendations During Contractor
Selection
Characteristics of a contractor selection process are such that in
general prediction of its full course is impossible. Nevertheless,
identification of its repeatable parts is useful in context of
boosting efficiency of selection execution and promotion of good
practices among selection process participants, especially those
being representatives of public administration.
Mechanism of recommendation in the C-CS method aims to
detect activity patterns in contractor selection process, where
activity pattern is a set of activities that are frequently performed
in a structured way in a particular context by a contractor
selection participant. Identified activity patterns are later
recommended to other selection participants. Identification of
activity patterns is possible due to information stored in
participant’s activity module of the repository. To identify activity
patterns, the approach presented in [4] is used.
5. CONCLUSIONS
The C-CS method contributes to increased efficiency of the
contractor selection process. It is achieved by computer support
for multi-variant automatic analysis of economic operators and
offers submitted by them. A structured approach is proposed to
definition and reuse of requirements, stored in a repository in a
form of contractor or offer specifications. An important aspect of
the C-CS method is an analysis of relationships among candidate
335
contractors from various ongoing or completed public auctions.
Such analysis eliminates the risk of selection of a set of
contractors unable to mutually collaborate which could lead to
one or more project failures. Identification of activity patterns in
every phase of the C-CS method addresses the problem of process
evolution and unpredictability. Activity patterns allow good
practices to be identified and reused. Recommendations generated
on the basis of activity patterns enable more effective execution of
contractor selections.
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work has been partially supported by the Polish National
Science Center. Grant no. DEC-2011/01/N/ST6/04205
7. REFERENCES
[1] Cellary, W., Picard, W., Agile and Pro-Active Public
Administration as a Collaborative Networked Organization,
in: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on
Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance
ICEGOV2010, October 25-28, 2010, Beijing, China, ACM,
2010
[2] Rabelo, R., Gusmeroli, S., The ECOLEAD Collaborative
Business Infrastructure for Networked Organizations, in:
Camarunha-Matos, L.M, Picard, W. (eds), Pervasive
Collaborative Networks, PRO-VE 2008, Springer, 2008
[3] Janowski, T., Pardo, T. A., Davies, J., Government
Information Networks - Mapping Electronic Governance
cases through Public Administration concepts, in:
Government Information Quarterly, vol. 29, Elsevier, 2012
[4] Paszkiewicz, Z., W. Cellary, Computer Supported
Collaborative Processes in Virtual Organizations , in:
Proceedings of the 20th Annual World Business Congress,
Poznań, Poland, pp. 85-94, IMDA Press, 2011,
[5] Directives 2004/17/EC and 2004/18/EC of the European
Parliament and of the Council of 31 March 2004
coordinating the procurement procedures of entities
operating in the water, energy, transport and postal services
sectors
[6] Ermilova E., H. Afsarmanesh: Competency and Profiling
Management in Virtual Organization Breeding
Environments. in: Camarinha-Matos, L.M., Afsarmanesh, H.
Ollus, M. (eds.) Network-Centric Collaboration and
Supporting Frameworks, pp. 131-142. Springer, 2007
[7] Canfora, G., Di Penta, M., Esposito, R., Villani, M.L., An
approach for QoS-aware service composition based on
genetic algorithms, in: Proceedings of the 2005 conference
on Genetic and evolutionary computation, pp. 1069-1075,
2005
[8] Paszkiewicz, Z., Picard, W. MAPSS, a multi-aspect partner
and service selection method. in: L.M., Camarinha-Matos, X.
Boucher, H. Afsarmanesh (Eds.), Collaborative networks for
a sustainable world, 11th IFIP working conference on virtual
enterprises, PRO-VE 2010 Boston, USA: Springer, 2010.

E-Government Success Factors in the Context of an ITenabled
Budget Reform: A Questionnaire Report
ABSTRACT
The adoption of e-government initiatives is not in vacuum. They
are usually adopted in complex settings influenced by not only IT
factors but other factors from different structures, such as
contextual, organizational, collaboration, knowledge, and trust.
These structures come from the context in which the egovernment
project is embedded. The goal of this research is to
explore the multiple factors from various structures involved in egovernment
success using a contemporary case of an IT-enabled
budget reform in Mexico. This study comprises a descriptive
summary of answers from a questionnaire applied over federal
and state government officials who participated in this initiative
who adopted it into their daily practice. Due to the context of the
IT-enabled budget reform, questions about the factors from
different structures including the budgeting structure were
analyzed. General characteristics and potential benefits of the egovernment
initiative were also examined. The main motivation
of this study is to extend our understanding of possible enablers
and inhibitors that public officials face during the adoption of egovernment
projects into work routines and different contexts.
Derived from the questionnaire results, a selection of 11 “practical
advices” were identified as useful for a successful adoption of egovernment
projects.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J.1 ADMINISTRATIVE DATA PROCESSING [Computer
Applications]: Government – applications, government.
General Terms
Management, Human Factors, Theory.
Keywords
Electronic Government; Success Factors; Questionnaire.
1. INTRODUCTION
Most of e-government projects involve a complexity of the
multiple factors and actors involved in practice [18,19,24,34,38].
In the literature, there are many frameworks that attempt to
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Gabriel Puron-Cid
Centro de Investigacion y Docencia
Economicas (CIDE)
gabriel.puron@cide.edu
336
integrate these multiple factors and actors involved in the
implementation of e-government initiatives [18,19,34]. These
efforts have contributed to our understanding of e-government
mechanisms of success and failure, but neglect other interacting
structures and actors involved in the phenomenon [18,19,24,34].
Depending on the type of e-government, other relevant structures
and factors need to be considered in practice and consequently in
theory [8,18,19,34]. For this paper, structures are analytical
dimensions considered in interaction in the adoption of egovernment,
while factors are particular features of this
interaction. This study accounts for the multiple success structures
and factors, not only from information systems, but from other
disciplinary fields and policy domains that are involved in the
adoption of e-government [18,19,34].
One of the most critical applications of e-government is present in
the field of budgeting [34]. Because of the intensive informational
content and technological use in the budget process, information
systems have become central to budgeting operations in
government, and vice versa [27,28]. As Joyce, Lee, & Johnson
[26: 397] noted “Contemporary approaches to budgeting and
accounting obviously require considerable amounts of information
for decision making and evaluation. Information Systems, then,
constitute an effort to bring about greater coordination of [diverse]
organizational units in the collection, storage, manipulations,
retrieval, and analysis of information.” This paper examines the
multiple factors of e-government success by using an IT-enabled
budget reform in Mexico as a contemporary e-government case in
the field of budgeting. This case not only helps to understand the
traditional structures from information systems and actors such IT
staff members involved in e-government initiatives, but also it
considers other critical structures and actors interacting as well
from other fields and staff areas (i.e. budgeting, planning,
management, evaluation, auditing, etc.). Since late 1980s,
Mexican government has reformed its budget system involving
the adoption of various information systems and managerial
techniques across time. The last of these reforms, known as PbR-
SED for its Spanish abbreviation of “Budgeting based on Results-
Performance Evaluation System”, was recently designed and
enacted in 2008 and its purpose is to transform the way agencies
spend public resources based on results and cost savings, new
information systems, and novel budgetary techniques. The PbR-
SED represents an ongoing and complex transformation and is
expected to condense multiple factors and actors from different
organizations.
This exploratory study comprises a descriptive summary of the
answers of the questionnaire over the PbR-SED adoption. The
questionnaire was applied over federal and state government
officials who participated in the initiative. With a response rate of

14.9% (221 respondents), the goal of the questionnaire was to
evaluate a variety of structures and factors deemed as influential
for a successful adoption of the PbR-SED from the perspective of
the public officials who adopt it. The structures revised were:
general characteristics of the initiative, benefits of the initiative,
contextual factors, budgetary and information systems factors,
collaboration factors, and knowledge and trust factors. The main
motivation of this study is to derive useful evidence for extending
our understanding about possible obstacles and enablers of egovernment.
The purpose is that e-government community of
practitioners and scholars use these findings for advising a
successful adoption of e-government into working routines and
particular contexts. Derived from the analysis of the questionnaire
results, a selection of 11 “practical advices” were identified as
useful for a successful adoption of e-government. The structure of
the paper is organized in six sections including these introductory
remarks. The second reviews the literature about the multiple
factors involved in e-government adoption. The third section
details research design and methods. The fourth section discusses
results of the questionnaire in seven subsections: 1) general
characteristics of the initiative, 2) benefits of the initiative, 3)
contextual factors 4) budgetary and information systems factors,
5) collaboration factors, 6) knowledge factors, and 7) trust factors.
The fifth section discusses 11 "practical advices" resulting from
the analysis of the questionnaire which we believe are useful for a
successful adoption of the e-government. The sixth section makes
some concluding remarks.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
The literature of the fields of information systems and budgeting
was reviewed by considering that e-government initiatives for
budget reforms engage in practice more than just information
systems and technology components [6,14,23,29,34]. The review
was not exhaustive, but sufficient for the purpose of exploration
of the multiple factors and structures involved in e-government
success. There are multiple disciplinary and paradigmatic
inquiries to understand the compound effects of different
structures and factors involved in the adoption of e-government
initiatives [8,14,18,19,34,40]. This article classifies them in two
categories: benefits of e-government and factors influencing egovernment
success.
In terms of benefits, the literature shares 8 potential benefits:
increase efficiency and cost reduction [17,18,34]; improve public
services [11,19,34]; strengthen accountability [15,34,35]; increase
communication based on performance information [22,34];
improve collaboration between different staffs [3,34]; improve
collaboration between different organizations [3,9,16,34]; and
increase knowledge sharing [31,34].
In the case of factors, the literature can be classified into 5 groups:
contextual, information systems, collaboration, knowledge, and
trust. Because of the particular context of budgeting in which the
e-government initiative is implemented, the literature of budgeting
was revised and budgetary factors were included. Different
authors have identified the role of contextual factors in egovernment
success [5,8,30,34,40]. In particular, it is
acknowledged the relevance of economic, social, political,
institutional, and organizational contexts for e-government
success [14,19,30,34,40]. Economic factors represent the
pressures for resource allocation on IT-related projects [14,19,34].
Social factors involve social challenges influencing e-government
337
adoption such as: security concerns, rapid technological change,
reforms and other social demands [30,34]. Political factors include
political support from top officials, legislators and policy makers
[30,32,34]. Institutional factors refer to the legal framework in
which e-government is embedded [8,14,19,34]. Organizational
factors involve four dimensions: strategic alignment between egovernment
and organization’s mission [6,14,34]; level of
standard setting of government processes and activities [30,34];
level of centralization [5,11,34]; and size and number of
jurisdictions in terms of diversity of users or organizations
involved in the project [8,11,34].
Budget factors include four dimensions: methodology, strategy of
implementation, and procedures. Methodology factors involve the
information format, content and methods for budgeting and
accounting [27,34,39]. Strategy of implementation factors are the
intentions of designers of the reform [12,34,37] and the proposed
direction of this change—top-down or bottom-up- [34,39].
Procedures factors include the roles of budgetary authorities and
their scope of action in the budget process [25,34,37,39].
Information systems factors involve three dimensions of factors
influencing e-government success: characteristics of official
information systems [30,34]; interoperability issues from
participant organizations [34,36]; and data integration as
challenges of information sharing [2,10,34].\
Collaboration factors occupy four structures: authority, leadership,
governance, and resource sharing. Authority factors include the
formal designation of responsible(s) of the project and the
development of effective policies and technical standards
[32,34,37]. Leadership factors consider support mechanisms to a
leader or team as well as guided actions through policies and other
boundary objects [32,34,41]. Governance factors are indicated the
procedures and mechanisms for making and monitoring decisions
regarding e-government such as selection of teams or networks,
and other mechanisms of interaction between participants
[1,33,34]. Resource sharing factors engage the potential inputs
required for coordination and adoption of e-government in
organizations such as financial, staff, technical infrastructure and
training [27,34].
Knowledge factors consider five dimensions: professional
experience, teamwork experience, information systems
knowledge, and budgetary knowledge. Professional experience
considers specific task knowledge and expertise to conduct the job
including professional background, job and operation experience,
and training [11,34]. Teamwork experience implies abilities
learned to work in team such knowledge sharing and previous
experiences working in team [7,34]. Information systems
knowledge suggests the technical expertise required to understand
technology in use, data bases, and other information structures
[31,34]. Budgetary knowledge represents the particular use of
information from the budgetary field [27,34].
Trust factors entail four dimensions: confidence based on
budgetary knowledge; confidence based on information systems
knowledge; clear roles and responsibilities; and motivation.
Building confidence based on knowledge, in this case in the fields
of budgeting and information systems, has been identified in the
literature as crucial [27,30,34]. Clarifying roles and
responsibilities has been also detected as influencial for building
trust among participants in the initiative [13,30,34]. Finally,

creating different incentives and public recognition has also been
influential to e-government success [21,34,37].
3. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS
This research applied a questionnaire to civil servants from
various ministries and government agencies of the federal and
state governments. The data of participants were collected from
the lists of staff who participated in the official training of the
PbR-SED initiative during 2009 and 2010 and contact information
of high officials at the federal and state governments available
online. 2.048 potential participants were first invited to participate
during the month of June 2011. 566 emails were not valid or
rejected by security measures from their organizations’ email
administrators. Only 1,482 emails were sent back and valid. Only
221 questionnaires were completed with a response rate of 14.9%
in general. This rate is considered normal for research via
electronic or online [4]. However, there are sections of the
questionnaire that reported lower rates of response (in particular
the last sections of the questionnaire). The questionnaire was
designed and developed using an electronic tool called
SurveyMonkey. The tool offers a platform that makes the
questionnaire available online for participants. The questionnaire
contains seven sections of questions (see Table 1). The first
section welcomes and provides information about the study. The
second section includes 12 questions of multiple choice about the
general characteristics of the project (it considers an option for
"others" in several questions). The third to the sixth sections, the
questionnaire includes 105 questions using a 7-point Likert scale
(from “totally agree” to “totally disagree” options), asking
“Was… [factor]… influential for PbR-SED success?” or
“Was…[benefit]…derived from the successful adoption of the
PbR-SED?”.
Only 54 questions are reported in this study in blocks of factors (8
for benefits, 12 for contextual, 5 for budgetary, 5 for information
systems, 9 for collaboration, 9 for knowledge, and 6 for trust).
The last section of the questionnaire contains 8 questions about
demographic aspects of respondents (see Table 1 for each
dimension and type of factor). The results are presented in
percents of two modalities of response: agreement and
disagreement. The percent of respondents “agree” coded the
opinions under the categories of "somehow agree", "agree" and
"totally agree". The percent of respondents “disagree” coded the
opinions under the categories from “neutral” to “totally disagree”.
The average, standard deviation, and level of agreement of each of
the 54 questions are reported.
The questionnaire registered the opinion of public officials at
different levels of responsibility in the areas of budget,
management programs, information systems, and other areas. On
average, respondents reported 16.4 years of job experience in
government and 6.5 years of experience in actual position. The
most common levels of education were undergraduate and
graduate level mainly in the fields of accounting, economics,
management, information systems, law and various engineering
fields. The average age of respondents was 45 (with a minimum
of 25 years and a maximum of 69 years). Gender of respondents
was reported as 33.6% women and 66.4% men.
Questions
Table 1. Factors and Questions
338
Benefits
1. Increase efficiency
2. Cost reduction
3. Improve public services
4. Strengthen accountability
5. Increase communication based on performance information
6. Improve collaboration between different staffs
7. Improve collaboration between your organization and others
8. Increase knowledge sharing
Contextual Factors
1. Influence of present economic situation [Economic]
2. New law, crisis or elections [Social]
3. Social demand [Political]
4. Support of top officials in your organization [Political]
5. Support of congress people [Political]
6. Budgetary norms and regulations [Institutional]
7. Public investment norms and regulations [Institutional]
8. Civil service norms and regulations [Institutional]
9. Strategic planning in your organization [Organizational]
10. Standards for processes and tasks in your organization [Organizational]
11. Level of decentralization of decision making in your organization [Organizational]
12. Size and number of jurisdictions in your organization [Organizational]
Budget Factors
1. Budgetary methodology for performance information
2. Top-bottom strategy of implementation from the ministry of finance
3. Strategy of implementation from the ministry of finance
4. Flow for enter, revise, and authorize performance information in the budgetary process
5. Official calendar of activities in the budgetary process
Information Systems Factors
1. Development and use of proprietary systems in your organization
2. Previous experience developing information systems and data bases in your organization
3. Official information system of the ministry of finance
4. Definition of roles and accesses in the official information system
5. Sharing data bases, catalogues, and tables with others
Collaboration Factors
1. Use of memos, internal norms and manuals to set rules in the initiative [Authority]
2. Official designation of a responsible of the initiative in the organization [Authority]
3. Use of official memos, internal norms and manuals to support the leader or team members
responsible of the initiative [Leadership]
4. Leadership of the person in charge or team members responsible of the initiative
[Leadership]
5. Designation of a multi-disciplinary team in the organization as responsible of the initiative
[Governance]
6. Meetings and its documents such as minutes, plans and other material [Governance]
7. Staff assigned in the initiative [Resources]
8. Technical infrastructure assigned in the initiative [Resources]
9. Resources for training [Resources]
Knowledge Factors
1. Professional background [Professional Experience]
2. Job experience [Professional Experience]
3. Management operation experience [Professional Experience]
4. Previous reform experience [Professional Experience]
5. Knowledge sharing with members from different areas [Teamwork]
6. Previous experience working with members from different areas [Teamwork]
7. Budget management experience [Budgetary Knowledge]
8. IS and technology use and experience [IS Knowledge]
9. Official training [Training]
Trust Factors
1. Level of budgetary knowledge created confidence to work in the initiative [Confidence
based on budgetary knowledge]
2. Level of IS and technology created confidence to work in the initiative [Confidence based
on IS knowledge]
3. My role and responsibility in the initiative were clear [Clear roles and responsibilities]
4. The role and responsibilities of other organizations and participants were clear to me [Clear
roles and responsibilities]
5. Attractive incentives to participate in the initiative [Motivation]
6. My effort collaborating in the initiative was publicly recognized [Motivation]
* Note: A 7-points Likert scale was used from “totally agree” to “totally disagree”.
4. ANALYSIS OF RESULTS
4.1 General Characteristics
This section of the survey includes the opinion of respondents
about the following features of the PbR-SED initiative: goals, type
of staffs collaborating, organizations involved, roles and
responsibilities, schemes of governance, and type of resources
assigned to the initiative.

4.1.1 Goals for the e-government initiative. The results of the
questionnaire show that establishing multiple goals for the
initiative creates confusion. Few but well-defined and clear set of
objectives generates certainty and perspective about the adoption
of the initiative in the organization. Figure 1 presents an opinion
from respondents over the perceived goals of the PbR-SED
initiative. Only 35.2% of respondents believed that the main
purpose of the PbR-SED is to develop administrative capacity.
32.8% of respondents believe that the goal of the initiative is to
comply with a legal mandate from the Executive or the ministry
of finance. Only 21.9% of participants agree that the goal of the
PbR-SED is to provide a specific solution for a problem in
government through the use and analysis of performance
information. Approximately 10% of opinions present "other"
goals such as improving the planning, assessment, and budgeting
operations of public spending. The lesson is that the establishment
of multiple objectives for e-government creates confusion among
the participants on the terms, scope and purpose of the initiative in
their organization.
Figure 1. Goals of the initiative (210 responses)
4.1.2 Inter-disciplinary collaboration. Results from the
questionnaire show the presence of collaboration between actors
from different staffs than just information technology. Figure 2
shows that the 22.4% of respondents involved in the adoption of
the PbR-SED belong to budget staffs. However, the vast majority
of participants come from different professional areas or staffs
such as: planning (27.4%), management of public programs
(18.4%), information systems (13.87%), and internal controls and
audits (8.4%). The results of the questionnaire also identify staff
from "other" areas such as evaluation, public investment, public
works management, and other administrative officers. These
results present evidence of the importance of the inter-disciplinary
nature of collaboration among the different staffs involved in the
adoption of the PbR-SED.
This interdisciplinary collaboration also varies along the process
of adoption. Table 2 shows different types of staffs collaborating
across the stages of adoption of the e-government initiative. For
example, staff members of planning areas have a very active role
in all stages of adoption, followed by project leaders and budget &
finance staff members. Members from information systems and
management of programs staffs engage more actively at the stages
of project planning, project design, development of information
systems, and implementation. The results also identified members
from "other" staffs, such as training, evaluation, internal controls,
339
and monitoring. On average, participants of the PbR-SED
initiative spent 34.4% of their weekly time for the adoption of the
PbR-SED. This is an important finding due to the need of
recognition that initiatives like the PbR-SED consume
considerable amounts of time and effort during the different
phases of the project.
Figure 2. Staffs involved in the initiative (206 responses)
Table 2. Number of participants by type of staff and stage of
adoption (204 responses)
4.1.3 Inter-organizational collaboration. The literature has
been predominantly aimed at studying the role of the legislative
branch members and the executive office in e-government success
[18,19,34,39,40]. Figure 3 shows that the first level of
collaboration was given at the interior of the organizations rather
than at the exterior. The first manifestation of collaboration of the
PbR-SED initiative occurs across different staffs within the
organization (inter-disciplinary collaboration). The second layer
of collaboration happens between various organizations from
federal, state or local levels of government (inter-organizational
collaboration). After the internal level of collaboration, the
collaboration between organizations and control agencies was
critical. Our respondents also identified other levels of
collaboration with different levels of government, private
organizations, and international organizations such as the World
Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the
Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC), the Latin

American and the Caribbean Institute of Economic and Social
Planning (ILPES). Collaboration with universities was also
reported such as the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)
and the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE). In
“others” option, respondents considered coordination with certain
agencies specialized in particular policy domains in Mexico like
the National Council of Evaluation for Social Policy
(CONEVAL), the National Commission of Housing (CONAVIS),
the Mexican Youth Institute (IMJUVE), the National Institute of
Women Affairs (INMUJERES), the National Commission on
Human Rights, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), and the
Superior Audit Organization. The results of the questionnaire
made evident that inter-organizational collaboration is multilevel
involving different organizations with different missions,
functions and responsibilities.
Figure 3. Types of inter-organizational collaboration in the
initiative (210 responses)
4.1.4 Governance scheme. The literature points out the
predominance of the ministry of finance and other control
agencies in the process of adoption of reforms. This represents a
strong disincentive for implementer agencies to get involved in
the process of adoption of the initiative [34]. Figure 4 provides an
overview of the predominance of federal government in the
governance scheme of the initiative progress. The oversight of
control agencies in the federal government like SHCP, SFP and
CONEVAL is stronger for the adoption of the initiative. However,
there are instances of governance involving state and local levels
of governments and very few cases from other organizations like
the World Bank and the IDB. Puron-Cid [34] suggests that
participatory governance involving organizations other than just
control agencies may enrich the process of adoption and may
ensure more innovation of the project in the organization.
4.1.5 Strategies of resources supporting the initiative.
Governance schemes are predominantly supervised by the federal
government. Strategies of assigning resources to support the
adoption of the initiative primarily come from the federal
government as well. This type of “centralized” support of
resources by control agencies at the federal level has advantages
and disadvantages. The great advantage of this strategy is that
offers a general framework for adoption across organizations
based on incentives and resources. However, this scheme also
suggests a lack of involvement by implementers due to the
imposed structures for adoption, and their low investment and
involvement in the project. Standard models of support may not
340
correspond to the needs of operation of implementer agencies.
The questionnaire identifies five types of resources and source of
support for the adoption of the PbR-SED initiative (see Figure 5):
financial, training, information technology, ICT knowledge and
staff, and experts and consultants.
Figure 4. Types of organizations supervising the initiative (205
responses)
Figure 5. Types of support for the initiative (193 responses)
On average, federal government assists on average 73% of these
supports. In the same way, state governments operate on average
17% of this aid and international organizations such as the World
Bank and the IDB orchestrated on average 24% of this help. It is
important to note that municipal governments presented almost no
participation in these support strategies. Future research should
corroborate if this pattern of support strategy corresponds to a
shortage of resources, a lack of involvement, or a failure in the
centralized design of the project at the federal level.
4.2 Benefits
Table 3 lists the results for the category of benefits of the adopted
e-government initiative. The benefit with higher level of
agreement is knowledge sharing. Respondents agreed that the
PbR-SED helped members from different staffs to share expertise,
knowledge and information across different areas like program

management, budget, and information systems (82.7%). The
second largest benefit perceived by respondents was improving
inter-disciplinary collaboration. Respondents consider that the
PbR-SED makes more effective working relationships between
different internal areas and staffs in the organization such as
planning, budget, program management, and information systems
(78.2%). With regards to the increase in communication,
respondents felt that the PbR-SED generated performance
information useful for decision-making of public programs
(70.4%). Respondents consider more strengthened accountability
between different staffs and areas within the organization as a
benefit as well (69.8%). For the benefit of improving public
services, respondents felt that the PbR-SED gave them rise to a
better delivery of public services based on performance (66.5%).
In terms of improving inter-organizational collaboration, a 64.2%
of respondents consider that the PbR-SED resulted in a better
collaboration between their organizations and other agencies and
ministries. About the benefit of increasing efficiency, respondents
perceived that the PbR-SED improves the organizations efficiency
(60.9%). In contrast to the benefit of cost reduction, respondents
have a divided opinion over whether the PbR-SED really saves or
reduces costs (50.8%).
Table 3. Benefits of e-government (179 responses)
* Note: A 7-points Likert scale was used from “totally agree” to “totally disagree”.
For the % agree, only the categories of "somehow agree", "agree" and "totally agree"
were considered.
These results present areas of improvement. On one hand, the
adoption of PbR-SED has resulted in: better collaboration across
different members within the organization (inter-disciplinary
collaboration); a critical tool to enhance accountability within the
organization; and an instrument to share knowledge and
information among different areas of expertise like program
management, budgeting, and information systems. However, there
are some divided opinions if the PbR-SED has really improved
efficiency in the organization, reduced costs, improved public
services, and enhanced inter-organizational collaboration between
different agencies and organizations involved in the initiative
(inter-organizational collaboration).
4.3 Contextual Factors
Table 4 lists the results for each contextual factor. The contextual
factors more influential in the adoption of the PbR-SED are the
support of top officials (75.6%) and the usefulness of the strategic
planning (75.0%). The first is political and the second is
organizational. Other contextual factors were less influential but
significant such as budgetary norms and regulations (75.0%),
341
level of standardization of processes and tasks (67.4%), level of
centralization (64.5%), and size and number of jurisdiction
(59.9%). The economic factor, social factors and the political
factor of support of congress people present divided opinions
about their influence on the success of the PbR-SED. In sum, the
political factor of top officials support, the institutional factor of
budgetary norms and regulations, and all organizational factors
were considered influential.
Table 4. Contextual factors of e-government (172 responses)
* Note: A 7-points Likert scale was used from “totally agree” to “totally disagree”.
For the % agree, only the categories of "somehow agree", "agree" and "totally agree"
were considered.
4.4 Budget & Information Systems Factors
Table 5 lists the results for the budget and information systems
factors. Three budget factors were considered influential by
respondents: budgetary methodology for performance information
(80.2%), top-bottom strategy of implementation (68.5%), and
strategies of implementation of the ministry of finance (63.6%).
Information systems factors presented lower levels of agreement
about their influence on the adoption of the PbR-SED, but two
factors figured among this battery of questions: development and
use of proprietary information systems in implementer
organizations (60.0%), and definition of roles and accesses in the
official information system (59.9%). There were divided opinions
for two budget factors: the influence of flow of performance
information (54.3%) and official calendar (44.4%). Similarly,
divided opinion was also present for some information systems
factors such as: the official information system (57.4%), previous
experience developing information systems and data bases in the
organization (57.4%), and sharing data bases, catalogues, and
tables (46.3%). In general, budget factors reached higher levels of
agreement than information systems factors.
Table 5. Budget & Information Systems factors of egovernment
(162 responses)

* Note: A 7-points Likert scale was used from “totally agree” to “totally disagree”.
For the % agree, only the categories of "somehow agree", "agree" and "totally agree"
were considered.
4.5 Collaboration Factors
Most of collaboration factors were perceived by respondents as
critical for adoption of the PbR-SED (see Table 6). For authority,
the use of memos, norms and manuals to set rules (74.4%) and the
official designation of a responsible of the initiative in the
organization (69.9%) were considered important. In terms of
leadership, similar use of memos, norms and manuals to support
the people leading the project (76.9%) and the work of the
leader(s) or team in charge of the initiative (67.9%) were
considered influential. Governance presents contrasting results,
while the designation of a multidisciplinary team to coordinate the
initiative presents a considerable level of agreement (69.9%),
mechanisms of governance such as meetings and its boundary
objects such as minutes, plans and other material had lower
percent of agreement (58.3%). Finally, the use of human resources
presented higher level of agreement (64.7%) than the resources
assigned to technical infrastructure (55.8%) and official training
(50.0%). In sum, the role of authority, leadership and certain
aspect of governance were evaluated by respondents as influential
for a successful adoption of the PbR-SED initiative.
Table 6. Collaboration factors of e-government (156
responses)
342
* Note: A 7-points Likert scale was used from “totally agree” to “totally disagree”.
For the % agree, only the categories of "somehow agree", "agree" and "totally agree"
were considered.
4.6 Knowledge Factors
All knowledge factors obtained the highest levels of agreement
across all factors in this study (see Table 7). In particular,
professional experience showed to be highly critical for a
successful adoption of the PbR-SED. Except for previous reforms
experience (71.1%), professional background, job experience, and
management operation experience presented higher levels of
agreement more than 80%. In terms of teamwork, knowledge
sharing across members from different staff areas presented
84.9% level of agreement while previous experience working with
members from other areas obtained 73.7%. These results suggest
that previous experience is critical, but not as much as
professional experience of individuals. Budget management,
information systems experience and technology use also present
important effects on the adoption of the PbR-SED with 75% of
agreement across respondents. These findings are aligned with the
idea that professional experience of participants in the initiative
may be enriched or complemented by disciplines’ knowledge.
Finally, the lowest level of agreement in this battery of questions
for knowledge factors is the official training with 70.4% level of
agreement. This evidence suggests that official mechanisms of
increasing knowledge and experience prescribed by reformers
“centrally” are not adequate for the particular needs and
operations of implementer agencies.
Table 7. Knowledge factors of e-government (152 responses)

* Note: A 7-points Likert scale was used from “totally agree” to “totally disagree”.
For the % agree, only the categories of "somehow agree", "agree" and "totally agree"
were considered.
4.7 Trust Factors
Most of trust factors obtained high levels of agreement about their
influential effects such as (see Table 8): confidence based on
budgetary knowledge (71.7%), confidence based on information
systems knowledge and technology use (71.1%), and clear roles
and responsibilities (78.3% and 69.1%). Only motivation factors
presented low levels of agreement: incentives (39.5%) and public
recognition (37.5%). Building trust is an important enabler for egovernment
success not only by establishing clear roles and
responsibilities, but by enhancing knowledge and expertise of
participants across multiple disciplines (not just IT).
Table 8. Trust factors of e-government (152 responses)
* Note: A 7-points Likert scale was used from “totally agree” to “totally disagree”.
For the % agree, only the categories of "somehow agree", "agree" and "totally agree"
were considered.
5. PRACTICAL ADVISES
These results from the questionnaire allow us to derive 11
“practical advices” for a successful adoption of e-government.
There are five advises taken from the general characteristics
section: (1) Avoid multiple goals for the e-government initiative;
(2) establish inter-disciplinary mechanisms of collaboration
343
among participants from different staffs at the interior of the
organization as first level of coordination of the e-government
initiative; (3) establish inter-organizational mechanisms of
collaboration among participants from different organizations as a
second level of coordination of the e-government initiative; (4)
define better and more complete governance schemes for the
organization by creating channels of participation between key
organizations, not just the traditional reformer agencies; in order
to (5) establish strategies of support of the initiative by sharing
financial, human, technological, training and knowledge
resources. Results from the benefits section suggest that (6)
specifying a clear set of goals and activities helps to direct action
towards achievable plans. For agencies, it was easier to improve
by having a clear set of goals and performance indicators for
improving a particular public service than goals set in general
terms. With the complex goals of the PbR-SED, respondents were
only able to improve knowledge sharing and interdisciplinary
collaboration, but efficiency, cost reduction, and public services.
From the contextual section, (7) the lesson is to consider in
advance potential economic, social, political, institutional, and
organizational risks that may influence the adoption of the
initiative. It was found that economic, social and political factors
cannot be forecasted, but general trends can be detected and
prevented for a better adoption of the initiative. Institutional and
organizational factors may enable or inhibit internal strengths for
e-government success. An analysis of contextual factors provides
a useful map for where the initiative is standing. For budgetary
and information systems’ components, it is critical to consider that
(8) both work together not in isolation. Depending of the context
and necessary fields of expertise required in the project, egovernment
initiatives need to acquire relevant disciplinary
knowledge and experience across participants for a successful
adoption. For collaboration, (9) implementers should preview the
multiple levels of collaboration. It is necessary to exercise clear
mechanisms of collaboration such as authority, leadership,
governance and different types of resources to support potential
interdisciplinary and inter-organizational collaborations during the
adoption of the initiative. In terms of knowledge, (10) reformers
need to provide official training in different disciplines (not just
budgeting) as an incubating step in the process of adoption. It is
critical to pay attention of the professional experience, teamwork
experience, and different disciplinary and areas of knowledge and
expertise of participants, project leaders, members of teams, and
people involved in the e-government initiative. Finally for trust,
(11) there are motivational schemes that build confidence among
participants and motivate participation and collaboration. This
study found influential to build confidence the following
mechanisms: promoting knowledge and expertise on the different
areas or disciplines; setting clear roles and responsibilities; giving
monetary and non-monetary incentives like public recognition.
The lack of these trust builders may act as inhibitors of egovernment
adoption.
6. CONCLUSIONS
This research provides evidence of the multiple structures and
factors involve in e-government adoption. The results also suggest
the multi-dimensional nature of the structures involved in egovernment
success. It is not the intention to suggest that “all
matters”, but to provide a conceptual map for evaluation that
serves to diagnose what components of the initiative require the
attention of both, reformers and implementers, for a successful
process of adoption. The questionnaire as research instrument

showed to be useful, for collecting data from respondents from
their natural settings. Using an online technique to collect
responses was limited, but useful to collect the data across
participants of the PbR-SED dispersed in the territory. This
allowed less expensive and more control process of data
collection. Particular attention of the phrasing of questions needs
to be considered carefully for this type of research method. In
particular, the section of questions valuated by using the 7-point
Likert scale proved to be very useful for capturing the opinion of
respondents. The dispersion of responses shows that the scale
goes from high levels of agreement to low levels of agreement
(disagreement). This dispersion was useful to scale the opinions
about factors influence going from enabling or positive impact to
inhibiting or negative impact over a successful adoption of the
PbR-SED. In other words, the results show that there is a set of
powerful enablers and inhibitors during the adoption of the PbR-
SED initiative. For enablers (equal or higher than 5.0 on average),
this study found some particular political, organizational, and
budgetary factors, but among all collaboration, knowledge and
trust factors obtained the highest levels of agreement about their
influence on e-government success. For inhibitors, several factors
across different structures showed low levels of agreement (less
than 5.0 on average) meaning not necessarily no relation with egovernment
success, but a negative impact on e-government
success. Another important result from this study is that the
connection between the goals of the e-government initiative and
the benefits perceived is weak. This may be resulted from the lack
of clarity about the goals and expected results of the PbR-SED in
organizations creating confusion across participants of the project.
In general, participants share knowledge and information,
collaborate more with others, and are more accountable for what
they do; however, they are unable of clear set of goals and
performance indicators for improving efficiency, cost reduction
and improving public services.
7. REFERENCES
[1] Agranoff, R. and McGuire, M. 2001. "Big questions in
public network management research". Journal of Public
Administration Research and Theory, 11. 295-326.
[2] Ambite, J. L. et al. 2002. Data integration and access. In
William J. McIver and Ahmed K. Elmagarmid. Advances in
digital government technology, human factors, and policy.
Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
[3] Andersen, D. F. and Dawes, S. S. Government information
management. A primer and casebook. Prentice Hall,
Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1991
[4] Bryman, A. Social Research Methods. Oxford University
Press, 2004.
[5] Cresswell, A.M., Pardo, T.A., and Hassan, S. 2000.
"Assessing Capability for Justice Information Sharing', The
Proceedings of the 8th Annual International Digital
Government Research Conference 2000.
[6] Cresswell, A.M., Pardo, T.A., Canestraro, D.S. and Dawes,
S.S. 2005. Why Assess Information Sharing Capability?
Center for Technology in Government.
[7] Davenport, E. and Hall, H. 2002. "Organizational knowledge
and communities of practice". Annual Review of Information
Science and Technology, 36 171-222.
344
[8] Dawes, S.S. and Eglene, O. 2008. New models of
collaboration for delivering government services: A dynamic
model drawn from multi-national research. CTG Working
Paper No. 01-2008
[9] Dawes, S. S., and Pardo, T. A. 2002. Building collaborative
digital government systems. Systematic constraints and
effective practices. In W. J. McIver and A. K. Elmagarmid
(Eds.), Advances in digital government. Technology, human
factors, and policy (pp. 259-273). Norwell, MA: Kluwer
Academic Publishers.
[10] Dawes, S. S., Helbig, N., and Gil-García, J. R. 2004.
Highlights: Exploring the feasibility of a digital government
journal. Albany, NY: Center for Technology in Government,
University at Albany, SUNY.
[11] Dawes, S. S. 1996. "Interagency information sharing:
Expected benefits, manageable risks". Journal of Policy
Analysis and Management, 15(3), 377-394.
[12] De Lancer Julnes, P., and Holzer, M. 2001. "Promoting the
utilization of performance measures in public organizations:
An empirical study of factors affecting adoption and
implementation". Public Administration Review, 61(6), 693-
708.
[13] Dirks, K. T. and Ferrin, D. L. 2001. "The Role of Trust in
Organizational Settings," Organization Science, vol. 12(4),
pp. 450-467.
[14] Fountain, J. E. 2001. Building the virtual state: Information
technology and institutional change. Washington, D.C.: The
Brookings Institution Press.
[15] Gant, D. B., Gant, J. P., and Johnson, C. L. 2002. State Web
Portals: Delivering and Financing EService. The
PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for the Business of
Government, Arlington, VA.
[16] Gant, J. P. 2004. Digital Government and Geographic
Information Systems. In A. Pavlichev and G. D. Garson
(Eds.), Digital Government: Principles and Best Practices.
Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing.
[17] Garson, G. D. 2004. The promise of digital government. In
A. Pavlichev and G. D. Garson (Eds.), Digital government:
Principles and best practices (pp. 2-15). Hershey, PA: Idea
Group Publishing.
[18] Gil-Garcia, J. R. and Pardo, T. A. 2005. "E-Government
Success Factors: Mapping Practical Tools to Theoretical
Foundations". Government Information Quarterly, 22(2),
187–216.
[19] Gil-Garcia, J. R. 2005. Enacting state websites: A mixed
method study exploring e-government success in multiorganizational
settings. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation,
University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany,
NY.
[20] Gil-Garcia, J. R., Pardo, T. A., and Burke, G. B. 2007.
"Government leadership in multi-sector IT-enabled
networks: Lessons from the response to the West Nile Virus
outbreak", Paper presented at “Leading the Future of the
Public Sector” – The Third Transatlantic Dialogue, Newark,
DE, Mon, 02 Jun 2007

[21] Grizzle, G.A. and Pettijohn, C. D. 2002. "Implementing
Performance-Based Program Budgeting: A System-
Dynamics Perspective", Public Administration Review,
January/February 2(X)2, 62(1)
[22] Gurbaxani, V., and Whang, S. 1991. “The impact of
Organizations System on Organizations and Markets,”
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 34, No. 1, January, pp.
59-73
[23] Hall, H. and Andrews, M. 2005. "Reforming Budget Ritual
and Budget Practice: The Case of Performance Management
Implementation in Virginia", International Journal of Public
Administration, 28: 255–272.
[24] Heeks, 2006. Implementing and Managing eGovernment. An
International Text. London: Sage Publications.
[25] Joyce, P. G. 2004. Linking Performance and Budgeting:
Opportunities in the Federal Budget Process, (IBM Center
for the Business of Government, October 2003—2nd
Printing January 2004).
[26] Joyce, P. G., Lee, R. D. and Johnson, R. W. 2004. Public
Budgeting Systems, 7th Edition, Jones and Bartlett
Publishers.
[27] Melkers, J.E. and Willoughby, K.G. 2001. "Budgeters' view
of state performance-budgeting systems: Distinctions across
branches", Public Administration Review, January/February,
Vol. 61(1).
[28] OECD. 2007. Performance Budgeting in OECD Countries,
Paris, France: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development.
[29] Orlikowski, W.J., and Baroudi, J. 1991. "Studying
Information Systems in Organizations: Research Approaches
and Assumptions," Information Systems Research, Vol. 2,
No. 1, pp. 1-28.
[30] Pardo, T.A., Cresswell, A. M., Dawes, S. S. and Burke, G. B.
2004. "Modeling the social and technical processes of
interorganizational information integration". In HICSS2004,
37th Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences.
[31] Pardo, T. A., Cresswell, A. M., Thompson, F., and Zhang, J.
2006. "Knowledge Sharing in Cross-Boundary Information
Systems Development". Journal of Information Technology
and Management, 7(4).
[32] Pardo, T.A., Gil-Garcia, J.R. and Burke, G.B. 2007. Informal
Leadership and Networks: Lessons from the Response to the
345
West Nile Virus Outbreak, in Paul Cunningham and Miriam
Cunningham (Eds), Expanding the Knowledge Economy:
Issues, Applications, Case Studies, IOS Press, 2007
Amsterdam
[33] Peterson, R. 2004. "Crafting information technology
governance". Information Systems Management, 21(4), 7-22.
[34] Puron-Cid, G. 2010. Extending Structuration Theory: A
Study of an IT-enabled Budget Reform in Mexico. Ph.D.,
University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany,
New York.
[35] Rocheleau, B. 2003. Politics, Accountability, and
Governmental Information Systems. In G. D. Garson (Ed.),
Public Information Technology: Policy and Management
Issues. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing.
[36] Sadri, F., Subramanian, I. N. and Lakshmanan, L. V. S.
1996., "Schema SQL - A language for interoperability in
relational multi-database systems", ACM Symposium on
Principles of Database Systems (PODS), June 1996.
[37] Schick, A. 2008. Getting Performance Budgeting to Perform.
Paper presented at the Conferencia Internacional de
Presupuesto por Resultados, Mexico City.
[38] Scholl, Hans J. 2009. Electronic Government: A Study
Domain Past its Infancy, In Scholl, H.J. (ed.) Electronic
Government: Information, Technology and Transformation,
M.E. Sharpe Armonk.
[39] Van Reeth, W. 2002. The bearable lightness of budgeting.
An explorative research on the uneven implementation of
performance oriented budget reform. Ph.D. Doctoral Degree
Thesis, Catholic University of Leuven, Leuven, Germany.
[40] Van Veenstra, A. F., Marijn, J., & Tan Y. H. 2010. Towards
an Understanding of E-Government Induced Change—
Drawing on Organization and Structuration Theories. In
M.A. Wimmer et al. (eds): EGOV 2010. LCNS 6228,
International Federation for Information Processing, pp. 1-
12.
[41] West, D. M. 2005. Digital Government. Technology and
Public Sector Performance. Princeton, USA: Princeton
University Press.
Zheng, H. Y. 2000. Data warehousing in government agencies:
Conceptual and managerial issues. In G.D. Garson (Ed.),
Handbook of public information systems (pp. 447-462). New
York: Marcel Dekker.

Public CIO, Figurehead or Decision-Maker? The case of
Germany.
Niels Proske
University of Potsdam, Chair of
Business Information Systems and E-
Government
August-Bebel-Str. 89
14482 Potsdam, Germany
+49 331 977 4681
nproske@wi.uni-potsdam.de
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we analyze the position of CIO in the German states.
In Germany, public CIOs range from figureheads to real decisionmakers.
We identified three CIO types: first, the Political CIO,
who has substantial resources but less IT competencies; second,
the Operational CIO, who manages IT primarily close to actual
projects; third, the Decorative CIO, who serves predominantly for
public image. Thus, the institution of CIO moves between
catchphrase and e-government enabler.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.6.1 [Project and People Management]: Strategic Information
Systems Planning
General Terms
Management, Human Factors, Theory, Legal Aspects
Keywords
CIO, Leadership in Public Authorities, Empirical Comparison
1. INTRODUCTION
CIOs gladly accept prizes for excellent e-government strategies,
give keynote addresses at fairs or conferences and are interviewed
about the importance of collaboration under public authorities.
But what is their actual impact on shaping and advancing the use
of IT in the public sector? Whereas research has given a lot of
attention to the position of Chief Information Officer in
companies, their equivalents in the public sector however have
been scarcely addressed by research. Given the public sector’s
peculiar determining conditions that are likely to affect the CIO’s
design and functions, findings from both science and practice,
should not be transferred carelessly. Especially since high
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Moreen Heine
University of Potsdam, Chair of
Business Information Systems and E-
Government
August-Bebel-Str. 89
14482 Potsdam, Germany
+49 331 977 4690
mheine@wi.uni-potsdam.de
346
Norbert Gronau
University of Potsdam, Chair of
Business Information Systems and E-
Government
August-Bebel-Str. 89
14482 Potsdam, Germany
+49 331 977 4681 3372
ngronau@wi.uni-potsdam.de
expectations are tied to the introduction of the CIO position.
Leadership failures or even the lack of adequate management is
one of the biggest obstacles of e-government activities, which are
for the most part activities of strategy and organizational change
[2] [5] [10]. A lack of political guidelines and an often too late
integration of crucial decision makers are constraining egovernment
progress in general. As a mean to address these
shortcomings, the concept of a Chief Information Officer, inspired
by private sector, emerged in public sector.
Introducing CIOs in the public sector indicates a shift towards
greater centralization as well as recognition that in order to
succeed in e-government a more holistic, inter-agency approach is
necessary [7] [8]. Thought to bridge the gap between IT and
highest-level executives [2], the position of CIO is also
understood as institutionalization of the organization’s egovernment-strategy
[6]. The rise of the CIO concept underlines
in particular the strategic importance of e-government for
organizational change in the public sector overcoming it’s
limitation to merely technical means [4].
CIOs in public sector are exposed to a particular environment,
with political implications, directly affecting their working
conditions. This leads to certain CIO models that often reflect
both power structures and relevance attached to e-government.
The objective of this paper is to explore and describe roles and
functions of CIOs in German federal state governments and to
assess whether this so gloriously titled position is actually more
than just symbolic.
2. DEFINITION OF TERMS
The term Chief Information Officer firstly appeared in the early
1980s in the private sector [1]. For W. R. Synnott the CIO is “the
highest ranking executive with primary responsibility for
information management. The CIO is responsible for the planning
and architecture of the firm’s information resources, for
promoting information technology throughout the firm, and for
looking after the corporation’s investment in technology” [9]. The
implementation is a visible expression of a changed view on
information and information systems that had become a
substantial production factor [12] and "can increase productivity
and provide better management support" and hence created a new
management dimension [11]. Focussing on hierarchy Boyle and
Burbridge define the CIO position as "an executive with broad

esponsibility for information technology [...] who reports to a
high-level corporate officer (e.g. president or CEO) [13]. Hence,
the CIO is part of the organisation’s top management or at least
directly tied to it. A clear definition of CIO position is almost
impossible to give [1], which is predominantly due to the various
roles and in the manifold modification of the CIO's
responsibilities. Generally in public sector the concept of a CIO is
well established for now almost two decades [5] [14]. Often their
introduction is part of broader e-government initiatives such as egovernment
strategies or similar action plans (e.g. in the state of
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern), coalition agreements (e.g. in the
state of Baden-Württemberg) or even by law (e.g. planned in the
state of Berlin; Clinger-Cohen Act in the U.S.).
However, it is hardly feasible to determine the specific date, when
the first CIO position was created in a German state. In 2003 the
German state of Hessen was the very first state, which has
established a so titled CIO position. However, a similar position
was already set up in 1996 by the German state of Hamburg,
albeit as a department on a lower hierarchical level and not
denominated as Chief Information Office. And even since 1985
there is a so-called Federal Commissioner for ICT
(Landessystembeauftragter) in the state of Baden-Württemberg, a
position clearly assigned with CIO functions and a dedicated
administrative body. Introducing a CIO position does not
necessarily mean adopting an innovation but often merely
establishing a prominent title, as will be shown later [2]. Today 13
out of 16 federal states have established corresponding positions,
even if the denomination is used rather rare.
3. STUDY DESIGN
We explore the design of CIO positions in public authorities by
comparing the German states. The data collection is mainly based
on content analysis. We used organization charts, schedules of
responsibilities, coalition agreements and online presences of the
16 states. Further, we conducted three expert interviews about the
design and intentions of CIO positions in three German states.
The following characteristics were collected:
o Placing
o Function
o Level of separate resources
o Relationship to other departments
o Representation in the Federal IT committee
The placing of the CIO concerns both vertical and horizontal
dimension. The higher he is positioned in the hierarchy the more
assertiveness can be assumed. However, in such a case he is most
likely not involved in concrete IT affairs, because he has to direct
several departments which may be far away from IT subjects.
CIOs that are not on the level of a state secretary are actually able
to operate as IT managers even though they are not authorized to
issue directives. With a view to the horizontal placing it is crucial
but not always in fact, that the CIO is positioned in that
department that is in charge of statewide IT topics.
CIOs fulfill several functions such as planning, governance and
controlling of IT issues focusing on strategic tasks [1]. In our
study the functional range of the CIOs is documented for every
state and finally accounts for the identification of special CIO
types.
347
To unfold full impact and to operate independently, the CIO
should be equipped with resources, for example directly dedicated
organisational units as well as budgetary means to initiate
projects, assign studies and drive agenda setting. The importance
of the CIO position should also be reflected in the crossdepartmental
IT committees over which he has to preside. In this
regard, there should be clarity about the relationship to the heads
of IT on lower hierarchical levels within the specific departments.
Every German state delegates a high-ranking representative (state
secretary) to the Federal CIO council (IT Planungsrat), so do the
the fereral government and representatives of the municipalities.
The council is responsible for an overall IT steering. For the
efficiency of each CIO position it is relevant whether the CIO is
also member of the Federal CIO council. If not, it can be supposed
that there is a lack of capacity to act at the interface of the own
and the overall IT strategy.
4. EMPIRICAL FINDINGS
Altogether 13 federal states possess a CIO, which is not to say that
among the remaining states CIO functions are not implemented.
The word CIO seems to be a kind of catchphrase. Some federal
states are afraid to use it, but actually have implemented an
analogous position but put the phrase in brackets. Another
symptom of this near-hype is that some states entitle a state
secretary, who is busy being in charge of several sections, to a
CIO. Under these circumstances the position is called Decorative
CIO, who has in addition mostly no own resources. Otherwise,
state secretaries are actually able to fulfil the CIO mission,
provided that they have any resources they need, which are time,
money, qualification and staff. In this case it is a Political CIO.
The third type focuses on IT qualification and more operative
tasks without neglecting strategic issues and is called Operative
CIO. In the majority of cases our three CIO types are hard to
distinguish from each other. Thus, the cases are assigned to the
types by concentrating on the main points.
4.1 Political CIO
As a state secretary the Political CIO performs primarily strategic
tasks. As its name implies, he distinguishes himself in his
commitment to political offices. He is provided with authority to
impact the IT governance, ideally cross-departmental. In the case
of federal states, he is the head of IT for the whole state
administration. The Political CIO has the budget responsibility. In
collaboration with other federal states and face to face with local
authorities he acts with the necessary power of representation.
This CIO type is almost completely observable in the Free State of
Bavaria. At first glance the state of Hessen possesses a similar
CIO position, but actually it seems to be a position for special IT
tasks (first, Digital Mobile Radio Network for emergency services
& government agencies; and second, the activities in the Federal
IT Council). The basic e-government department is not under his
command. Without fixed coordination operations this situation
tends to result in isolated CIO offices with a very decorative
character. On the surface he appears as virtual head of IT. It is a
peculiarity that the CIO is associated to two ministries, the
Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Finance. This is due to
budget requirements. Requiring high spending but then enabling
high savings, IT projects have strong financial impacts. Hence, it
will be very advantageous, if CIOs have well-established and
formal relations to both professional and financial departments.

4.2 Operative CIO
The Operative CIO is characterized by his IT competence.
Political CIOs are more often than not almost laymen in IT issues.
The Operative CIO is head of the IT department without further
engagements. Thus, he is able to concentrate on his root tasks. On
management level the Operative CIO is involved in projects.
Requests from other authorities like local communities or other
federal states are addressed to him, even though he is not entitled
to make binding decisions.
The federal city state of Hamburg has an Operative CIO as
described above. Hamburg provides both a global fund for IT
projects and a pool with specialized staff. IT specialists are
delegated to work on projects within the operating department. All
in all Hamburg has a powerful CIO organization. The state of
Saarland has also an Operative CIO, but not as ideal as Hamburg.
Introducing a CIO organization means always a certain need of
concentration. That did not succeed, because there are still two
departments which handle statewide important IT issues. The CIO
of the state of Saarland is positioned as a staff unit at the Ministry
of Finance and is completely oriented on the project “IT reengineering”
with the aim to consolidate. It seems that the CIO
day-to-day business is not included.
4.3 Decorative CIO
Missing adequate resources Decorative CIOs are not able to reach
significant results. They only serve for image brightening.
Decorative CIOs have little or no managerial function. The state
of Brandenburg has a CIO with only representative functions. The
CIO is positioned deep within a department of the Ministry of
Interior and he is ancillary to the head of this department, which is
in charge of e-government and IT. Thus, Brandenburg has a CIO
but nothing else. The state of Lower Saxony also holds a CIO with
questionable reliability performance. Initially they recruited a CIO
from the private sector. This year the position was upgraded. The
state secretary took over additional task. To the present this is not
communicated in detail, which indicates that this CIO design is
located along the border to decorativeness.
4.4 Synopsis
Political CIOs are most common, seven german states have a CIO
that predominantly serve political purposes. That may be because
of their role in the federal IT council. The states seek to delegate
representatives who are able to speak on equal terms (two out of
three Decorative are also in the position of state secretaries).
Another three states’ CIO positon can be classified as Operational
CIO, three as Decorative CIO. Three German states have no CIO
position so far.
A further aspect is the department, in which the CIO performs.
Traditionally IT issues are handled in the Ministry of Finance.
That is because the first data possessing systems were introduced
for the tax authorities. Six German CIOs are employed at financial
departments. Another six CIOs are at the Ministry of Interior,
which is as a rule in charge of Public Service Modernization.
Possessing the CIO in the Ministry of Justice and Europe, Saxony
is an outliner.
Deriving from the localization of the state CIO in a certain
ministry is the hegemony over priorities and aims associated to
the use of technology [18] [19]. One can expect that a CIO
employed at financial departments is more likely to stress the
348
potential of ICT to strengthen efficiency in order to save money,
whereas a CIO at Ministry of Justice is more likely to focus on
subjects such as data protection or the restriction of crossauthority
exchange of data.
5. EXPLANATION APPROACH
One of the most fundamental lessons learned from evaluations of
the New Public Management is to take into account the public
sector’s specific conditions before transferring concepts from
private sector, as both sectors differ in a couple of basic
dimensions [15]. Although they clearly affect the CIO position in
the public sector, we do not want to elaborate on these basic
characteristics (such as stakeholder structure, orientation to the
common good or administrative culture) but to stress those
principles and conditions, which are directly tied to CIO’s
capacity to act and might explain our findings.
Probably as the most important difference, it starts with the
position in organisation hierarchy. Whereas in private sector the
CIO is member of the executive board or at least closely tied to it,
there is no comparable body in state governments. Unlike the
municipal level, where a central management body can be
identified (albeit with significant differences to private sector), a
state government’s cabinet combines the state ministers who lead
their respective departments independently and under their own
responsibility (departmental principle). It falls to the ministers, to
decide whether, where and how tasks are to be administrated.
For the CIO’s capacity to act consensus must exist on his crossdepartmental
responsibilities, and his respective remit clearly
defined, in particular if establishing the CIO function is
accompanied by the delegation of hitherto decentralised functions.
Some states and countries describe responsibilities, authority and
the allocation of dedicated resources by specific legislation.
Each type of CIO in public sector can be seen as an expression of
certain political conditions, thus as the result of intense
negotiations. Consensus is yet needed on where to establish the
prominent position, a question that might easily become subject of
envy, taking into account the idealistic understanding of
technology as a metaphor for progress and innovation. And
ministries are likely to seek being recognized as progressive and
innovative. Willingness on to abandon and cede once owned
responsibilities by delegating functions, capabilities or staff can be
seen as huge challenge. Thus, public sector CIO is also always a
moderator between the respective departments (and their IT
managers) likewise towards politics.
Considering constantly changing political power structures, hence
changing policies and priorities, the need for consensus is a steady
companion. For instance strategic and organisation wide planning,
which is without doubt one of the CIO’s key field of activity, is
subject to particular challenges specific to the public sector [3].
But what if consensus is reached neither on where to establish a
CIO function nor on its responsibilities or authority? A weak, thus
rather decorative CIO is likely to be the result. If departments
insist on keeping staff, capabilities or activities, if comprehensive
planning is not wanted, the CIO’s room for manoeuvre will dry
out. In case of Decorative CIOs a gap between the glorious title
and the actual rather slight capacity to act is self-evident.
But why do they introduce CIO-positions anyhow? From the
perspective of sociological new institutionalism [17] [16] they do
precisely because there is a need for decoration, in terms of a

substantial demand for highlighting ICT as metaphor for
effectiveness, efficiency and performance, or just to be state-ofthe-art.
Stakeholders demand public sector to be efficient, with
sophisticated e-government as a catchy expression. Introducing a
CIO appears to be a plausible response, even more if other states
do. Even in case of insufficient political will, reluctance to agree
on to delegate responsibilities and resources or political costs,
estimated as too high, the subject of e-government appears well
addressed when a CIO position is established.
New institutionalism emphasises the role of legitimacy in order to
ensure support and secure the organisation’s survival. By
establishing a CIO position, as a significant institutional rule, that
organisations incorporate, illegitimacy can be avoided. John W.
Meyer and Brian Rowan describe a gap between the formal
structure and actual work as decoupling, as a mean of dealing with
conflicts. "Decoupling enables organizations to maintain
standardized, legitimating, formal structures while their activities
vary in response to practical considerations." [17] The type of
Decorative CIO may be interpreted as a response to the
simultaneousness of environmental demands and differing
understandings of rational organizations but also to political costs
that do not match the actual priority.
6. FUTURE PROSPECTS
This paper’s aim was to assess and describe the CIO position in
German state governments and to point out the potential impact
on e-government. Being still ongoing work, the paper sets a
starting point to unfold a rich field of future research work. One
subject of further research is to assess the actual impact,
regardless of available resources or position in hierarchy, as
personal attributes may outweigh shortcomings, such as the lack
of a dedicated administrative body. Describing requirements for a
full-spectrum CIO position [1] is stressing especially leadership
competencies, networking abilities as well as being an innovator.
Another desideratum of research is the assumption that
establishing a merely Decorative CIO refers to differing
estimations of a CIO’s impact on organizational goals and
performance. Moreover the assumed link between the statewide
policy of the Chief Information Officer and the determining basic
priorities of the ministry he is assigned to is posing another
interesting research question, in order to assess the impact of a
CIO in the public sector.
7. REFERENCES
[1] Krcmar, H.: Informationsmanagement, Springer, Berlin,
Heidelberg, New York, 2005.
[2] Heine, M.: Transfer von E-Government-Lösungen, Gito,
Berlin, 2010.
[3] OECD: OECD E-Government Studies. e-Government for
better Government. OECD Publishing, 2005.
[4] Mehlich, H.: Electronic Government. Die elektronische
Verwaltungsreform, Gabler, Wiesbaden, 2002.
349
[5] Eynon, R. and Margetts, H.: Organisational Solutions for
Overcoming Barriers to eGovernment. European Journal of
ePractice 1 (November 2007), 73-85.
[6] OECD: Bessere Rechtsetzung in Europa. Deutschland.
OECD Publishing, 2010.
[7] Jupp, V.: Realizing the Vision of eGovernment, Journal of
Political Marketing, 2:3-4, 128-145, 2003.
[8] Borins, S.: A Holistic View of Public Sector Information
Technology, Journal of E-Government, 1:2, 3-29, 2005.
[9] Synnot, W.R.: The Information Weapon: Winning Customers
and Markets with Technology. John Wiley & Sons, 1987.
[10] Abele, J.: Methoden für Strategie und Organisation. In:
Zechner, A. (ed.): Handbuch E-Government, Deutschland
Online and Fraunhofer eGovernment Zentrum, 197-211,
2007.
[11] Declan O'Riordan, P.: The CIO: MIS Makes Its Move into the
Executive Suite, Journal of Information Systems
Management, 4:3, 54-56, 1987.
[12] Buhl, H.U.; Kreyer, N. and Wolfersberger, P.: Die Rolle des
Chief Information Officer (CIO) im Management.
Wirtschaftsinformatik, 43(4), 408, 2001.
[13] Boyle, R.D. and Burbridge, J.J.: Who needs a CIO?
Information Strategy. The Executive's Journal, 7:12-18,
1991.
[14] McClure, C.R. and Bertot, J.C.: The chief information officer
(CIO): assessing its impact, Government Information
Quartely, 17:1, 7-12, 2000.
[15] Reichard, C.: Zur Naivität aktueller Konzepttransfers im
deutschen Public Management, in: Edeling, T., Jann, W. and
Wagner, D. (eds.): Öffentliches und privates Management.
Fundamentally Alike in All Unimportant Respects?, Leske +
Budrich, Opladen, 53–70, 1998.
[16] DiMaggio, P.J. and Powell, W.W.: The iron Cage Revisited.
Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in
Organizational Field, in: Powell, W.W. and DiMaggio, P.J.,
(eds.): The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London, 1991.
[17] Meyer, J.W. and Rowan, B.: Instituationalized
Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. In:
American Journal for Sociology 83, 1977.
[18] Killian, W. and Wind, M.: Verwaltung und Vernetzung.
Technische Integration bei organisatorischer Vielfalt am
Beispiel von Agrar- und Umweltverwaltungen, Opladen,
Leske + Budrich, 1997.
[19] Pollitt, C.: Technological Change: A Central yet Neglected
Feature of Public Administration. The NISPAcee Journal of
Public Administration and Policy, III (2), 31-53, 2010

Session 12
Implementation & Impact

Design and Implementation of a Public School
Government-to-Employee System
Carl Strang a
a Capital Region BOCES
900 Watervliet Shaker Road
Albany, NY 12205
+1 518 862 5300
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we describe NERIC Connect, a Government-to-
Employee (G2E) system for public schools, which is a work in
progress. NERIC Connect provides teachers and administrators
with timely, contextually meaningful information and automated
alerts, which can be used to catch students before they fall through
institutional cracks. The system addresses the missed benefit
resulting from islands of data contained in disparate, independent
computer systems. Relying on any single view of the data is not
sufficient for effective data-driven decision making. NERIC
Connect provides a unified view that results in school district
employees having actionable information that can be used to
improve instruction.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J.1 [Administrative Data Processing]: Administrative Data
Processing – Government, Education; K.6.1 [Management of
Computing and Information Systems]: Project and People
Management – Strategic Information Systems Planning
General Terms
Management, Measurement, Performance, Human Factors
Keywords
E-government, Education, Government-to-Employee, Data-
Driven Decision Making, Portal
1. INTRODUCTION
If children are our future, then ensuring that they receive a proper
education is of critical concern to everyone. In the United States,
the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) [1] attempts to do
just that by making states and local school districts accountable
for student outcomes via standardized assessments that are aligned
with state and federal academic standards. Under NCLB, teachers
are encouraged to provide instruction to ensure that each student
meets or exceeds the assessed standards, and administrators are
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
{carl.strang, ira.goldstein}@neric.org
350
Ira Goldstein ab
b University at Albany: SUNY
1400 Washington Avenue
Albany, NY 12222
+1 518 442 4687
provided with data to monitor student progress and to make datadriven
decisions. This paper addresses one approach to the open
question of how best to provide teachers and administrators with
meaningful access to disparate student data in order to make
informed data-driven instructional decisions.
Relying solely upon standardized assessments is not sufficient for
effective data-driven decision making. In addition to standardized
assessment results, various types of data, such as attendance, final
examination results, and data acquired on intake can collectively
form a comprehensive view that may be used to help improve
education. The data can be used for curricula implementation,
development of differentiated instruction, encouraging selfdirected
learning, and professional development. Using
educational theory as our lens, we find that teachers and
administrators should base their decisions on the evidence
provided by multiple data sources [2, 3]. For example, while
standardized assessments can be used to inform a teacher about a
given student’s level of mastery of a topic, this information needs
to be put into context based upon the student’s attendance and
performance in other classes, as well as the performance of other
students working on the same topic [4]. Even though schools
collect a large amount of data [5], simply collecting data is not
enough to lead to instructional improvement or to effectively
monitor key indicators of student success. Schools need systems
that present data to teachers and administrators in the context of
actionable information, but often do not have the means to
implement complex data mining tools.
According to Ackoff [6], data can be considered collections of
raw facts or symbols. Information is data that has been processed
to help answer “who,” “what,” “when,” and “where” questions.
Knowledge is a collection of information that can answer “how”
questions. Wisdom requires judgment and enables looking at what
could be. Ideally, a G2E system should help teachers and
administrators move from collecting data to acquiring wisdom.
The New York State Education Department (NYSED) may not
mandate any particular management software for functions such
as payroll, accounting, or student information. It is the
responsibility of each local school district to select the individual
systems that best meet their needs. In the absence of mandated
systems, islands of information often form within a given school
district. It is not unusual to find that student information is stored
redundantly in a school district’s student information, library,
transportation, cafeteria management, and special education
systems. Compounding the problem, neighboring school districts
often adopt disparate systems, impeding the sharing of
information and region wide data analysis.

NYSED is responsible for collecting, processing, and reporting
the data needed to meet state and federal accountability
requirements. As a result of NCLB, NYSED has mandated the
electronic transmission of data for accountability reporting
through a statewide network of reporting centers. This collection
of data provides, in part, an opportunity for the standardization of
data for purposes other than accountability reporting.
The New York State Legislature created Boards of Cooperative
Educational Services (BOCES), consortia referred to as
intermediate service units, “for the purpose of carrying out a
program of shared educational services” [7] to school districts
within the state. School districts within New York State are able
to acquire services from BOCES that a given district may be not
be able to afford on their own. As of 2012, there were 37 BOCES
that provided shared services to 688 school districts [8]. While a
BOCES can offer services, it may not mandate adoption by the
school districts in their catchment area.
The BOCES’ have established 13 Regional Information Centers
(RICs) to provide computing and networking services. One of
these is the Northeastern Regional Information Center (NERIC),
which has provided a variety of computer services to school
districts for over 40 years. These services include payroll,
accounting, student information, school lunch, and special
education systems. NERIC serves 136 school districts and 7
BOCES in a 17 county area in the northeastern corner of New
York. This service area is home to districts located both in the
northern part of the Appalachians and most of New York’s
Adirondack State Park, two of the least populated areas of the
state, as well as in small cities such as Schenectady and Albany.
We describe one approach to address the missed benefits caused
by of islands of data contained in disparate, independent computer
systems. We begin with the premise that relying on any single
view of the data is not sufficient for effective data-driven decision
making. We create an extensible Operational Data Store (ODS)
which draws the disparate data together. We provide a user
friendly data dashboard that contextualizes the data and creates
actionable information.
2. GOVERNMENT TO EMPLOYEE
SYSTEMS
There are four main areas of e-government, government-tocustomer
(G2C), government-to-business (G2B), government-togovernment
(G2G), and government-to-employee (G2E) [9]. The
objective of G2E is to improve internal efficiencies and
effectiveness needed by government employees. Typical G2E
services include payroll, benefits, travel, and training [9, 10].
G2E systems should act as a foundation for the user experience,
offer flexibility to users while adhering to governance tenets,
include person-centric (e.g., social networking) components, and
be based on an architecture which allows for a rapid response to
changes in demand [11]. Given that the desired data is often
stored in many different locations, a robust G2E system must have
the ability to "mash-up" data from various sources [12]. Mash-ups
take data from multiple sources and create a new service with a
new purpose [13]. To assist in their adoption, G2E systems should
meet the specific needs of employees [14].
351
3. NERIC CONNECT
Relying exclusively on the results from standardized assessments
is not sufficient for effective data-driven decision making. NERIC
determined that teachers and administrators needed a way to bring
together their disparate data in order to process, analyze and apply
the data to the mission of educating students. Since 2006 NERIC
has been working with the emerging technologies of data mining
in order to develop a means for teachers and administrators to
actively investigate the relationship between various data
elements and student achievement scores on state exams. The first
set of technologies NERIC published, referred to as NERIC IQ,
provided an interactive interface that allowed the teachers and
administrators to pivot on a variety of data elements as they
related to one another. While a handful of districts adopted this
system, the technologies never reached the hoped for level of
utilization.
Current research indicates that schools are challenged with finding
the resources required to provide data analysts and data coaches
who can help teachers learn to use the tools to mine data and to
analyze the data once it has been mined [15, 16]. Specific
recommendations include the development of user friendly data
dashboards to help teachers contextualize data. In addition, it was
recommended that this data be refreshed in a manner to provide
timely and meaningful access [15].
Districts do not make use of all their collected data [16]. Merely
collecting the data necessary to create actionable information is
insufficient. However, most school districts have no systems in
place that present data in the context of actionable information.
Furthermore, the development of systems that present actionable
information takes time, money, and knowledge.
Due to its role as a provider of integrated information technology
related services to school districts, and having custody of the
districts’ authoritative data, NERIC is uniquely positioned to
address this void. NERIC Connect is envisioned as a G2E system
that meets the goal of providing a single point of access for
actionable information. This actionable information can be used to
monitor student progress, helping to ensure that student
intervention and new curricula better coincide with the needs of
each student. Such a system will not, and can not, replace the
teachers’ and administrators’ relationships with students. The
intent is to help ensure that no student falls between the cracks by
tracking and reporting key indicators of student success.
3.1 Challenges
School districts often implement separate computer systems for
managing different aspects of student information. This results in
information stored independently, and redundantly, in a school
district’s various data systems. In addition, school districts in the
same region often adopt disparate systems. Given a high rate of
student transiency, the use of these disparate systems makes it
difficult to transfer information when students move from district
to district. Even when two districts adopt the same software,
creative usage of the system can impede the sharing of
information. For example, the authors are aware of one district
that uses an asterisk in the “Tuition” field in order to indicate that
the student completed their foreign language requirement.
Teachers and administrators need to make informed, data-driven,
instructional decision. Storing data in disparate systems can be
considered the primary inhibitor to providing such access.

The United States Department of Education [17] found that only
25% of all teachers reported having access to the prior year’s
assessments for their current students and fewer than 11%
reported having access to multiyear assessments. Teachers are
increasingly using computer systems to input attendance, course
scores, and interim assessment information. However, it may well
be that teachers are accessing the system only for reporting
purposes [15] and not for actionable information. This is not to
say that the individual existing systems cannot produce reports.
The mature and well-understood reports available from existing
systems were developed for purposes other than programmatic
and instructional interventions, and only include data from their
one source. While these systems may excel at managing the data
for a given function, they were not developed for the purpose of
providing actionable information to teachers and administrators.
At issue is the need to provide contextually meaningful reports
which can be used to improve instruction. If existing systems
cannot combine data from multiple systems, then alternatives
must be considered. However, individual schools often do not
have the development resources needed to implement solutions,
even when the tools are available.
The frequency with which data are refreshed is important in any
decision making environment. The data refresh rate needs to
reflect the speed or frequency of change. Data that are refreshed
on a timely basis, and include school process related information,
are exceptionally helpful. The process of refreshing data presented
to teachers and administrators cannot be delayed in order to
accommodate existing information processing cycles. Some data
types, such as period-by-period student attendance, may need to
be updated several times a day. It has been shown that refreshing
data on a cycle greater than two weeks may be too long a period
to effect meaningful interventions [18].
3.2 Design
NERIC Connect is built on Microsoft’s SharePoint environment.
The SharePoint platform provides a secure environment to
leverage Microsoft’s SQL (MSSQL) server technologies. MSSQL
technologies are used extensively to provide role based, user
specific contextualized and interactive data displays. SharePoint
provides a simple, uncluttered, consistent user experience. NERIC
Connect can run on any Web-enabled computer, offers automated
workflow processes, integrates Microsoft Office products, and
provides a centralized location for documents and collaboration.
Built-in functionality allows for easy access to surveys, document
management, and virtual meeting workspaces. NERIC Connect
enables teachers and administrators to make better informed
decisions by securely presenting critical information about their
students from one central location, at anytime, from anywhere.
NERIC Connect creates a mash-up of the data from multiple
sources. It presents a customized user friendly data dashboard to
help teachers and administrators contextualize their data. Each
dashboard is generated in real-time, is specific to the user, and
limits the data presented based on their role and responsibility. In
other words, each user views their own customized dashboard that
contains up to date information, that is specific to their needs, and
that merges redundant data into a consistent presentation. The
dashboard takes disparate data and provides actionable
information that can be used to alert teachers to situations that
may need their attention. For example, if a student skips their
352
math class, all of their teachers, not just the math teacher, become
immediately aware of this change in behavior.
In order to aid adoption, NERIC Connect offers several features
which meet the needs of teachers and administrators. In addition
to a contextually relevant dashboard, the system provides a
dynamic collection of frequently used tools and documents. It also
will provide a virtual classroom for safe, controlled collaboration
between and among teachers and students.
An extensive and extensible ODS (see Figure 1) was developed to
provide a canonical model for data elements required for
reporting. NYSED maintains a data warehouse, which is driven
by NCLB and is primarily used for storing data for enrollment and
assessment reporting purposes. However, the underlying data
model is insufficient to provide the data required for producing
actionable information to assist teachers and administrators in
improving student performance. The ODS draws not only from
the NYSED data warehouse; it also draws from student
information, employee payroll, special education systems, as well
as any district based data that contain key indicators of when a
student may need intervention.
Operational
Data Store
Employee
Data
Enrollment &
Assessment
Query
Reply
Application
Server
Extract
Transformatio
n Load
Student
Information
Systems
Figure 1- Logical Data Flow
Web Front
End
District
District
Based
Based Data
Data
Special
Education
The NERIC Connect system has a governance group and a
development advisory committee comprised of chief school
officers and other district administrators, as well as NERIC
administrators and staff. Their purpose is to identify desired
modification to the existing system and to plan for major updates
and rewrites of the system that can lead to improving student
achievement. These groups have already focused on the
development of key indicators of student success.
While performing data analysis of standardized assessments can
reveal specific instructional gaps and provide accountability
information, such analysis takes time to produce. In order to
empower teachers so that they can provide timely interventions,
school districts need to rely on more than just assessments. The
governance group helps to develop, and to fine tune, the key
indicators of student success, such as attendance information or
even if the student has overdue library books. Key indicators do
not need to imply causation; it is up to teachers and administrators
to look at root causes. Key indicators of student success can be

considered markers that are able to draw attention to a potential
problem and provide actionable information. Once the key
indicators of success have been agreed to, “at risk” algorithms can
be developed. If a student exceeds a predetermined threshold, then
automated alerts are initiated. Multiple thresholds, or pools of
thresholds, can be developed so that combinations of key
indicators can be used to ensure that no student falls through the
cracks. Specific “at risk” algorithms can be localized for a given
district. One of the open tasks in this in-progress work is to
determine if there are any best practices that can be used as the
initial threshold(s).
Unique to the BOCES/RIC model is the capability to provide
application developers who work under the supervision of
education administrators to evolve applications of information
technology that meet more than just the needs of public education.
They can evolve them to assist teachers and administrators in
doing the work they are inspired to do.
Representatives from the subscribing school districts and NERIC
leadership and developers meet monthly to identify enhancements
and modifications that integrate NERIC Connect technologies into
the daily process of progress review and planning. These
enhancements will help teachers make the best use of their time
by providing a digital snapshot of student progress in their class,
as well as throughout the school.
4. CONCLUSIONS AND NEXT STEPS
School districts maintain independent systems that accumulate
data for a specific function (e.g., bus routing or grade reporting).
Each of these systems provides only a partial view of the available
data, and does not enable data-driven decision making. Driven by
the educational theory that instructional decisions should be based
on the evidence provided by multiple data sources, NERIC
Connect addresses the open question of how best to provide
meaningful access to disparate student data in order to make
informed data-driven instructional decisions. NERIC Connect is a
G2E system that mashes-up data from multiple sources and
creates a new service with a new purpose. It helps teachers and
administrators move from merely collecting data to having access
to actionable information.
NERIC Connect use is growing and evolving, and will be rolled
out to additional school districts. Once these additional school
districts are on board, the system will then begin to provide crossdistrict
and region wide access to the data. Other plans include
providing virtual classrooms to offer state of the art technologies
to support constructivist learning pedagogy and collaboration
capabilities from a myriad of internet enabled devices.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors wish to thank the NERIC Regional Advisory
Committee for their support of NERIC Connect.
6. REFERENCES
[1] An act to close the achievement gap with accountability,
flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind. Pub L
107-110, 115 Stat 1425. United States 2001.
[2] Bernhardt V. L. Data tools for school improvement.
Educational Leadership. 62,5 (2005), 66-9.
353
[3] Schildkamp K. and Kuiper, W. Data-informed curriculum
reform: Which data, what purposes, and promoting and
hindering factors. Teaching & Teacher Education. 26,3
(2010), 482-96.
[4] Black P. and Wiliam, D. Assessment and classroom learning.
Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice. 5,1
(1998), 7.
[5] Stecker P. M., Fuchs, L. S., Fuchs, D. Using curriculumbased
measurement to improve student achievement.
Psychology in the Schools. 42,8 (2005), 795-819.
[6] Ackoff R. L. From data to wisdom. Journal of Applied
Systems Analysis. 16, (1989), 3-9.
[7] Establishment of boards of cooperative educational services.
NYS Ed Law §1950 1948.
[8] New York State Education Department. Boards of
Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES). 2011 [cited 9
March 2012]; Available from:
http://www.p12/nysed.gov/mgtserv/boces/
[9] Siau K. and Long, Y. Synthesizing e-government stage
models - a meta-synthesis based on meta-ethnography
approach. Industrial Management & Data Systems. 105,4
(2005), 443-58.
[10] Evans D. and Yen, D. C. E-government: Evolving
relationship of citizens and government, domestic, and
international development. Government Information
Quarterly. 23,2 (2006), 207-35.
[11] Murphy J. Build an enduring portal strategy for a wave of
change on the web.: Gartner; 2011. No.: G00213225.
[12] Meng J. and Chen, J. A mashup model for distributed data
integration. In Proceedings of International Conference on
Management of e-Commerce and e-Government (ICMECG),
Nanchang, China, 2009.
[13] Di Lorenzo G., Hacid, H., Paik, H.-Y., Benatallah, B. Data
integration in mashups. SIGMOD. 38,1 (2009), 59-66.
[14] Ebrahim Z. and Irani, Z. E-government adoption:
Architecture and barriers. Business Process Management
Journal. 11,5 (2005), 589-611.
[15] Means B., Padilla, C., DeBarger, A., Bakia, M., Department
of Education Office of Planning Evaluation & Policy
Development. Implementing data-informed decision making
in schools: Teacher access, supports and use: US Department
of Education; 2009.
[16] Strang C. F. The systemic use of data to inform improvement
in student achievement: A qualitative study of six school
districts [Doctoral dissertation]. Albany, NY: The Sage
Colleges; 2011.
[17] Bakia M., Yang, E., Mitchell, K., Office of Planning
Evaluation and Policy Development Policy and Program
Studies Service. National educational technology trends
study: Local-level data summary: US Department of
Education; 2008.
[18] Deno S. L., Reschly, A. L., Lembke, E. S., Magnusson, D.,
Callender, S. A., Windram, H., et al. Developing a schoolwide
progress-monitoring system. Psychology in the
Schools. 46,1 (2009), 44-55.

E-Governance and Millennium Development Goals:
Sustainable Development Perspective in Rural India
ABSTRACT
The year 2015 is fast approaching for the countries and the United
Nations pursuing Millennium Development Goals (MDG). In the
United Nation (UN) Millennium Summit 2000, 191 countries
adopted the Millennium declaration. Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) supported E-Governance is a
critical element in achieving MDGs. National E-Governance
strategies have hastened ICT interventions. Recent global
assessments on MDGs suggest that though many countries have
shown noticeable results in meeting MDGs with scope for
supporting sustainable development strategies. In this paper, it is
posited that efforts to meet MDGs in India need to have
converged efforts at the village levels. This is desired because
local development processes are likely to influence the national
agenda. Village households being units of development processes
need to understand the contours of MDGs and its effects in lives
of the household. Use of E-governance supported services by
these units for meeting MDGs has influences to meet sustainable
development of the households. This paper includes studies in
some sample villages in the state of Gujarat to examine the effects
of E-Governance in meeting MDGs and sustainable development.
It discusses the process of convergence and contributions of E-
Governance services to meet MDG agenda and overall sustainable
development.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H5.2. [Information Systems]: Information Interfaces and
Presentation- User Interfaces Evaluation/Methodology, Theory
and Methods.D4.8. [Software Engineering Performance]:
Measurement, Modeling and Prediction.
General Terms
Management, Measurement, Documentation, Performance,
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors, Theory, Verification.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Harekrishna Misra
Institute of Rural Management Anand
Anand, Gujarat, India
91-2692-221612
hkmishra@irma.ac.in
354
Keywords
ICT for Development, E-Governance, Millennium Development
Goals, Modeling Convergence, Sustainable Development, Citizen
Centered Services
1. INTRODUCTION
MDG is considered as an important agenda for the United Nations
(UN) with the aim to address poverty reduction globally. UN, in
its Millennium Summit in the year 2000, resolved to acknowledge
poverty as a global phenomenon. MDG having a set of eight goals
aims to achieve targeted objectives by the year 2015 and
recognizes inter-twined relationships among all these goals in
order to foster sustainable development. UN, in its declaration,
aims to address two major dimensions. One of the dimensions is
to have commitment of developed nations to extend increased
Official Development Assistance (ODA) with better export
market for developing nations. The second dimension is to ensure
that each developing nation has its own national policy with the
objective to reduce the gap between goals and achievements
[41],[42],[43],[33]. While the deadline for achieving MDG is fast
approaching, the results of the planned activities under UN’s
mandate are found to be discouraging and all the member
countries are showing mixed results across all the eight goals.
ODA has reduced over the years and the assistance has so far been
0.31 percent of the Gross National Income against the UN’s target
of 0.7 percent [44],[40],[39]. As regards role of E-Governance for
development with specific reference to MDG, goal 8F suggests
effective inclusion of ICT as component for the development
process. While recognizing the progress in embracing E-
Governance among all participating nations, UN acknowledges
the persistence of digital divides in the form of affordability,
access to technology, usage and usability of the services rendered.
However, most of the countries have shown considerable progress
in establishing ICT infrastructure and services to implement E-
Governance strategies. World Summit on the Information Society
(WSIS) have acknowledged the impact of E-Governance on the
development and suggested a ten-point agenda for ICT related
interventions for supporting sustainable development and achieve
committed targets by the year 2015 [14],[15],[37],[38],[36]. In
real terms MDG has not been able to focus on the role of ICT to
ensure that all the goals are inter-twined for a converged effect on
sustainable development.
ICT for development globally has shown mixed results despite
wider deployment and acceptance of E-Governance services[4].
The core area of successful ICT enabled development processes
has been limited to E-Governance efforts with direct support to

many of the MDGs. The direct impact has been in the form of
establishing ICT infrastructure, networks among governments and
access to telephony, television and other modes of
communication. Despite mixed results, most of the countries have
incubated E-Governance projects with the active participation of
entrepreneurs from public, private and civil society organizations
[3],[28],[14]. E-Governance projects are quite complex in nature
due to the inherent characteristics of the development process
involving government, society, citizen, market and business
issues. Thus there is a need for understanding this complex
phenomenon of convergence among various stakeholders
involved in the development process so that citizens accept this
new environment for fostering the development of their own life
and the society as envisaged in MDGs and meeting sustainable
development challenges.
The paper is organized with the objectives of understanding the
reasons for having mixed results despite clearly defined MDGs,
and growth in E-Governance services. It also explores the effects
of e-readiness for each of the MDGs based on primary surveys,
their influences on overall sustainable development indicators.
Organization of the paper is as follows. In section two, MDGs and
E-Governance are discussed in order to establish proposed
causality in achieving MDGs with support of E-Governance. In
this section global perspectives are presented with specific
references to Indian scenarios. This section includes discussions
on sustainable development and possible roles of E-Governance
and MDGs. In section three, research motivations are discussed to
present the contributions of E-Governance services to achieve
MDGs and overall sustainable development in local context. In
section four, research methods are discussed to establish the
proposed causality among various contributors to the overall
success of MDGs. A research model is also developed to assess
the contributing factors of E-Governance to achieve MDGs and
overall sustainable development. Hypotheses are developed in this
section to present various dimensions of the causality including
the approach for their validations. In section five, data collection
processes are discussed and analyses are presented. In section six,
conclusions are discussed. In section seven limitations of the work
and scope for further studies in this area are discussed.
2. RESEARCH MOTIVATION
As discussed in the introduction section, MDGs are now
embedded in the policies of the member countries. Goal 8F of
MDG recognizes the importance of E-Governance in meeting
various objectives set in the MDG. In order to bring in more
clarity in adopting E-Governance strategies for development
WSIS has provided ten goals for the member countries
[33],[10],[15]. In this section a link between MDG and E-
Governance with WSIS agenda in the backdrop is discussed. In
table 1 below agenda of WSIS and MDG goals with E-
Governance focus are presented.
Table 1. MDG and E-Governance Deliveries [15],[19],[26]
MDG Goals Expected E-Governance Interventions
1.Eradicate
extreme
poverty and
hunger
2.Achieve
universal
WSIS MDGs
Connect Villages with
e-services and establish
access points
Connect Universities,
Colleges, Secondary
Rise in individual
income with eservices
Increase supply of
e-services of
355
MDG Goals Expected E-Governance Interventions
primary
education
3.Promote
gender
equality and
empower
women
4.Reduce
child
mortality
5.Improve
maternal
health
6.Combat
HIV/AIDS,
malaria, and
other diseases
7.Ensure
environmental
sustainability
8.Develop a
global
partnership
for
development
WSIS MDGs
and Primary Schools,
Public Libraries,
Scientific and Research
Centres
World’s population
should have access to
Television and Radio,
facilitate use of eservices
to have
information on internet
in local languages
trained teachers,
establish networks
among teachers,
internet
connectivity in
schools, improved
student/computer
ratio; distance
learning
Focus on e-literacy
among girls, adopt
e-communication
to encourage
women to
contribute to the
society
Increase in use of e-services by Health
Workers, increase in awareness
Enhance accessibility to specialists by village
health workers through remote access, training
through e-services
Increase in use of e-services by Health
Workers, increase in awareness
Use of GIS and Remote Sensing Technologies
enabled e-services, maintain transparency
Ensure that World’s
population have
access to ICT
Currency in
databases, networks
WSIS though has not been specific in setting the agenda for ICT
interventions for implementing the MDGs (Goals 4,5,6,7), there
are continued efforts in these areas. As per the predictions of
WSIS, ICT interventions would be quite significant in the areas of
mobile communications, basic radio and television services by the
year 2015. Progress in the areas related to e-governments has also
been quite reasonable as per WSIS study. But as per WSIS, the
barriers for larger use ICT would be in the form of availability of
electricity and internet. UN’s MDG report for the year 2010
indicates that due to targeted interventions with sustained effort
through political and administrative (including funding) support,
there are significant progresses in achieving MDGs. However,
many important goals are still unmet for the poor, living in remote
areas, and the progress has been uneven. More importantly the
report recognizes that gender inequality and women
empowerment concerns are not adequately addressed which are
preconditions for overcoming poverty, hunger and disease
[1],[31],[30],[29].
Linking E-Governance services to achieve MDGs is not a new
approach [1],[29],[11]. While addressing the challenges for
linking E-Governance with MDGs, UN has accepted various
dimensions related to measurements including impact, policy
development, resource mobilization, global alliance and initiatives

[43],[44]. E-governance at the national level has now progressed
for supporting MDGs either directly or indirectly. Every nation
now has adequate plans to display its e-readiness and has
strategies to support the MDGs effectively [32]. It is thus
imperative that each MDG needs to be assessed in terms of the
contributions of E-Governance in meeting the agenda across all
the levels of governance with adequate focus at the local level. In
Indian context, this is more relevant as part of the development
process because of the fact that local development has larger
ramifications in meeting the national goals [29].
Sustainable development strategies are constantly focusing on
MDGs [12],[10]. E-Governance strategies are also being termed
as effective contributors to sustainable development.
Measurements of sustainable development and assessment of
critical success factors of MDGs provide common base for
understanding readiness of a nation to address sustainable
development with social, economic and ecological dimensions. In
this paper assessment of causality for achieving successful MDGs
through E-Governance is explored. It considers dimensions
related to sustainable development as important contributors. In
Table 2 below the stated dimensions are related to the E-
Governance readiness indicators with specific relationships with
MDGs[19].
Table 2. MDG and E-Governance Readiness
MDG Goals E-Governance Readiness
Indicators
1.Eradicate
extreme
poverty and
hunger
2.Achieve
universal
primary
education
3.Promote
gender
equality and
empower
women
4.Reduce
child
mortality
5.Improve
maternal
health
6.Combat
HIV/AIDS,
malaria, and
other diseases
7.Ensure
environmental
sustainability
8.Develop a
global
partnership
for
development
Government E-Readiness to
provide support for
economic issues at the local
level. This readiness
indicates citizens’ readiness
to achieve higher income
through better education,
skills, reduction in
information asymmetry,
information on market
Government E-Readiness to
socially network the
community, enhance
awareness among women
with multi-media services
Government E-Readiness to
network the community,
enhance awareness and
provide inputs to the citizens
to use natural resources
effectively with holistic
environmental considerations
Sustainable
Development
Dimensions
Economic
Social
Environmental
356
Global readiness reports on E-Governance have maintained that
national E-Governance efforts are likely to bring in the desired
effects in achieving sustainable development indicators [25],[23].
2.1 Research Model and Hypotheses
Sustainable development is a complex and multifaceted issue that
has been challenging each and every nation [12]. Various attempts
are made to attain this through MDGs and there are various
instruments used to assess the level of attainment of these goals.
National E-Governance readiness for each nation has been a
routine phenomenon that showcases readiness of each nation with
benchmarking to provide insights to the efforts being made for
attaining sustainable development goals though ICT interventions
[14],[15]. These efforts, especially in the context of India, need to
examine the causal relations among E-Governance readiness and
sustainable development.
This research includes assessment of following relationships:
1. Contributions of E-Governance services in the village can be
used for assessment of e-readiness to meet the MDGs.
It is argued that e-readiness (excluding ICT infrastructure
readiness which is a subset of overall e-readiness) is made
available through E-Governance services. Such services need to
be designed with active collaborations of citizens.
2. E-readiness to support MDGs is likely to contribute to the
empowerment of the village households for meeting sustainable
development indicators in the village.
It is argued that MDGs need to direct E-Governance services at all
levels of the nation. This would facilitate creation of success
factors for the E-Governance services provided. In absence of
such directed efforts e-readiness may get limited to establishment
of IT infrastructures.
In order to answer the research questions some research
hypotheses are proposed as discussed below. These hypotheses
are leveled in three tiers.
Tier-I Hypothesis: In Figure 1 the first hypothesis is presented. It
posits that every goal under MDG at the local level is influenced
collectively by the citizens, community groups and government
agencies.
H1
Household
Affinity
Community
Affinity
Government
Support
MDG #
Figure 1. MDG and Stakeholders
Tier-I includes collective contributions from the local level
citizens, community groups to successfully meet the MDGs. It is

strongly believed that local governance has far reaching effects at
the national level in terms of sustainable development [21]. This
is quite significant because of the local self governance in India
has provided the rights to use and develop local resources for
development. Government agencies are responsible to these local
empowered agencies and extend support in terms of awareness,
expertise and finance development interventions. Collective effort
is therefore, essential to attain MDGs. It is because successful
development process needs collective efforts from the planners
and mediating agencies and the citizens [20],[42]. In such
scenarios, the contributions are multilevel oriented and therefore,
predictability of their contributions will be influenced by
collective participation [20],[1].
Hypothesis H1. Citizens, Community Groups, Government
Agencies contribute collectively to the success of MDGs
Tier-II Hypotheses: E-governance readiness is a major contributor
to each and every MDG due to the enormous benefits of ICT
envisaged in the MDG agenda. E-Governance aims to bring
appropriate services closer to the citizens with optimized cost,
time and relevance [1], [19], [3]. Thus it is important to find the
causal effects of E-Governance efforts and their contributions to
the MDGs. In order to measure this effect, it is posited that E-
Governance supported efforts for MDGs are reflected through
display of readiness across all the dimensions of sustainable
development. It is also considered important that group of MDGs
are likely to support a particular dimension of readiness for
sustainable development. There is a continuous process adopted
by World Bank, World Economic Forum through INSEAD and
ITU etc. to look at the progress done in the areas of e-readiness. In
Figure 2 below India’s position on e-readiness (reports of
INSEAD are used here) is presented [2],[35]. This e-readiness
exercise provides comprehensive analyses on various metrics
driven performance assessment (termed as indices) of various
countries participating in the process. Major indices which are
presented in Figure 2 reflect the ICT adoption behaviour in India
vis-à-vis global scenarios [6],[7],[8],[9]. Indices used in this
assessment provide a percentile score. A higher percentile
provides better status for the country. The percentiles are
presented longitudinally by using data of INSEAD since the year
2002. It may be noted that these e-readiness assessment
indicators are useful to evaluate the role of E-Governance in
meeting MDGs.
Figure 2. ICT Indices for India [2]
Eight MDGs envisaged for improving the quality of life of people
in member countries are grouped as presented in Figure 2 and in
the following manner. MDG#1 and MDG#2 are related to ereadiness
for rendering services related information, optimizing
cost and time of availing information on income generation
opportunities, enhancing skills through education, government’s
effort to use ICTs for providing networks among wage earners,
357
schemes for income opportunities and providing transparency in
such processes. In India there are many E-Governance initiates
aimed at all these defined areas of interventions including Unique
Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) [35]. MDGs# 3,4,5,6
relate to social issues which reflect in gender inequity, women
health, HIV etc. In India, this is quite challenging because of
various social, cultural and infrastructural issues [31]. It is noted
that despite improvements in health services including National
Aids Control Programme, National Rural Health Mission, rural
India in particular is not recording encouraging results as per
MDG reports [27],[29]. It is thus posited that social empowerment
can be measured through e-readiness to support MDG#3,4,5,6.
MDG
#8
MDG #7
MDG #6
MDG #5
MDG #4
MDG #3
MDG #2
MDG #1
Figure 3. MDG and E-Readiness
MDGs#7,8 encompass larger issues related to environment. In
India e-readiness to support this cause needs active interfaces with
networks, and awareness among the rural citizens. It is posited
that role of E-Governance in these areas is expected to enhance
the e-readiness in managing environment. In Table 3 various E-
Governance programs are planned to meet the MDG agenda.
Table 3: E-Governance Programmes in India [5],[6],[7]
MMP Level Description of the Service
Central Government Income Tax, Central Excise,
Passports/Visa & Immigration, MCA
21, National ID, Pensions, Banking,
Insurance
State Governments
H23
H22
H21
E-Readiness -
Environment
E-Readiness -
Social
Empowerment
E-Readiness -
Economic
Empowerment
H3
Sustainable
Developmen
t
Agriculture, Land Records, Transport,
Treasuries, Commercial Taxes, Gram
Panchayats, e-Health, Registration,
Police, Employment Exchange, e-
Districts (State can add 5 MMPs as

MMP Level Description of the Service
Integrated
per their choice)
e-Business, Electronic Data
Interchange, India Portal, Electronic
Government Gateway, E-Courts, E-
Office, E Procurement
Hypotheses H2 in Tier-II includes e-readiness assessment of three
dimensions of sustainable development with the considerations
that MDGs need to harness the goals with active support of ICTs
and E-Governance services in order to attain the objectives of
sustainable development [6],[7],[8],[13]. Sustainable development
requires holistic approach and thus there is a need to assess the
strengths of E-Governance in meeting social, economic and
environmental needs [19]. In the process, H2 posits three subhypotheses
as follows:
Hypothesis H21: E-Governance services available for MDG#1
and MDG#2 collectively contribute to E-Readiness for Economic
Empowerment
Hypothesis H22: E-Governance services available for MDG#3,
MDG#4, MDG#5, MDG#6 collectively contribute to E-Readiness
for Social Empowerment
Hypothesis H23: E-Governance services available for MDG#7,
MDG#8 collectively contribute to E-Readiness for Environment
In these hypotheses E-Readiness for Economic Empowerment,
Social Empowerment and Environment are the latent variables
which are measured through the contributions of the ICT enabled
services for MDGs.
Lastly in these Tier II hypotheses, it is posited that MDGs need to
contribute to the overall sustainable goals in India and this is
possible because of the sustainable development at the local levels
[11],[12].
Hypothesis H3: E-Readiness for Economic Empowerment,
Social Empowerment and Environment collectively contribute to
Sustainable Development.
3. EMPIRICAL VALIDATION OF THE
MODELLING
This study involved primary survey among rural citizens, rural
communities and government agencies who are major
stakeholders in supporting MDGs. For the purpose some villages
in the state of Gujarat were considered for pilot studies. The
sample size was 194. This includes 24 government
representatives, 52 village community members and 118 village
citizens in eight sample villages in the district of Panchmahals in
the state of Gujarat. This number was arrived during visits to eight
villages where access could be possible due to the support from
government officials and intervening agencies. In Figure 4
sampling frame is presented.
358
Figure 4. Sampling Frame
3.1 Validation of Tier-I Hypothesis
The sampling indicates that samples are multi leveled and thus
their collective orientation in assessing MDGs would be
beneficial. In reality villagers, village community groups and
government representatives are not same in numbers and their
strength varies in the shape of a pyramid. Due to this structure of
population, stratified layering of the sample respondents and
divergence in their objectives in contributing to MDGs, dummy
coding principle was chosen to validate the collective
contributions [24]. In dummy coding one of the major
considerations is to identify the controlling variable in the
stratified layers. In this case, citizens are considered as the
controlling variables because their contributions are deterministic
for the success of MDGs. Communities and government
representatives are mostly characterized as service provisioning
and supporting agencies for overall progress of the citizens.
Besides, citizen empowerment is quite critical in managing
MDGs. Validations for H1 include dummy coding and ANOVA
to predict the overall contributions through Dunnet values which
is used for dummy coding [18]. For each MDG this validation
procedure is adopted and in Table 4, variables and related
measurement instruments are presented.
Table 4: Variable Descriptions, Measurement Instruments
Goal Variables Measurements
1
N=194
Community
Affinity
E-
Governance
Support
Household
Affinity
Community groups are using ICT to
share information on Income generation
Community groups are using ICT for
networks
Community groups have influence on
Individuals
Government representatives are using
ICT to share information on Income
generation
ICT has enhanced transparency in
getting wages
Internet is available in village
Information is useful
Information is available on Mobile
ICT has enhanced transparency in

Goal Variables Measurements
2
3
Community
Affinity
E-
Governance
Support
Household
Affinity
Community
Affinity
E-
Governance
Support
Household
Affinity
4 Community
Affinity
E-
Governance
Support
Household
Affinity
5 Community
Support
E-
Governance
Support
Household
Affinity
6 Community
Affinity
getting wages
Possibility has increased to enhance
skill through ICT
Parents are sending children to schools
Community groups are using ICT to
share information
Community groups influence child
education
Availability of computers in schools
Availability of internet in schools
Teachers get support from teachers
from other schools through computers
Teachers get support for using library
through internet
Students are using computers
Government representatives are using
ICT to share information
Availability of Teachers in the Schools
Teachers are trained to teach ICT
based courses
Households are interested in ICT based
education
Community groups are using ICT to
share information
Volunteers are using ICT to share
information
Computers have local language
interfaces
Government representatives/volunteers
are using ICT to share information
Girls are using computers
Broadcast media are used for
disseminating information
Community groups are using ICT to
share information
Health workers are using ICT to
network with doctors and other
agencies
Government representatives/volunteers
are using ICT to share information
Information on child care is available
Broadcast media are used for
disseminating information
Community groups are using ICT to
share information
Health workers are using ICT to
network with doctors and other
agencies
Government representatives/volunteers
are using ICT to share information
Information on maternal care is
available
Broadcast media are used for
disseminating information
Community groups are using ICT to
share information
359
Goal Variables Measurements
E-
Governance
Support
Household
Affinity
7 Community
Affinity
E-
Governance
Support
Household
Affinity
8 Community
Affinity
E-
Governance
Support
Household
Affinity
Health workers are using ICT to
network with doctors and other
agencies
Government representatives/volunteers
are using ICT to share information
Information on HIV/AIDS care is
available
Broadcast media are used for
disseminating information
Community groups are using ICT to
share information
Government Representatives/
volunteers are using ICT to share
information
Households are using ICT to remain
aware of environmental issues
Broadcast media are used for
disseminating information
ICT enabled Library and information
services are available in the village
Community groups are using ICT to
share information
Government representatives/volunteers
are using ICT to share information
Village has ICT enabled networks with
other villages
Broadcast media are used for
disseminating information
The measurement instruments are used with the help of Likert
Scales in a five point scale (1- strongly unsatisfactory…., 5strongly
satisfactory) [22]. In Table 5 below, a generic example of
dummy coding structure is presented as applicable to MDG#1.
Explanation of the Table is as follows. It is argued that households
(citizens) control the overall objectives of MDGs. MDG#1 as
explained in Table 5 below is the mean of the responses obtained
from the subjects through Likert scale. This summative nature of
Likert scale is used since all the independent items are proved to
be reliable and are not mostly non-dimensional (Nunnally,1978).
The purpose of dummy coding is to understand whether
collectively respondents across the three layers (strategic, tactical
and operational) do collectively display their holistic
understanding in projecting preparedness as hypothesized as
MDG#1. D1 and D2 are two dummy coded vectors associated
with each group. In this case there are three independent groups
for predicting validations of MDG#1 i.e. MDG#1Community Affinity,
MDG#1Governmnet Support and MDG#1Household Affinity. As per dummy
coding procedures, vectors are to be identified which is n-1 (i.e., if
number of groups are 3, number of vectors would be 2). In this
case number of groups are 3. Out of two vectors one vector in a
group is assigned “1” whereas other vector is assigned “0”. All the
vectors in one group are assigned with “0” which is termed as
control group. For example, MDG#1Household Affinity, (MDG# 1) has
three contributors i.e, Community Affinity (with 2 instruments (j))
and position in the dummy table is 1 (i). Thus MDG#1 is thus
∑MDG1ij /n where n=2 in this case. Likert values will have their
mean which is dependent on number of measurement instruments
used. MDG#1 will have sample response mean.

Stratified
Layers
Community
Affinity
E-Governance
Support
Household
Affinity
(Control)
Table 5: Dummy Table for MDG#1 (sample data)
Sample
Size*
(n)
MDG# 1
Objectives
52 (Mean
3.16, SD
0.81,
Cronbach
Alpha
0.719)
24 (Mean
3.14, SD
0.86,
Cronbach
Alpha
0.716)
118 (Mean
3.11, SD
0.76,
Cronbach
Alpha 0.65)
Dummy
Code
(D1)
Dummy
Code
(D2)
Remarks
1 0 MDG1 =
∑MDG1ij
/n; i=1, j=n
0 1 MDG1 =
∑MDG1ij
/n; i=1, j=n
0 0 MDG1 =
∑MDG1ij/n;
i=1, j=n
*N=194
In Table 6 below the F-Test and other relevant results for MDG#1 are
presented.
Table 6: F-Statistics for MDG#1 through Dummy Coding (ANOVA)
Sum of df Mean Square F- Sig.
Squares
Statistics
a
Regression 1.304 2 .652 3.194 .046
Residual 19.193 191 .204
Total 20.497 193
N=194
The major contributor for this regression is the F-Statistics which is
observed as 3.914 and is above the desired value of 2.3 [18]. Thus the
hypothesis H1 for MDG#1 is validated in favour of collectively predicting
contributions of E-Governance in achieving MDG#1. In Table 7 below
results for all the MDGs are presented.
Table 7: F-Statistics for al MDGS through Dummy Coding
MDG# F-Statistics
(Observed)
F-Statistics
(Expected)
1 3.194 2.3 .046
2 6.574 2.3 .002
3 25.925 2.3 .000
4 8.524 2.3 .000
5 10.694 2.3 .000
6 4.807 2.3 .010
7 18.516 2.3 .000
8 10.053 2.3 .002
N=194
Significance
(P-Value)
360
It may be noted here that results available through F-Statistics for all the
MDGs supported hypothesis H1. Barring MDG#1 and MDG#6 where pvalues
were statistically significant with more than 1 percent, all other
MDGs predicted affirmatively the collective contributions of E-
Governance services. It implies that households, community groups and
government representatives collectively contribute to meet the MDGs with
E-Governance support.
3.2 Validation of Tier-II Hypotheses
Hypotheses defined in Tier II i.e., H2 and H3; deal with latent
variables in order to validate contributions of MDGs for attaining
overall sustainable development. Dealing with latent variables to
predict complex phenomena requires careful theoretical modeling.
Theoretical models and their validations are restricted to depict
behavior of the constructs through approximations. Virtually in all
cases we do not expect to have a completely accurate description
of reality. If the model helps us to understand the relations
between variables matching (fitting) the data, we may judge it (the
model) as validated [16],[17]. It is known that model tries to
approximate the reality. During the validation process it is
essential to understand the relationship among the variables
governing the outcome of the proposed model. Adequacy of a
model is typically determined using conceptual definitions of the
unobserved (endogenous) variables, along with observed variables
(exogenous). Increasingly, model-to-data fit and parameter
estimates form measurement models that utilize structural
equation analysis are being pursued. Model-to-data fit and
parameter estimates are derived from the hypotheses and from
structural models utilizing structural equation analysis. For
theoretical model testing researchers tend to agree that specifying
and testing models using unobserved variables with multiple item
measures of these unobserved variables (endogenous) and survey
data involves: i) defining model constructs, ii) stating
relationships among these constructs, iii) developing appropriate
measures of these constructs, iv) gathering data using these
measures, v) validating these measures, and vi) validating the
model (i.e., testing the stated relationships among the constructs)
[16].
In the case of validating Tier-II hypotheses, Structural Equation
Modelling (SEM) is adopted using LISEL 8.8[17]. In Table 8
constructs are presented with their role on the model proposed in
Figure 3.
Table 8. Variables Used for the Model
Hypothesis Variables
Endogenous Exogenous
H21 MDG#1 E-Readiness -
MDG#2
Economic
Empowerment(ErEco)
H22 MDG#3 E-Readiness - Social
MDG#4
MDG#5
MDG#6
Empowerment(ErSoc)
H23 MDG#7 E-Readiness -
MDG#8
Environment(ErEnv)
H3 E-Readiness - Economic Sustainable
Empowerment (ErEco) Development
E-Readiness - Social
Empowerment(ErSoc)
E-Readiness –
Environment(ErEnv)
(MDG_Ready)

Hypothesis Variables
Endogenous Exogenous
H3 Social Development Sustainable
Economic Development
Environmental
Sustainability
Development
(MDG_Ready)
The model considered H3 as an important contributor to assess
successful E-Governance services adoption for achieving MDGs.
Figure 5. The Observed Model (Path Diagram using LISREL 8.8)
It is posited that sustainable development needs to be pursued
notwithstanding the adoption of MDGs listed in national agenda.
Sustainable development is argued to have three major
dimensions and rural India needs careful interventions to achieve
them. In this research work, hypothesis H3 therefore, considers it
important to include empowerment of citizens through economic,
social and environmental dimensions.
Table 9: Testing of Hypotheses proposed through the Model
Hypothesis Path
Coefficient
T-
Statistics*
Remarks
H21 0.35 16.27 Path coefficient is positive
and t-statistics is
0.35 16.37
significant, Hypothesis
H21 is validated
H22 0.22 9.02 Path coefficient is positive
and t-statistics is
0.24 10.34 significant, Hypothesis
H22 is validated
0.31 11.94
0.25 10.25
H23 0.13 2.62 Path coefficient is positive
and t-statistics is
0.19 2.83 significant, Hypothesis
H23 is validated
H3 0.92 0.38 Path coefficient is positive
-0.25 0.22
except in the case of
Environment where the
0.36 1.61
coefficient is negative and
t-statistics is significant,
0.48 13.91 Hypothesis H3 is not
validated
0.46 19.06
361
Hypothesis Path
* p < 0.05
Coefficient
T-
Statistics*
0.48 20.82
Remarks
It may be noted here that H3 has been negatively influenced by
the environmental factors. It means that e-readiness is not
encouraging in the areas of environmental empowerment in the
levels of households, communities and government agencies.
Other hypotheses in Tier-II have shown positive contributors for
attaining overall sustainable development. The overall model
fitness exercise has generated following structural equation:
MDG_Ready = 0.36*ErSoc -0.25*ErEnv+0.92*ErEco,
Errorvariance = 0.033, R² = 0.97 ----------------------------(1)
This equation (1) explains the relationship between Dependent
Exogenous Variable “MDG_Ready” (Overall e-Readiness of
MDG) and the Endogenous Variables “ErSoc”(contributions of
e-Readiness to Social empowerment), “ErEco”(contributions of
e-Readiness to Economic empowerment) and
“ErEnv”(contributions of e-Readiness to support Environmental
empowerment). This structural equation with R 2 of 0.97 has
indicated a “good fit” [16],[34] and with less error variance of
0.033. It implies that MDG readiness with E-Governance as a
component is influenced by the E-Governance services aimed at
social, economic and environmental issues. It is important to note
that the structural equation showed a negative contributions of E-
Governance services for ensuring environmental sustainability.
This denotes that there is enough scope for policy makers to
prioritize E-Governance efforts in this direction. As regards
contributions of E-Governance services in other two dimensions
of sustainable development, most of the contributions are towards
economic empowerment (0.92) followed by social empowerment
(0.36).
Further analysis on overall readiness of MDG driven sustainable
development “MDG_Ready” indicates that respondents have
indicated almost equal concerns for e-Readiness across all the
three sustainable development dimensions (Economic 0.48, Social
0.46 and environmnet0.48). This implies there is scope for
establishing ever increasing role of E-Governance services in
attaining MDGs for sustainable development.
4. CONCLUSION AND FURTHER
RESEARCH
MDGs are expected to achieve its targets with active
collaborations of the citizens, government agencies and other
stakeholders. E-Governance services are aimed at providing the
basis of networking among stakeholders, and providing desired
information and services to the citizens. This scenario, particularly
in the rural environment and in developing countries, is a
necessity in which E-Governance services are made available with
optimized cost, time, and latency. In this research, it is posited and
proved that collaborative efforts are possible through ICT enabled
E-Governance services. It is also shown that E-Readiness needs to
be assessed at the local level to achieve MDGs in a nation like
India. Besides, MDGs need to extend its purviews to support
sustainable development and thus overall effort is to be made to
empower local level entities including citizens to contribute to this
cause.

Global perspectives in providing E-Governance services for
development indicate that e-readiness for India is of great concern
and needs improvement in order to enhance its effectiveness.
Most of e-readiness parameters assessed by the INSEAD indicate
that the digital divide continues to exist despite improvements in
many areas including individual readiness. However, analyses of
the survey conducted in the sample eight villages in the district of
Panchmahals in the state of Gujarat suggest that most people
living in rural areas are yet to gain access to such services. Rural
teledensity too is a prime concern in India despite mobile
penetration having gone up. As regards services’ usage in India
vis-à-vis global contexts as per INSEAD, India has not shown an
encouraging performance and has been ranked low in all the areas
including broadband services, bandwidth availability and network
coverage etc. Thus it is important to note that there is a designreality
gap in all the parameters that may be used to assess the role
of E-Governance to support MDGs and sustainable development
in Indian context. It is worth mentioning following statements
that are relevant for Indian E-Governance and its role in
supporting MDGs.
“India lives in Villages”
“ You must be the change you wish to see in the world”
- Mahatma Gandhi
“You have to decide whether development means affluence or
whether development means peace, prosperity and happiness. “
-Sunderlal Bahuguna
“While the distribution of wealth and income need not be equal, it
must be to everyone’s advantage, and at the same time, positions
of authority must be accessible to all.”[27]
It is imperative that MDGs in India need to ensure its
contributions to sustainable development while making efforts to
make quantifiable progress in achieving the goals. Role of E-
Governance services needs to concentrate on bringing in
transparency in government and governance while ensuring
adequate measures in optimizing the costs and time for the
citizens dwelling in the access layer of the governance. In India,
people in this access layer form the core of the development
process and they are poor. These people are still affected by the
digital divides. In absence of an appropriate strategy to enforce
convergence among E-Governance services and with an aim to
empower people in access layer to collaborate, it would be
difficult for India to have sustainable development despite
improvements in MDGs.
4.1 Limitations
This research has several limitations. First, the research has been
limited to a homogeneous sample of respondents in a particular
district which does away with the scope for generalization. A
larger number of samples need to be included covering diverge
demographic areas with heterogeneity. Secondly, E-Governance
services considered for the study are limited to government webaccess
alone. Other sources like civil society and business
organizations providing such services need to be included in order
to make the analyses broad-based. Thirdly, User Centered Designs
(UCD) are quite relevant in such studies to assess Quality of
Services (QoS), cost and latency. These could not be assessed as
most of these services are yet to be availed by the sample
respondents. There is scope to include these dimensions while
362
validating the model (especially in capturing information needs of
uses and their intentions to use E-Governance services).
5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author acknowledges the support of the SDTT, Panchmahals
District Collectorate and Panchmahals District Milk Cooperative
Union for the successful conduct of the study.
6. REFERENCES
[1] Aisha Ghaus-Pasha, 2007, Governance for The Millennium
Development Goals, International Journal of Information
Technology and Knowledge Management, Volume 4, No. 1,
pp. 119-124
[2] Dutta, Soumitra, and Mia, Irene, 2011, The Global
Information Technology Report, 2010-2011, INSEAD,
World Economic Forum, Geneva.
[3] European Union (EU),2007, “Inclusive e-Government:
Survey of status and baseline activities”, European
Commission, DG Information Society and Media, e-
Government unit, December
[4] Gilhooly, Denis, 2004, Mainstreaming Information &
Communication Technologies for the Achievement of the
Millennium Development Goals, Report UN ICT Task
Force, Berlin, 18-20 November.
[5] Government of Gujarat,2011, Gujarat Informatics Limited,
Enabling e-Governance. url: www.gujaratinformatics.com.
Accessed on 15.07.2011.
[6] Government of India, 2007, Country Strategy Paper, 2007-
2013, Planning Commission, New Delhi.
[7] Government of India,2011, Agmarknet, A Step towards
Globalization of Indian Agriculture, Ministry of Agriculture,
New Delhi. url: www.agmarknet.nic.in accessed on
15.07.2011.
[8] Government of India,2011, National Informatics Center. url:
ww.nic.in accessed on 15.07.2011
[9] Government of India,2011, Saaransh, A Compendium of
Mission Mode Projects under NeGP, Ministry of IT, New
Delhi. url: http://www.mit.gov.in/content/mission-modeprojects
accessed on 17.07.2011;
http://www.mit.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/Compendiu
m_FINAL_Version_220211.pdf accessed on. 14. 07.2011.
[10] Heeks, R. and A. Molla,2009, “Impact Assessment of ICTfor-Development
Projects: A Compendium of Approaches”,
Working Paper 36, Institute for Development, Policy and
Management (IDPM), University of Manchester.
[11] IBRD, 2011, Improving the Odds of Achieving the MDGs
Heterogeneity, Gaps, and Challenges, Global Monitoring
Report, 1818 H Street NW Washington DC 20433
[12] IISD, 1997, Assessing Sustainable Development, Principles
in Practice, The International Institute for Sustainable
Development, December, ISBN 1-895536-07-3
[13] India Statistics , 2011, Revealing India Statically. url:
www.indiastat.com. accessed on 14.07.2011.
[14] International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 2010, World
Telecommunication/ICT Development Report 2010,
Monitoring the WSIS Target: A Mid Term Review, Geneva,
Switzerland.
[15] International Telecommunication Union, 2010. World
Telecommunication/ICT Development Report 2010,
Monitoring the WSIS Target: A Mid Term Review, Geneva,
Switzerland.

[16] Joreskog, K.G., and Sorbom, D., (1989), LISREL 8:
Structural Equation Modelling with SIMPLIS command
Language, Hillsdale, NJ: Lwarence Associates.
[17] Kline, R. B. (1998), Principles and Practice of Structural
Equation Modeling, New York: The Guilford Press.
[18] Mcliver, John P., and Carmines, Edward G., 1994,
Unidimensional Scaling, International Handbook of
Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences, Volume 4,
Sage Publications, London, UK,
[19] Misra, H. K. 2012, Understanding ICT Enabled
Development Interventions With MDG Perspectives in
Indian Context : A Study in Panchmahal District, Working
Paper 230, IRMA.
[20] Misra, H. K., 2011. Information Kiosk Based Indian Rural E-
Governance Service Delivery, Value Chain Based
Measurement and Acceptance Modelling. The 5th
International Conference on Theory and Practice of
Electronic Governance (ICEGOV2011), Tallin, Estonia, 26-
28 September.
[21] Misra, H.K. 2010, “Citizen-Centric Service Dimensions of
Indian Rural E-Governance Systems: An Evaluation”, in
Hakikur Rahman (ed.) Cases on Adoption, Diffusion, and
Evaluation of Global E-Governance Systems: Impact at the
Grass Roots. Hershey, USA: IGI Global Publishing.
[22] Nunnally, J C., 1978, Psychometric Theory, New York,
McGraw-Hill.
[23] OECD, 2004, Measuring Sustainable Development,
Integrated Economic, Environmental and Social
Frameworks.
[24] Pedhazur, E. J., 1997, Multiple Regression in Behavioral
Research (Third Edition), Harcourt Brace College Publishers,
New York.
[25] Peter Hardi and Terrence Zdan, 1997, Assessing Sustainable
Development, Principles in Practice, 161 Portage Avenue
East - 6th Floor Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3B 0Y4, ISBN 1-
895536-07-3
[26] Rahman Naimur, 2010, MDGS, Inclusive Growth and
Governance, One World Foundation India, New Delhi.
[27] Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press
[28] Richard Gerster And Sonja Zimmermann, 2005, Up-Scaling
Pro-Poor ICT-Policies and Practices: A Review of
Experience with Emphasis on Low Income Countries In Asia
And Africa, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation
(SDC), Gerster Consulting, CH–8805 Richterswil,
Switzerland
[29] Roman Mogilevsky and Anara Omorova, 2011, Assessing
Development Strategies to Achieve MDGs in Asia
Macroeconomic Strategies of MDG Achievement in the
Kyrgyz Republic, Center for Social and Economic Research,
Warsaw, CASE Network Report No.95
[30] Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, 2008, Are the MDGs Priority in
Development Strategies and Aid Programmes? Only Few
Are!, Working Paper number 48, October, The New School
University, New York. http://www.ipcundp.org/pub/IPCWorkingPaper48.pdf
accessed on
02.03.2012
[31] Sanjay Jamwal, 2011, Project Proposal on Impact
Assessment Of Village Resource Centres (VRC) In
Achieving Millennium Development Goals
[32] Satterthwaite, David (Ed.), 2003, The Millennium
Development Goals and Local Processes, Hitting the target
363
or missing the point? IIed, 3 Endsleigh Street, London,
WC1H 0DD, UK
[33] Tomasz, J. et al. ,2011, ICEGOV 2011. Tallinn, Estonia:
Tutorial on Electronic Governance for Development.
[34] Spector, P E., (1988), “Development of the Work Locus of
Control Scale”. Journal of Operational Psychology, 61,
pp.335-340.
[35] UIDAI, 2010, Unique Identification Authority of India
Strategic Overview, Unique Identification Authority of India,
Planning Commission, Government of India, New Delhi.
[36] UN, 2007, Development Goals: Core Issues And Good
Practices, 7th Global Forum on Reinventing Government
Building Trust in Government, 26-29 June , Vienna, Austria
[37] UN, 2008, UN E-Government Survey, From E-Government
to Connected E-Governance, New York UN, 2011,
Measuring Impacts of Information and Communication
Technologies for Development, Geneva.
[38] UN,2010, Current Strategies on MDGs Monitoring and
Evaluation: The MDG Africa Group Cluster on Statistics,
Second Meeting of the Statistical Commission for Africa
(StatCom Africa - II), 17 – 22 January, Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia
[39] UNCTAD,2011. Measuring Impacts for Information and
Communication Technologies for Development, United
Nations Conference on Trade and Development, New York
and Geneva.
[40] UNDP, 2010, What Will It Take to Achieve the Millennium
Development Goals? An International Assessment, United
Nations Development Programme, One United Nations
Plaza, New York, NY 10017, USA
[41] United Nations, (UN),2008, UN E-Government Survey, New
York: E-Government to Connected E-Governance. url:
http://www.indiatelecomonline.com accessed on 14.07.2011.
[42] United Nations,2001, Road map towards the implementation
of the United Nations Millennium Declaration, United
Nations, New York.
[43] United Nations,2010, The Global Partnership for
Development at a Critical Juncture. MDG Gap Taskforce
Report, United Nations, New York.
[44] United Nations,2011, Millennium Development Goals
Report, New York.

Harnessing Renewable Energy Technologies for ICT and
e-Governance Services in Un-Electrified Communities in Rural Nepal
Mona Sharma
Winrock International
P.O.Box 4927
Kathmandu, Nepal
977 1-4467087; 977 9851146002
msharma@winrock.org.np; mona33sharma@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
The Government of Nepal’s electronic-governance initiatives
remain beyond the access of the majority of Nepal’s population.
Many are not even aware that such services exist. This is because
due to Nepal’s difficult terrain, two vital vehicles for egovernance
services -access to energy/the national electricity grid
and internet penetration - are both negligible. Rural populations
stand to benefit the most from e-governance services, yet they
continue to be overlooked by government and non-government
information and communications (ICT)-based development
activities largely on grounds of lack of access to energy sources.
A recently completed ICT project funded by Intel Corporation and
implemented by Winrock International challenged this bottleneck
to efficient rollout of e-governance services, and has demonstrated
a successful shift in the national rural ICT paradigm. This paper
communicates the experience of a pioneering community-based
activity to extend electronic services, including e-governance, in
remote un-electrified communities in Nepal. This public-private
partnership between rural communities, local and national
governments, and a non-government organization harnessed
energy generated from small solar photovoltaic and micro-hydro
systems to operate power-efficient ICT and e-services. The ICT
infrastructure is housed in local government schools, and has
enabled rural communities to access multifaceted e-services
beyond the electricity grid network.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.6.1 [Management of Computing and Information Systems]:
– Project and People Management – System Analysis and Designs
General Terms
Management, Documentation, Performance, Design, Reliability,
Human Factors
Keywords
Renewable Energy Technologies; Nepal; Program Management
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
364
1. INTRODUCTION
The Government of Nepal (GoN) has introduced numerous ICT
interventions for development and poverty alleviation over the
past five years. An E-Governance Master Plan has also been
rigorously researched and developed. The focus of government
and non-government ICT initiatives to date has been on rollout of
infrastructure, hardware, software packages, online applications
such as e-governance services, and capacity building of human
resources. While all these aspects are crucial for effective
implementation of ICTs nationwide, a major challenge continues
to be largely overlooked: access to electricity to power equipment
and deliver services. This paper chronicles the experiences and
findings of a pioneering attempt to break this barrier by
introducing power-efficient computing and electronic public
services based on alternative energy sources. This pilot project has
demonstrated to all stakeholders that ICT services and
applications can be taken to the 60 percent of rural communities
that currently remain beyond the national electricity grid (see
Figure 1). The pilot was carried out in conjunction with GoN’s
Alternative Energy Promotion Project (AEPC) and the High Level
Commission for Information Technology (HLCIT) at the Ministry
of Environment (MoE). AEPC has since incorporated the model
in the national renewable energy technology (RET) expansion
program, and replicated the community-based model in over
twenty additional locations.
2. BACKGROUND
Nepal’s difficult topography has long challenged extension of
basic services and infrastructure across the country. Road
networks are limited; the national electricity grid currently serves
only 40% of the population as illustrated in Figure 1 below. Even
today, many communities walk days to district headquarters to
access governance services such as birth registrations and transfer
of deeds. Such communities would benefit immensely from
access to E-governance and other online services in their own
villages.
Figure 1. National Electricity Grid of Nepal

GoN has addressed the challenge to nation-wide electrification by
expanding access to RETs for electrification in rural areas. This
government initiative promotes domestic and institutional
electrification based on locally-available sources of renewable
energy, including micro hydro and solar photovoltaic (solar pv)
systems. Even where it is available, RET-based rural
electrification systems are very limited as they are designed for
lighting for a set number of households. They generally cannot
support the power requirements of appliances, and basic ICT
equipment. These compounded factors have resulted in limited
access to, and expansion of ICT applications and electronicservices
beyond urban and peri-urban areas. Nepal’s terrain has
also impeded expansion of the internet backbone. Internet service
providers are gradually extending connectivity through vertical
spurs from the backbone, yet terrestrial systems are feasible only
along the plains area. The majority of the country relies on
wireless and satellite-based connectivity, which is expensive.
Consequently, remote communities needing vital access to
information and communications services, the potential key
beneficiaries of the national E-Governance initiatives, remain
deprived of electronic and ICT services. Public access services do
not exist, and ICTs have been unable to be integrated into rural
governance and education systems.
2.1 Challenges to Rural ICT
o Limited access to grid electricity
o Limited power from RET-based power systems
o Limited penetration of information ICT infrastructure
o High power consumption of conventional computers
o Inadequate integration of ICTs into rural tapestry
o Inadequate rural-appropriate online-based applications
3. APPROACH
In this scenario, Winrock International has pioneered an approach
to introduce and establish locally appropriate electronic services
based on RET-power. Basic details are presented in Table 1; the
geographic diversity of the pilot sites is presented in Figure 2.
Name
Table 1. Project Details
Rural Livelihood Enhancement
through Increased Access to
Information and Communication
Technologies project
Location Four remote communities in rural
Nepal
365
Timeline April 2009- February 2012
The primary focus of the approach:
o Increase public access to rural electronic and ICT services
o Increase awareness of power-efficient options
o Foster the right to information
o Internet-based services to local communities
o Renewable energy, rural ICT, and education services through
partnerships
o Ensure sustainability through partner networks
o Computer and internet literacy
− E-services, applications and services for MDGs
− Poverty alleviation and overall development through
access to information and communication on health,
agriculture, and education
3.1 Innovative Model
The project has leveraged Intel funding to demonstrate maximum
impacts on rural development by establishing the last mile of
connectivity, and using the internet to enhance lives. Multistakeholder
partnerships have been forged with government as
well as non-government bodies to deliver appropriate internetbased
services to local communities. Partners contributing to the
project activities at various levels have contributed additional
funds, forging a sense of ownership of the activity across sectors,
and enabling multiple activities to be carried out towards the
single common goal of sustainable rural development. The model
is illustrated in Figure 3.
Figure 2. Topographic map of Nepal indicating project
districts

Figure 3. The Project Model
Simultaneously, this has also strengthened the sustainability of
services, as well as replication potential through the diverse
networks of each contributing partner. The project facilitated
access to electronic and ICT services in rural Nepal by mobilizing
partnerships to provide a package for holistic rural development
package, from installation of RETs; infrastructure for access to the
internet; low-power hardware; to development of locally
appropriate online products and internet-based services; and
capacity building of locally-based internet service providers to
ensure sustainable internet services.
Figure 4 (L). Solar photovoltaic for ICT center
Figure 5 (R). Microhydro powerhouse
3.2 What We Did
a) Power-efficient ICT facilities
o Isolated micro hydro stations; solar photo voltaic
systems
o Low power equipment at school labs and telecenters,
including Netbooks, Rural Connectivity Platforms
(RCP) and other wireless media
o Enabling environment and vehicle for e-governance in
off-grid areas
b) Dual purpose services
o ICT labs school hours; rural telecenter non-school hours
o Online and offline locally appropriate services
366
o Enhance poverty alleviation, attainment of Millennium
Development Goals, and overall development through
access to information and communication, and eservices
c) Enabling rural E-services
o Strengthening ICT service providers
o Locally appropriate ICT-based applications
o Channel for information dissemination for government
initiatives across sectors, including health, agriculture,
and e-governance
o Rural access to government e-governance initiatives
o Digital content and complete e-curriculum for six
grades as part of the formal school curriculum
o E-Granary type servers to house content for schools and
public for offline use
d) Multi-sector Public Private partnerships
o Government Renewable energy, rural ICT, rural
development Ministries
o Rural schools and communities
o Private ICT service providers and vendors, including
internet service providers and equipment importers
o Non-government agencies, including Open Learning
Exchange and local community-based organizations
(CBO)
3.3 How We Did It
The approach was two-pronged. First, the project leveraged ties
between AEPC, communities and schools to establish computer
labs and ICT service centers based on RET. Second, the project
demonstrated the use of locally available micro hydro and solar
photovoltaic, expanding the reach of electronic services to
deprived rural areas. Figures 4 and 5 illustrate the power sources
for two of the solar and micro hydro pilot sites.
The internet facilities were housed in government schools for
maximum development impact. Placement of these facilities in
the schools is a deliberate attempt to avail children from deprived
communities that may not have access to modern forms of energy
to the benefits of electricity at least during school hours. The
school children have used computer facilities as a computer
laboratory in structured sessions during school hours. Before and
after school hours, as well as during school breaks, the computer
facilities have served as community-based rural ICT centers. By
serving as rural ICT centers, the labs have provided wider
communities reliable communication through the internet, and
locally-appropriate internet based services. Figures 6 and 7, and 8
and 9 illustrate both sets of services at the pilot schools. This has
included information on health, education rights awareness, and
agriculture among others. Facilities such as e-governance
services, search for employment opportunities, and promotion of
products for livelihood enhancement etc have also been provided.
A structured tariff system for these services will support
maintenance costs.

Figures 6 and 7. Computer classes at schools
Figures 8 and 9. Public access services at telecenters
4. THE OUTCOME
a) Created enabling environment for rural ICT
o Demonstrated use of low-power pcs in rural areas
to the government and other stakeholders.
b) Promoted government endorsement of ICT for rural
development through cross-sector use of ICTs for
education, e-governance, and agriculture.
c) Fostered delivery channel for GoN E-governance and
other electronic services.
d) Demonstrated mainstream computer education through
low-power computer labs in government schools.
e) Incorporated ICT facilities for rural access in GoN RET
extension strategy. This will contribute to the overall
rural development, and attainment of MDGs resulting
from access to power.
f) Leveraged local development
g) Service provider training for schools/rural ICT centers
o Integrating E-teaching in schools
o Providing public ICT services
o Hardware and software fundamentals
h) E-content and applications
o Updating online platform for rural users
o ICT-enabled full-year curriculum in Nepali,
English, and Science Grades 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10
Table 2. Impacts from four community-based pilot sites
Beneficiary Group Direct Beneficiaries
Schoolchildren 3200
Individuals 5500
Rural households 1100
367
5. SUSTAINABILITY
5.1 Localized Services
This approach is unique in that it presents a holistic approach in
installing and using RET, and wireless technology to bring about
direct economic impacts upon vulnerable communities. The
project has been integrated into the local community to ensure
optimum development impact, and respond to demand-based
online resources and applications. Offline services and products
have been integrated along with online services. Offline services
have strengthened the business plan of the entrepreneurs as they
cost much less to provide in terms of investment cost, but deliver
constant fees for services. Offline services are integral in the
initial phase to encourage rural clientele not used to online
resources to enter the service facilities and gradually build
comfort in using technology.
Activity sustainability has been ensured by:
1) Offsetting the access to energy, and upfront and operating
cost barriers through multi-sector linkages
2) Providing diversified use of the ICT center facilities to the
local population as public access services
3) Localizing content to meet needs at rural schools, including
E-granary server and E-curriculum
4) Creating ownership and demand for ICT services through
partial subsidy towards local commitment to deliver Egovernance
and other services
5.1 Contributing to the National Agenda
This initiative has addressed major barriers to national expansion
of electronic services. This project has precipitated synergy
between multi-sectoral activities, and mobilized financial and
human resource investments from multiple players at the local as
well as national level in order to translate technological scopes
into direct impacts upon rural lives. Winrock International's
previous efforts in rural information and communication activities
strongly indicate that public-private-partnerships are a pivotal
aspect of sustainability following project completion. Impacts on
direct beneficiaries, the children from grades six through ten, and
households in the vicinity in the four pilot sites alone has been
immense, as indicated in Table 2. With the initiation of public
access ICT services and computer classes using just 14 Netbooks
per site in villages averaging 300 households, schools report
enhanced enrollment in the pilot government schools, and better
student retention and attendance rates as students are more regular
in coming to school. Successful demonstration has made this
model universally replicable in partner networks: MoE has
delivered project-developed capacity building trainings in
government rural ICT initiatives; AEPC has replicated the project
model in their microhydro communities as ICTs enable access to
crucial public services, and make productive use of the electricity
generated. The project-developed curriculum has also been
adopted as a locally-appropriate resource by many schools
nationally. This level of commitment from the national to
grassroots players is anticipated to continue to foster strong
ownership of the approach, thereby supporting the development of
locally-appropriate online electronic services and applications.

5.2 Challenges Remain
a) Lobby with central and district governments for:
− Integration into Computer Science curriculum
− Qualified human resources
− Rural development initiatives
b) Inadequate human resources for ICT-aided teaching
c) Communities not adequately e-ready
d) High cost of bandwidth
e) Keyboard issues with Netbooks
− Dust infiltration
368
− Loose keys following constant use
f) Frequent power fluctuations affecting power supply and
connectivity
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Our thanks to ACM SIGCHI for allowing us to modify templates
they had developed.
7. REFERENCES
[1] Nepal Living Standards Survey 2011. Central Bureau of
Statistics, Kathmandu, 2012.
[2] GoN E-Governance Master Plan and ICT Policies, 2011.

ICT-enabled Delivery of Maternal Health Services
ABSTRACT
Fresh opportunities are being created daily for the deployment of
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) [42]
particularly in the area of poverty alleviation and sustainable
economic growth in developing countries in particular. Therefore,
the adoption of mobile telephones as service and information
delivery tools and platform is expected to foster partnership and
efficiency in improving health through dissemination of health
information and data and supporting communication and
collaboration within the entire health sector.
This paper examines the integration of a sectoral policy and
strategy in the area of health and national ICT Policy in the
developmental context. Specifically, it investigates if a mobiletelephony
based e-Health strategy has proven sustainable,
stimulated acceptance of mobile phone-based health information
or awareness of stakeholders on the benefits of mobile phonebased
health information and services, thus accelerating the pace
of reduction in maternal mortality in Ghana. The analysis
presented in the paper is based on secondary material collected
from government website and data directly obtained from
policymakers and users involved in the initiative.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
Computers and Society, General
General Terms
Human Factors, Public Policy
Keywords
Mobile Phones, ICT4D, e-Governance, Development, Maternal
Mortality, Ghana
1. INTRODUCTION
Nine years ago, the UN General Assembly endorsed the World
Smmit on the Information Society, held in two phases, in Geneva
003 and Tunis 2005. In particular, it encouraged governments, as
part of their implementation of the Tunis Agenda for the
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
Johanna E. Awotwi
Centre for e-Governance
P.O. Box MP 270
Mamprobi- Accra, GHANA
+233 (0) 243 408 047
jeawotwi@ghanaceg.org
369
Information Society, to establish before 2010, “ comprehensive,
forward –looking and sustainable national e-strategies, including
ICT strategies and sectoral e-strategies, as integral parts of
national development plans and poverty reduction strategies.”
Responding to this call, most countries have met the WSIS target
of developing national e-strategies by 2010. At least 84% of all
economies have a national e-strategy in place, and at least 14
economies are in the process of developing such a strategy [33].
Ghana met the WSIS target for developing national e-strategies
with, two policies which are driving ICT developments – ICT for
Accelerated Development Policy (ICT4AD) and National
Telecom Policy (NTP). The ICT4AD Policy has the overall
objective of supporting an ICT-led socio-economic development
process aimed at transforming Ghana into a middle income,
information-rich, and knowledge-based society [24]. On the other
hand, says the policy, the goal of the NTP is to establish market
structures that will be most beneficial to Ghana’s citizens and
businesses, and to set in motion the procedures and incentives that
will boost the market’s development.
Efforts have been made to implement some of the strategies
enunciated in these two policy documents [20]. One such
important e-strategy is the Health Sector ICT Policy and Strategy,
2005 which underlining vision is to significantly enhance and
improve all areas of health delivery. The strategy is specifically,
meant to provide quality primary healthcare services that are
affordable, sustainable and meet the needs of patients, by
overcoming geographical barriers through ICTs [24]. For a lowincome
country such as Ghana, the policy is welfare –oriented.
It is instructive to note that ICT4AD Policy (2003) is currently
under review after a review forum in May 2011. New thematic
areas are being added to the policy including cyber security,
climate control and green ICTs, Broadband Strategy and
Geospatial policies [50].
The main objective of this paper is to lay emphasis on integration
of a sectoral policy and strategy on health in the developmental
context; and to investigate if a mobile–telephony based
intervention has proven sustainable, stimulated acceptance or been
able to create awareness on benefits of mobile health information
and services and the consequent impact on maternal mortality and
governance in Ghana. The availability of up-to-date and accurate
information, created and disseminated by ICTs, has decisive
impact on peoples’ lives and on the socioeconomic development
of a country as a whole says [53]. Further, “countries that have
created an enabling environment are experiencing revolutionary
effects especially in the governance, education, health and
business sectors, as its citizens are now more empowered, can
change the equilibrium of power and start creating choices and
opportunities for themselves.” “Yet,” it continued, ‘there are

countries in Africa where people are not able to make informed
decisions on their daily lives because of lack of access to ICTs,
information and knowledge.”
Ghana’s response to the above realities especially in the health
sector is the focus of this paper with the recognition of the
positive potential of mobile phones. The background of this paper
will review ICT integration at both practice and policy levels in
general and investigate attempts by Ghana, to initiate, formulate
and implement national e-strategies with a view to achieving
development goals. Section, 2 will focus on a short history of
ICTs under eHealth. The analysis in this section will be on how
developing countries disadvantaged due to lack of capital and
knowledge of the internet and Information Technology [42] could
carve out solutions which harness ICTs to improve internal
administrations, with the potential for interactions with
stakeholders to attain improved political representation,
institutional effectiveness and economic management. Sections 3
and 4 outline the general framework for analyzing the solutions or
interventions through mobile telephony, with Ghana country data
used, Section 5 dwells on acceptance, sustainability and
acceptance impacts. Section 6 focuses on a review of the results,
their implications, and concludes on possible future research
directions.
2. BACKGROUND
[52] stresses that response to considerable challenges in providing
high quality, affordable and universally accessible care have led to
policymakers, donors and program implementers to search for
innovative approaches, to eliminate the geographical and financial
barriers to health. Consequently, lately, there has been an
increasing interest in the potential of ICTs in resolving these
issues. The use of mobile technology or m-health, a subset of ehealth,
is growing in the low- and – middle income or developing
countries.
There is also the recognition that National e-strategies act as
fundamental preconditions for bridging the digital divide, that is,
the gap between people with access to ICT and those with limited
or no access to them [30]; [36]. Further, e-strategies are believed
to enable socio-economic development. The WSIS outcomes,
according to the ITU, encourage countries to incorporate ICT into
their national development plans and, in the particular case of
lower income economies, to integrate national e-strategies into
their poverty reduction plans. It defines for a better understanding
of the concepts; ‘ICT strategy is a general plan on how to bring a
society and its economy forward through the use of ICT; sectoral
e-strategies, on the other hand, break down the general ICT
strategy into policies for specific sectors, such as health, education
or administration. Sectoral strategies are called “e” for electronic,
followed by the name of the area the strategy applies to, for
instance, e-health, e-learning or e-government. Together, ICT
strategies and sectoral e-strategies constitute national e-strategies,
which is the super-ordinate concept.’ As of April 2010, 163
countries and territories, that is, 85.3 percent of all ITU Member
States, already had a national e-strategy in place, while another 13
countries and territories (6.8%) are currently formulating and
adopting one. Six countries (3.2%) do not have a national estrategy
in place, and the status of ICT strategy formulation in the
remaining 9 economies (4.7%) is unknown, due to lack of
information, the report declares. It is possible, however, that some
of the economies in the latter group have also formulated an ICT
370
strategy or are in the preparatory process. In general, Africa is the
continent with the lowest penetration of ICT, continued [30], as
well as the region where the formulation of ICT strategies has
taken place at the slowest pace. By the first phase of WSIS in
2003, only 17 African countries had developed ICT strategies.
According to a recent ECA survey however, 90 percent of the
African countries consider ICT as their national priority. As
suggested by the ITU, “Several ICT strategies are still lacking a
real strategic approach. Despite the existence of numerous good
practices and innovative and forward-looking strategies, some
plans are merely a collection of initiatives and projects.
Governments, societies and economies would benefit from an
overarching strategic direction and from the formulation of a
long-term vision. Further, sectoral e-strategies should be rooted in
these overarching national e-strategies in order to unleash the full
potential of ICT in each sector, making best use of existing
synergies.” For instance, there should be coherence between a
country’s health sectoral strategy and the National ICT Policy.
The ICT4AD which was approved by the Ghanaian Parliament
and Cabinet in early 2004 fully takes into account the aspirations
and provisions of key socio-economic development framework
documents including: The Vision 2020 Socio-Economic
Development Framework; the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy
(GPRS) (2002-2004) and the Co-ordinated Programme for
Economic and Social Development of Ghana [18]. “The e-Health
Strategy means application of the Internet and other related
technologies in the healthcare industry to improve the access,
efficiency, effectiveness and quality of clinical and business
processes utilized by healthcare organizations, practitioners,
patients and consumers to improve the health status of patients”
[8].
Several other governments have developed e-health strategies.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines e-Health as “...the
use, in the health sector, of digital data - transmitted, stored and
retrieved electronically- in support of health care, both at the local
site and at a distance.” eHealth technologies are essential when
they are integrated into health services that meet basic needs, have
been proven to be cost-efficient and are evidence-based. They are
evidence-based when they meet well-defined specifications and
have been validated through controlled clinical studies or rest on a
widely accepted consensus by experts. Some of the benefits of ehealth
include faster and easier access to medical data; improved
delivery of healthcare services, in particular in rural and remote
areas, and the reduction of costs for healthcare services.
Many ICT strategies include approaches for the adoption of egovernment
which are the most common type of sectoral estrategies.
Many of these sectoral strategies focus on improving
the effectiveness and transparency of public administration
activities by making use of ICT in government-to-government,
government-to-citizen and government-to business. With its ICT
strategies in place, Ghana’s Minister of Communications reported
in October 2011 that, “in 2010, Ghana’s GDP expanded by 5.9%,
with the Services Sector (dominated by ICT) contributing 32.8%
and surpassing traditional agriculture.
The ICT/Telecom industry is therefore playing significant and
vital role in driving wider economic growth across the country
and contributing substantially to the government kitty” [40].

3. E-HEALTH
3.1 ICTs and Health Communication
[26] suggests; there has been abundant anecdotal evidence that
ICTs could be applied to livelihood enhancement and thus directly
address financial poverty, but it was not at all clear that these
applications were reproducible, scalable and sustainable. There
has been significant focus on using ICTs to actually deliver
healthcare (telemedicine) and as a way of educating people on
health issues. Health is vital to development he adds and “the lack
of adequate healthcare is one of the most onerous aspects of
poverty” and in developing countries especially Sub-Saharan
Africa, poverty has deepened the crisis in health-care delivery and
the mass exodus of professionals to the developed world have
further worsened this problem.
The 2008 UN report on progress toward meeting the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) indicates continuing dire conditions
in crucial public health areas. Reliable information about the rates
and trends in maternal mortality is essential for resource
mobilization, and for planning and assessment of progress
towards Millennium Development Goal 5 (MDG 5), the target for
which is a 75% reduction in the maternal mortality ratio (MMR)
from 1990 to 2015 [38].
Ghana has an estimated population of 23.48 million accounting
for 2.97% of the African population [62]; 49% of the population
lives in urban areas (regional average 37%). Ghana has relatively
better health system indicators in the region. In 2007, life
expectancy was 57 years (52 years in the WHO African region
and 57 years in low-income countries), maternal mortality ratio
was 560 per 100,000 live births (900 in the region and 650 in low
income countries), infant mortality rate was 73 per 1,000 live
births (88 in the region and 80 in low income countries, antenatal
care (at least 4 visits) coverage was 69% (45% in the region and
38% in low-income countries) and proportion of births attended
by skilled health personnel was 50% (46% in the region and 41%
in low-income countries).
[43] state there are a few concerns though. Ghana’s human
development index (HDI) worsened from 0.563 in 2001 to 0.520
in 2005 [23]. Similarly, infant mortality rate rose from 71 in 2000
to 73 in 2007 [62].
The level of health spending is low at 5.1% of GDP with
household out-of-pocket spending accounting for 51.2% of it says
[56]. It is therefore, worthwhile to find out whether access to
proven and powerful ICTs can improve health indicators which
also happen to be an ongoing debate. Does the process of social
change through ICTs enhance positive health outcomes in low and
middle income countries such as Ghana? A growing number of
people are searching to understand the meaning of empowerment
and ways it can be used to change their settings and lives. Most of
the literature associates empowerment with personal control.
[45] points out that "by empowerment I mean our aim should be
to enhance the possibilities for people to control their own lives."
The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion notes that "people
cannot achieve their fullest health potential unless they are able
take control of those things which determine their health" [60]. It
is obvious that lack of empowerment leads to poverty which also
has an important informational dimension [19].
371
Poor people often lack access to information that is vital to their
lives and livelihoods, including weather reports, market prices,
healthcare information and income-earning opportunities. Such
lack of information or empowerment, adds to the vulnerability of
the people concerned. Infact, in terms of livelihood strategies,
information plays a dual role: informing and strengthening the
short-term decision-making capacity of the poor themselves, and
informing and strengthening the longer-term decision-making
capacity of intermediaries that facilitate, assist, or represent the
poor. The contribution of ICT to poverty reduction through
enterprise lies in its power to give poor women especially, and
men access to improved information and better communications
to help them build assets for better living conditions [19]. There
has been considerable international discussion about the potential
of ICTs to make major impacts in improving the health and well
being of poor and marginalized populations, combating poverty,
and encouraging sustainable development and governance [63].
Used effectively ICTs have enormous potential as tools to
increase information flows and the dissemination of evidencebased
knowledge, and to empower citizens. However, despite all
its potential, a major challenge is that ICTs have not been widely
used as tools that advance equitable health care access.
A critical mass of professional and community users of ICTs in
health has not yet been reached in developing countries. Many of
the approaches being used are still at a relatively new stage of
implementation, with insufficient studies to establish their
relevance, applicability or cost effectiveness [63]. This makes it
difficult for governments of developing countries to determine
their investment priorities.
The topic of e-government and e-governance has become
increasingly acknowledged over the last few years, and many
governments desire for online services. However developing
countries are disadvantaged due to lack of capital and knowledge
of the internet and Information Technology.
[42], while acknowledging what ICT brings through improved
effectiveness & efficiency in governance, improved customer
satisfaction and enhanced public participation in Government’s
policies / decision and making processes and provision of quality
services; said there are difficulties in bringing components that
make these a reality. Reality involves a clear, well planned and
easy to implement strategy, connectivity infrastructure such as
broadband technologies, database management, and enabling
technologies such as those for pervasive/mobile access amongst
others [4].
E-Governance in an implementation sense is restricted primarily
to the use of computer based internet access to deliver services. In
countries where the penetration of computers and internet is
relatively low, such as in Ghana, there is an apprehension that the
reach of e-Governance may be limited. Such limited reach of e-
Governance has made governments think of new technologies,
such as mobile phones, to reach the residents and to deliver public
services.
The use of mobile phones in healthcare settings can potentially
deliver important benefits, because of their ability to provide and
improve access to communication and information resources [13].
Mobile phones have tremendous potential to expand the access to
and reach of public services in developing economies. The
relevance of mobile platform as a medium for delivery of public

services in Ghana is also evident from the subscriber base of
mobile phones as seen in Chart 1.
The use of mobile and wireless technologies to support the
achievement of health objectives (m-Health) has the potential to
transform the face of health service delivery across the globe and
a powerful combination of factors is driving this change, [13]
stresses. These include rapid advances in mobile technologies and
applications, a rise in new opportunities for the integration of
mobile health into existing eHealth services, and the continued
growth in coverage of mobile cellular networks.
According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU),
there are now over 5 billion wireless subscribers; over 70% of
them reside in low- and middle income countries. The GSM
Association reports commercial wireless signals cover over 85%
of the world’s population, extending far beyond the reach of the
electrical grid [59].
A multitude of m-Health solutions have emerged over the years in
countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa,
which are leading the way in using mobile health services,
according to the Global Observatory for e-Health at the World
Health Organization (WHO). Getachew Sahlu of the WHO
identified the convergence of the following factors as the driving
force behind the current rapid m-Health growth in developing
countries: (1) a record growth of mobile phone users, (2) rapid
expansion of mobile networks, (3) the decline in mobile phone
costs, and (4) the innovation in mobile technology [36].
Mobile connects four times as many people as landline telephony
because of its better reach, convenience, and functionality and its
lower costs [31];[32]. Mobile telephony also surpasses the
landline Internet by more than 3.5 billion users, reports [29],
while driving economic growth and important societal benefits, as
documented in the World Economic Forum’s Global Information
Technology Report 2008–2009: Mobility in a Networked World
and other research.
At the recent Mobile World Congress held this year in Barcelona,
Mr. H. Toure, Secretary-General of ITU confirmed, ‘Over the past
twenty years or so we have seen an extraordinary transition from a
world where most people did not have access to even basic
telecommunications, to a world where we have six billion mobile
cellular subscriptions, and where 2.3 billion people use the
Internet. The key to this extraordinary communications miracle,
he added, has of course been mobile, which has conquered the
globe and brought ICTs within reach of virtually all of the world’s
people [51].
Mobile health solutions—whether used to automate electronic
health records or treat chronic diseases—enable governments to
more easily, quickly, and cost-effectively bring the benefits
associated with access to comprehensive healthcare services to
their citizens. Mobile remote monitoring devices and services that
transmit information about the condition of patients and
applications that remind patients when to take their medications
will allow many more people to lead healthier, more independent
lives[15]. Accordingly, a recent Juniper Research study forecasted
remote patient monitoring using mobile networks to be a US$1.9
billion market by 2013 [35].
Table 1. Justifying mHealth
372
CHALLENGES EXPLANATION
Infrastructure Absence of electricity in rural areas
and low bandwidth
Cultural attitudes Superstitions due to illiteracy
Sustainability Lack of financial capability after
initial donor assistance. Therefore,
inability to afford technology
upgrades
Environmental Dusty regions affect equipment
Human Resource Lack of ICT skilled personnel
(Author)
m-Health represents a cost-effective technology solution to many
of these challenges if implemented correctly and brought to scale.
The costs of mobile handsets and usage are declining as demand
for mobile services increases and mobile networks are being
rapidly expanded [36]. The use of mobile phones has been noted
in the area of prevention and monitoring for pregnant women, to
reduce infant and maternal mortality through treatment, and
provide post-natal follow-up healthcare support [34].
The discipline of m-Health has been gaining ground as mobile
device penetration rates grow rapidly, increasingly prompted by
plunging hardware and usage costs, as developing world
consumers adopt this accessible communication technology
[16];[28];[47];[27]. Case studies have been recorded in the
instances of using Short Message Service (SMS) for HIV/AIDS
prevention and control, and for treatment of tuberculosis in South
Africa [46]; consultation services and dissemination of critical
health information in rural communities in India [48]; [5]; and
using Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) to collect data and teach
medical students in Ghana and Uganda respectively 12].
4. GHANA-CASE STUDY
4.1 E-Health in Ghana context
[49] state, “similar to Rwanda, Kenya and Ghana, in 93rd and
97th position, respectively, suffer from low levels of ICT
readiness due to the underdevelopment of ICT infrastructure and
the lack of a widespread skill base that would enable society to
make an optimal use of technology.
However, according to [2], the services sector in Ghana recorded
a 6.1% growth in 2010 compared with 5.9% in 2009. Financial
services and expansion in the telecommunications industry
continued to spearhead growth of the sector in 2010. The
telecommunications sub-sector expanded by 10.8% in 2010
raising total telephone access lines to about 17 million in 2010
from 15.2 million in 2009. In 2010 Ghana achieved telephone
penetration rate of nearly 74%, with mobile telephony accounting
for about 98% of the total access lines. As at July 2011 the total
telephone subscriptions in Ghana stood at 19,805,896 yielding a
tele-density of 80.2%.
This chart is distributed by Market Share as follows:-

Chart 1 [40] GHANA – Total Telephone Subscription
The growth in penetration and use of mobile phones presents
unprecedented opportunities to communicate with rural audiences,
and may soon be the largest media opportunity in rural Ghana,
especially for enhancing healthcare delivery.
[50] informed in personal communication with the author that “as
at the last count on March 2nd, 2012 the National Communication
Authority (NCA) had registered over 25 million SIM cards and
assuming 20 percent double or triple SIM registrations, we are
likely to have over 80% of Ghanaians owning phones including
citizens in the rural areas. This phenomenon has obviously made
communication across the country very efficient and brought great
relief to rural folks,” he added.
Ghana’s health sector reforms were guided by five principles:
integration, decentralization, partnerships, ownership, and
common financing. During the process of decentralization,
decision making authority and management of health care services
was transferred from the national level to the regional and district
levels [23]. With the unprecedented opportunities offered by
mobile phones to communicate with rural audiences, Ghana’s
Health Sector reforms made room for the maximum use of ICTs.
The Ghana Health Service (GHS) intends to coordinate and
mainstream all m-Health projects in Ghana to derive the
maximum benefit for the people, ensure sustainability and
ownership after the pilots by the current implementing
organizations for the project to survive beyond the donor-funded
period.
4.1.1 Health Sector Strategies in Ghana
Poor people often lack access to services, because of physical and
financial barriers, lack of information, unavailability of care, and
other factors [9].
[14] adds, “Although developed-world newsflashes tell us that
the whole world is “wired” and that people in the farthest reaches
globally are able to surf the ’net, the reality is that the poorest of
the poor do not have access to even the most basic of health
information.
A recent analysis showed that young women from the poorest
households in 12 low and middle income countries were more
likely to enter in early marriages, to have given birth at an early
age, and to be less likely to be using maternal health services [54].
It must be noted that the response to exploitation of ICTs in the
health sector in Ghana has been only modest, what with continued
low bandwidth problems causing a digital divide between the
health headquarters in the capital and the various regions. The
promise of mobile technology is what could speed up the
transformation process- recognized by that part of the sector ICT
373
Policy and Strategy’s plan of work which states the wish to,”
improve efficiency of health delivery by improving both
management and technical efficiency of the sector through
reliable information dissemination systems and by supporting the
decision –making process through the prompt availability of
information for all decision-makers” [24].
The Mobile Technology for Community Health (MoTeCH)
initiative recognized Ghana Government’s desire according to its
ICT Policy to, “improve ICT infrastructure in the health sector by
networking all health facilities and by providing adequate ICT
tools and service delivery management.’’, albeit on a smaller pilot
scale as a beginning. In 2007, strategies and priorities were
articulated [21] within the context of Government’s development
agenda as spelt out in the GPRS and of the three priority areas for
transforming Ghana into a Middle Income Country by 2015
include, Private Sector Development, Good Governance and
Human Resource Development. The Ghana Reproductive Health
Strategic Plan (2007-2011) includes six high-level objectives
under its Safe Motherhood Policy, the first of which is to “reduce
maternal morbidity and mortality.”
In the author’s consultation with Ghana’s Head of Monitoring and
Evaluation Department of the Ministry of Health Dr. A. Ofosu, he
emphasized that ‘the use of mobile devices in the health sector in
Ghana, has been increasing over the past five years. There are
various pilot projects in Ghana where mobile devices are being
used to; collect health data, facilitate Telemedicine, provide health
messages to clients, follow-up children and women to reduce
drop-out from service, manage logistics to reduce stock-outs,
conduct Health Surveys and conduct facilitative supervision.’
The mobile devices in use range from Pocket digital Assistants to
simple phones and smart phones. Some of the initial pilots, using
mobile devices, used pocket digital assistants, due to the low
telephone network coverage. With the increase in availability of
mobile communication service providers, phones of varying
complexity have become the choice tool for use in various fields
in health. Mobile technology holds immense potential for
addressing health delivery bottlenecks. Indeed mobile devices will
become as important as the stethoscope in the years ahead, Dr.
Ofosu added.
4.1.1.1 The Mobile Technologies for Community
Health (MoTeCH) Initiative
Improved maternal health, as is well known, is a major indicator
for development and global initiatives to intensify policy
intervention for maternal mortality began with the Safe
Motherhood Initiative in 1987, a response to growing recognition
that primary health-care programmes in many developing
countries were not adequately focused on maternal health [10]. In
an article by Rosemary Ardayfio titled ‘Improved Maternal
Health. An Indicator of Development,’ reference was made to
health delivery in the Northern Region ‘which is beset with
several challenges including poor road networks, lack of
electricity and inadequate community health workers’ [3].
[1] in a paper, also discussing obstacles challenging maternal
health in Ghana, listed them as limited geographical access by
some clients, limited human resources; ageing midwives, and their
numbers, inadequate funding, inadequate collaboration among

Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) and between
MDAs and the Private sector, Socio-economic challenges, Lower
literacy rate among females leading to low empowerment level,
high poverty levels and poor health-seeking behaviours. Low risk
perception. Service availability is also low and where available
utilization is generally low especially in the rural and peri-urban
areas, not forgetting harmful traditional practices.
When ICTs are integrated into donor strategies implementation of
programmes in developing countries produce effective results; the
degree of corruption is reduced and democracy heightened.
Within this context, the Ghana MoTeCH initiative which begun
May 2010, aims to determine whether mobile phones can be an
effective tool in managing healthcare data and transmitting health
information to remote populations, with the ultimate goal of
empowering rural folks by improving maternal and child health
outcomes in rural Ghana. The project is led by the Ghana Health
Services, in partnership with Columbia University’s Mailman
School of Public Health and the Grameen Foundation. It is funded
by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. MoTeCH is currently
in its pilot phase, with plans to expand throughout Ghana in the
future. The Upper East is one of the smallest and least urbanized
regions in Ghana, with 85 percent of the population living in
dispersed communities throughout the rural areas [58].
The low population density and infrastructure barriers create a
challenge for health care delivery, necessitating a communitybased
approach. Over the past decade or so, Ghana has been
operating its Community Health Planning and Services (CHPS)
program, which utilizes traditional institutions and social
networks with support from outreach nurses employed by the
Ministry of Health to reach as many people in the rural areas as
possible. It is on these CHPS centers and the nurses who work
there, in particular, that MoTeCH focuses its efforts [[58] informs.
The local communities’ aspect of the project investigates the
question, “Can mobile phones be utilized to meaningfully answer
questions and provide information to individuals in impoverished
rural communities in a way that promotes better health
practices[11];[6] evaluates the project as designed to answer
policy questions regarding possible health service benefits of
information technology. It is expected to build upon the promising
healthcare reform efforts underway in Ghana by examining the
feasibility of utilizing mobile phone technology for reforming
routine health information operations and improving community
healthcare worker efficiency and health service effectiveness. The
project is working toward this goal by: reviewing existing health
information systems and assessing community health service
information needs, designing standardized registers for client
information for community-based nurses; developing a
community service delivery system for testing mobile phonebased
information systems for improving maternal, newborn, and
early childhood care; developing the district health management
system software needed to accommodate mobile phonetransmitted
service information; eavaluating the impact of mobile
phone technology introduction on health service volume and
delivery, and disseminating lessons learned about mobile phone
applications to key stakeholders, policy makers, and health system
managers so that, if effective, this type of data gathering can be
replicated in similar settings [7].
374
Figure 1. Main Flows of Client and Reporting for MoTeCH
Information Source: (Grameen Foundation, March, 2011)
Figure 2. MoTeCH Impact (Author)
are increasingly using mobile phones to create new livelihoods to
enhance their lifestyles, while governments are using them to
improve service delivery and citizen feedback mechanisms
5. IMPACT ASSESSMENT
5.1 Acceptance
Mobile phones, are opening up a powerful new avenue of
ommunication and information‐sharing for the population, and a
alberg Global Development Advisors study, commissioned by the
UN Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology
Partnership notes that monitoring and evaluation efforts can face
critical challenges in the short term, particularly with limited
budgets to fund such activities such as the MoTeCH initiative
[55]. As mHealth applications improve the process of data
collection and the incorporation of data into decision making, will
provide a foundation upon which to conduct long-term impact
evaluations.
In the MoTeCH context, one could safely say the target
population has developed the capabilities for effective use of the
mobile phone since the women feel less afraid and are more
confident because the information conveyed is coming from
health professionals. The messages are also helping them to

change their behaviour, improve their diet, seek care when they
need it, and convince their husbands and families that many
traditional beliefs and practices may not be good for the mother or
baby [25].
Nurses meanwhile are reporting that women are indeed coming to
the health facility because of information received through the
mobile phone. Additionally, the time that nurses save in not
having to aggregate their monthly data returns manually, due to
the electronic reports MoTeCH generates, means significantly
more time can be spent on patient care. Efficiency and
effectiveness are illustrated here.
The Upper East Regional Director of Health Services, Dr Koku
Awoonor-Williams, has said MoTeCH has improved health care
delivery after its inception in some districts in the region There
are improvements in deliveries from 45 percent to 52 percent and
postnatal registrants from 26.9 percent to 63 percent [6]. This
makes it possible to assert that MoTeCH has empowered pregnant
women and new mothers to make the right choices concerning
their conditions or even protected their human rights.
5.2 Sustainability
[28], in focusing on sustainable mobile Health or m-Health in
developing countries, has noted that Health projects are far more
likely to be sustainable in cases where buy-in from governmental
or public bodies is secured. In this way, the project is
institutionalized into existing government health programs and
can receive budget attention. It is very important that a mobile
Health project have the support of government. Ghana has done
this through its Health Sector reforms which have made room for
the maximum use of ICTs. The majority of m-Health projects are
currently funded by international agencies or corporate social
responsibility (CSR) initiatives of companies. For every m-Health
project, therefore, it is critical to ensure that the program is
aligned with the strategic goals of the national health system.
Even though health sector funding has gradually increased over
the years, the percentage that goes into actual service delivery
remains low. About 90% of the health sector budget is spent on
salaries and wages; since 2006 the share allocated to capital
spending has dropped [41] continued. Current policy
environments, business models and funding schemes around m-
Health have fuelled the proliferation of pilot projects without
enabling them to scale up in a meaningful, replicable way. An
additional, and perhaps most significant, obstacle to improving
and scaling the implementation of m-Health initiatives is the lack
of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and use of meaningful,
consistent indicators and rigorous evaluation methods [36]
laments. Additionally, [39] point out, “to overcome these
obstacles around cost, access, and standards, healthcare systems
must be highly innovative and inventive in their approach to
delivering services. One way is to leverage the experience of other
sectors that have used technology to improve their processes’ To
avoid implementations such as MoTeCH being seen as a
temporary project, visible ownership by the local implementation
partner needs to be built in from the outset. Involvement of the
375
local partner needs to be not only in decision-making at the top
but also in day-to-day management in the field [25].
While these have been possible with the project, there is the need
to step up future plans and actions of participants which could be
used to customize future like-minded programs. As is well known,
mobile phone usage in whatever field whether agriculture,
banking and so on, derive from livelihood needs.
The MoTeCH initiative recognized Ghana Government’s desire
to, “improve ICT infrastructure in the health sector by networking
all health facilities and by providing adequate ICT tools and
service delivery management’’[24].
The subject of long term sustainability is however in doubt. [25]
believes that for MoTeCH system to survive beyond the life of the
grant, ‘A broader country strategy for m-Health will help with
sustainability.’
This means if the Ministry of Health and Ghana Health Service
could develop a comprehensive strategy for how m-Health will be
approached, it should facilitate NGOs and other stakeholders
coming together to design programs that fit together; a measure
for continuous evaluation of systems, as one passes through
various stages of implementation. Its framework too, can be tested
on real or simulated environment to prove its worthiness the
Foundation emphasizes.
5.3 Awareness
By mobilizing supply and demand, MoTeCH manages to deploy
important and relevant messages to the target population.
Community Health Workers (CHOs) transmit information
obtained through the mobile phone to the patient database which
in turn gets automatic reporting to the Ghana Health Service.
Alerts and reminders are sent to CHO from patient database which
facilitate scheduling of home visits in communities, ensure that
services to pregnant women are provided in a timely manner.
These include reminders on vaccinations for children. These
reminders serve as awareness channels for the target population.
There is broad agreement therefore, that access to communication
is one of several essential components to enhance improvement in
maternal health services. Here, the use of mobile phones has much
potential. However, there is a need for robust evidence on
constraints and impacts, especially when financial and human
resources will be invested say [37].
5.4 Implications of Mobile Phone Usage
This paper believes in the suggestion that human capital is created
by changing persons so as to give them skills and capabilities that
make them able to act in new and improved ways. Development
of the capabilities for effective use of a mobile phone also leads to
enhancement of social capital or empowerment as noted
elsewhere in this paper. Malcolm Gladwell said “poverty is not
deprivation. It is isolation.” Often the “smallest technological
advances create the largest social impacts” [22].
Communication is important and universal and this paper affirms
that mobile technology helps provide a cure against the isolation.
6. DISCUSSION
While the benefits are undeniable, mobility comes at its own
price. It is imperative to plan extensively before deployment and

continue monitoring after implementation to prevent issues and
maintain an optimal user experience. The benefits of mobile
technology, combined with the improvement that mobile phones
offer over PDA's in terms of data loss and uploading difficulties,
make mobile phones a feasible method of data collection that
needs to be further explored. Mobile-phone based technology for
health is an emerging field in addressing health problems in the
developing world declares [14], but it is imperative to note that
most of the world –wide initiatives are disease specific and
importantly, they are not integrated into health strategies, as
Ghana is doing. Without integration into national ICT Policies,
inefficiencies in this m-Health system remain unaddressed. For
example, MoTeCH would have failed if PDAs and smart phones
were used because they are expensive; this obviously makes
impact of these initiatives more often than not “methodologically
unsound”. MoTeCH is not disease-specific. Its focus is to improve
access to a broad range of essential health services with special
emphasis on pregnant women and infants.
eHealth technologies according to [61] are essential when they are
firstly, integrated into health services that meet basic needs,
secondly, have been proven to be cost-efficient and also, when
they meet well-defined specifications and have been validated
through controlled clinical studies or rest on a widely accepted
consensus by experts.
The Head of Monitoring and Evaluation of the Ministry of Health
in Ghana Dr Ofosu has admitted, during the author’s
consultations, that the MoTeCH innovation was possible because
of a mixture of factors including the significant health gaps,
targeted private and public funding, and most important of all, the
flourishing mobile markets. With the use of Mobile phones it is
easy to track health outcomes and deviations may improve the
healthcare system's ability to assess population health. Similarly,
mobile applications could be used to track health trends as an
early indicator of emerging health issues.
On the question of trends that have developed as a result of the
use of mobile technology, Dr. Ofosu mentioned that, the effect
has been ‘huge’ in his words, ‘increase demand for services that
makes service adjust to accommodate the increase contributes to
improvement in quality of care.’ In other words, there is improved
access to data for generating information for decision making.
This definitely leads to an improvement in post-treatment
understanding. Mobile technology gives pregnant women and the
Community Health workers, a convenient medium to monitor ante
and post natal instructions and double check prescriptions.
Medication accuracy, a huge patient safety issue, could improve
as a result. One can therefore, safely assume that MoTeCH mainly
addresses information gap in pregnant women and the population
- a way to advance the use of mobile telephony to support the
achievement of the Millennium Development Goals for health.
Research has revealed the beneficial outcome of savings of
transportation costs, time and also the ability to reallocate the
saved income from travel to other important activities. Overall,
however, there is lack of empirical data and research concerning
how the poor absorb the costs of mobile phones, and uncertainty
about possible negative outcomes associated with the reallocation
of cash resources such as between male and female household
members [17]. Evaluation is part of a process that can determine
cost-effectiveness, and involves educating the public about the
benefits of m-Health, and leads to government policy – all of
which were reported as among the most important barriers to m-
376
Health adoption by Member States [59]. Despite the need for
evaluation, a survey found that results-based evaluation of m-
Health implementations is not routinely conducted. Only 12% of
Member States reported evaluating m-Health services. This may
be because short term challenges of limited funding are faced by
the implementing agencies. m-Health applications improve the
process of data collection and the incorporation of data into
decision making, Thus providing a foundation upon which to
conduct long-term impact evaluations [57]. The use of mobile
phones in the health sector as confirmed by [33] and, necessarily
leads to; quick, timely high quality affordable healthcare for all,
everywhere, at any time; overcomes shortage of healthcare staff
and funding and optimization of patient care; Enhances preventive
care; Protects human rights; and educates and thus empowers
citizens, and so on.
7. CONCLUSIONS
Currently, there has been a proliferation of multiple approaches to
thinking about health systems and there are many ways in which
the term “health system strengthening” is used [37]. The
penetration of mobile phone networks in many low- and middleincome
countries surpasses other infrastructure such as paved
roads and electricity, and dwarfs fixed Internet deployment. The
growing sophistication of these networks – offering higher and
higher speeds of data transmission alongside cheaper and more
powerful handsets – are transforming the way health services and
information are accessed, delivered, and managed. With increased
accessibility comes the possibility of greater personalization and
citizen-focused public health and medical care [59].
Universally speaking, cellular technology has six main intrinsic
features appropriate for its adoption in developing countries: low
infrastructure investment, ease of use, low energy consumption,
affordability of services and devices, surpassing unfavorable
geographic structures and less vulnerability to vandalism and
natural disasters than other technologies. With a myriad of
obstacles preventing low-income countries from increasing their
ICT uptake, this paper shows that Ghana’s MoTeCH project is
truly cutting-edge. It fills critical knowledge gaps about the
feasibility of using mobile phone technology to improve routine
maternal health information operations, and demonstrates the
possibility of using information systems as a tool to deliver
community healthcare more efficiently and effectively [7].
However, still in its infancy, mHealth runs the risk of not realizing
full potential due to small‐scale implementations and pilot
projects with limited reach. [37] has insisted in research work on
the topic with others. The Ghana Health Service admits that little
research has been done on the feasibility of utilizing mobile phone
technology for reforming routine health information operations
and improving community health care worker efficiency and
health service effectiveness. Also, few studies have investigated
the use of mobile phones as a data collection tool in low income
countries. [46] suggests; with the increasing application of ICT
and e-networks within countries, the concept of e-governance has
arisen. E-governance deals with the whole spectrum of the
relationships and networks within government that involve the use
and application of ICTs as shown in Chart 1 of the MoTeCH
initiative. Similarly, the advent of global ICT networks and
globalization is challenging these recent concepts, and global ehealth
governance is emerging as a major issue, Scott continued.
A concluding question for future research is how to control

activities such as the MoTeCH partnership (health related and
otherwise) that increasingly reside in the hands of globally
distributed entities.
8. REFERENCES
[1] Aboagye, D. (2005). Achieving MDGs 4 & 5. WHO.
[2] African Economic Outlook. (2011). Ghana. AfDB, OECD,
UNDP, UNECA.
[3] Ardayfio, R. (2012, March 26th). Improved Maternal Health.
Major indicator of development. Daily Graphic , p. 11.
[4] Arora, S. Strategies in e-Governance.
http://www.mgsipap.org/egov-conference.
[5] Asheeta Bhavnani, R. W.-W. (June, 2008). The role of
Mobile Phones in Sustainable Rural Poverty Reduction .
Washington, DC: UN ICT Policy Division (GICT).
[6] Awoonor-Williams, D. J. (2012). MoTeCH - Population and
Family Health. NY: Colombia University.
[7] Awoonor-Williams, J. K. (2012). Mobile Technology for
Community Health. Population and Family Health .
[8] Boateng, V. (2009). E-Government and e-Health Strategies.
ECOSOC Africa Regional Ministerial Meeting on e-Health :
E-Government and E-Health Strategies. Accra: ECOSOC.
[9] Bos, E. (2008). Improving Maternal Health:The need to
focus on reaching the poor. The World Bank.
[10] Campbell, O. M. What Are Maternal Health Policies in
Developing Countries and Who Drives Them? A Review of
the Last Half-century. London: UK DID -JSI Europe.
[11] Center, D. P. (August 2009). MOTECH: m-Health
Ethnography Report. Grameen Foundation.
[12] Chetley, A. (2006). Improving Health, Connecting people:
the role of ICTs in the health sector of developing countries.
INFODEV.
[13] Chib, A. (20-21 May, 2009). The Aceh Besar Midwives with
Mobile Phones Program: Design and Evaluation Perspectives
using the Information and Communication Technologies for
Healthcare Model. Pre-conference workshop at the
International Communication Association (ICA)
Conference“Mobile 2.0: Beyond Voice?”. Chicago, Illinois:
International Communication Association (ICA).
[14] Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
Ghana Health Service. Grameen Foundation. (n.d.).
MoTeCH: A Comprehensive Overview. Mobile Technology
for Community Health .
[15] Davidson, W. B. (2012). The GIT Report- Mobile
Broadband:Redefining Internet Access and Empowering
Individuals. GENEVA: WEF/INSEAD.
[16] Donner, J. (7-8 June 2004). Innovations in Mobile-Based
Public Health Information Systems in the Developing
World:An example from Rwanda. Mobile Technologies and
Health: Benefits and Risks. Udine (Italy): The Center for
Global Health and Economic Development The Mailman
School of Public Health The Earth Institute at Columbia
University.
377
[17] Duncombe, R. (2012). Understanding Mobile Phone Imact
on Livlihoods in Developing Countries: A New Research
Framework. Manchester: University of Manchester.
[18] Dzidonu, P. C. (2005). Ministerial ICT Policy- Opening
statement. Accra, Ghana: Ministry of Communications -
Government of Ghana.
[19] Fredriksson, T. (2010). The Growing Possibilities of
Information and Communication Technologies for Reducing
Poverty. Geneva: The Global Information Technology
Report 2010–2011 © 2011 World Economic Forum.
[20] Frempong, G. (2010). Ghana ICT Sector Performance
Review Performance Review.2009/2010 . Towards Evidence
-based ICT Policy and Regulation. ResearchICTAfrica.net ,
Volume 2 Policy Paper 8.
[21] Ghana Health Service. (May 2009). Ghana Maternal Health
Survey 2007. Accra: Ghana Statistical Service,Ghana Health
Service,Macro International Inc.
[22] Gladwell, M. (2009). The Tipping Point. Social Implications
of Mobile Technology in Developing Worlds .
[24] GoG. (2007). National health policy: Creating wealth
through health. Accra: Government of Ghana- MInistry of
Health.
[25] Government of Ghana. (2005). Ghana ICT4AD Policy.
Retrieved April 6th, 2012, from
http://www.ict.gov.gh/pdf/Ghana%20ICT4AD%20Policy.pdf
[26] Grameen Foundation. (March, 2011). Mobile Technology for
Community Health in Ghana- Early Lessons Learned.
Grameen Foundation.
[27] Greenberg, A. (2005). ICTs for Poverty Alleviation:Basic
Tool and Enabling Sector. Montreal: SIDA.
[28] Harry McConnell, w. P. (2008). Leapfrog technologies for
health and development . Global Forum Update on Research
for Health Volume 5- Technological Innovations.
[29] Iluyemi, A. (2007). Mobile eHealth for health workers in
developing countires:impacts on organisational process, and
users' behaviour-Research in progress. Portsmouth, UK:
University of Portsmouth.
[30] Internet World Statistics. (2001-2012, April 1). Internet
World Stats- Usage and Poulation Statistics. Retrieved April
7th, 2012, from Internet World Stats.
[31] ITU. (2010). National e-Strategies for Development. Global
Status and Perspectives 2010. GENEVA: ITU.
[32] ITU. (2012). Report of the Partnership on Measuring
Information and Communication Technology for
Development. UNSTATS.
[33] ITU. (2011). The World in 2011-ICT Facts and Figures.
Geneva: ITU.
[34] ITU-D. (2010). Mobile eHealth Solutions for Developing
Countries- qUESTION 14 2-2. Geneva: ITU.
[35] Jayanthy Maniam, C. C. (2007). Mobile Phone based
Pregnancy Support System . Washington DC USA: UNPAN.

[36] Juniper Research. (2011, April 13). The Mobile Healthcare
Opportunity-Monitoring, Applications & mHealth Strategies
2010 - 2014. Juniper Research Reports , p. 83 pages.
[37] Lemaire, J. (December 2011). Scaling up Mobile
health:Elements necessary for the successful scale up of
mHealth in developing countries. Advanced Development
for Africa.
[38] Marchal B, C. A. (2009). Global Health Actors Claim To
Support Health System. PLoS Medicine Volume 6 | Issue 4,.
[39] Margaret C Hogan, K. J. (April 12, 2010). Maternal mortality
for 181 countries, 1980–2008:. The Lancet .
[40] McKinsey and Company and GSMA. (2010). mHealth a new
vision for healthcare. London, Milan and Gurgaon Haryana:
United Nations Foundation.
[41] NCA- Ghana. (2011, October). Broadband Wireless Access
(BWA)Licences in the 2500MHz – 2690MHz Band. Accra,
Ghana.
[43] OAU. (2001). Abuja Declaration on HIV/AIDS,Tuberculosis
and other Related Infectious Diseases. African Summit on
HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and other Related Infectious
Diseases (pp. 1-8). Abuja: OAU.
[44] OECD. (2003). Integrating Information and Communication
Technologies in Development Programmes. OECD Policy
Brief .
[45] Osei, D. A. (2007). Implementation of the National Health
Insurance Scheme (NHIS) in Ghana: experience sharing.
Cape Town.
[46] Rappaport, J. (1985). The power of empowerment language.
Social Policy, 16(2), , 15-21.
[47] Rifat A. Atun, S. R. (2005). Uses and Benefits of SMS in
Healthcare Delivery. Centre for Health Management, Tanaka
Business School. Imperial College London , V21.1.
[48] Scott, R. E. (2009). Global e-health policy: from concept to
strategy. canada: IDRC.
[49] Sheila Kinkade, K. V. (2008). Wireless Technology for
Social Change:Trends in Mobile Use by NGOs. Washington,
DC / Newbury, UK: United Nations Foundation: Vodafone
Group Foundation.
[50] Singh, B. a. (2007).
[52] Soumitra Dutta, B. B.-O. (2012). The GITREPORT 2012-The
Networked Index 2012. GENEVA: WEF/INSEAD.
[53] Tevie, M. W. (2012, February 12). Director-Generalof
National IT Authority (NITA). (J. E. Awotwi, Interviewer)
378
[54] Touré, D. H. (2012). Mobile Broadband Vision and The
Broadband Commission. Mobile World Congress (MWC
2012)-Government Mobile Forum . Barcelona, Spain: ITU.
[55] Trevor Lewis, C. S. (2012). E-Health in Low-and-middle -
income countries:findings from the Center for Health Market
Innovations. Bull World Health Organization , 332-340.
[56] UNESC & ECA. (2003). Report on e-Strategies in
Africa:National, Sectoral and Regional ICT Policies, Plans
and Strategies. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: UN Economic and
Social Council and Economic Commission of Africa.
[57] UNFPA. (2009). UNFPA's Contribution To The Joint UN
Accelerated Support to Countries in Maternal and Newborn
Health. UNFPA.
[58] United Nations Foundation & Vodafone Foundation
Technology Partnership. (2011, February). Health
Informationas Healthcare - The Roleof Mobiles in unlocking
Health Data and WellnessS. Washington,D.C.: United
Nations Foundation & Vodafone Foundation Technology
Partnership.
[59] Varatharajan Durairaj, S. D. (2010). Ghana's Approach to
Social Health Protection-World Health Report
(2010).Background Paper, 2. Geneva: WHO.
[60] Vital Wave Consulting. (2009). mHealth for Development-
The Opportunity of Mobile Technology for Healthcare in the
Developing World. Washington D.C. USA and Newbury,
Berkshire, UK: United Nations Foundation and Vodafone
Foundation.
[61] Weinstein, J. (2011, June Wednesday 8th). MoTeCH's
Mobile Apps Bridging Rural Gap for Pregnant Women.
Retrieved April Saturday 7th, 2012, from NextBillion.net.
[62] WHO. (2011). mHealth- New Horizons for health through
mobile technologies. Global Observatory for eHealth Series ,
Volume 3.
[63] WHO. (1986). Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion.
International Conference on Health Promotion. Ottawa:
Health and Welfare Canada, Canadian Public Health
organization.
[64] WHO. (2004). STRATEGY 2004-2007. eHealth for Healthcare
Delivery. Taking basic health solutions to countries.
Geneva: WHO.
[65] WHO. (2009). World Health Statistics, 2009. Geneva: World
Health Organisation.
[66] Wikihealth. (n.d.). ICT in Health care delivery system: A
Framework for developing nations. Retrieved April 5th,
2012, from ICT for Health.

If We Build it Will They Come? A Mixed-Method
Exploration of High Speed Broadband Access and
Economic Development
ABSTRACT
High speed broadband internet is often heralded as an effective
economic development tool. To realize the purported benefits of
broadband services, federal, state and local governments are
investing in its expansion. However, the relationship between high
speed broadband and the economic health of North Carolina
communities is unknown. Using quantitative and qualitative
methods, this study explores the relationship between high speed
broadband and the economic health and economic development
activities in North Carolina.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
B.4.3[INPUT/OUTPUT AND DATA COMMUNICATIONS]:
Interconnections (Subsystems) - Fiber Optics; C.2.5
[COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS]: Local and
Wide-Area Networks - High Speed (Fiber), Internet; G.3
[MATHEMATICS OF COMPUTING]: Probability and Statistics
- Correlation and Regression Analysis, Multivariate Statistics;
K.4.2 [COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY]: Social Issues -
Employment
General Terms
Measurement, Economics, Theory
Keywords
High Speed Broadband, Economic Development, ICT, North
Carolina
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background
High speed broadband internet (hereafter referred to as
broadband), defined by the FCC as a connection of at least 768
kbps downstream and greater than 200 kbps upstream at the time
of this analysis, is often heralded as an effective economic
development tool. Proponents argue it should enhance
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
Amy Huffman
Center for Public Technology
CB #3330
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
arhuffman7@gmail.com
379
communities’ ability to attract new businesses and industries
while retaining and improving their existing businesses [6]. To
realize broadband’s projected economic and social benefits,
federal, state and local governments are investing in its expansion
[9]. In North Carolina, several governmental agencies and nonprofits
such as the Golden LEAF Foundation, MCNC, and local
governments invested in building a broadband infrastructure with
hopes of positive results [16]. However, the literature on the
relationship between broadband and economic growth is mixed
and little research on its impact on NC communities has been
conducted to date.
1.2. Literature Review
While ample research on broadband’s overall impact on society
exists, few studies focus exclusively on its impact on the
economic health of local economies and their economic
development efforts. However, several studies measure and
analyze the relationship between broadband infrastructure and
economic growth. Czernick et. al, argue an increase in broadband
availability positively impacts economic growth at a macro-level
as their data from 25 OECD countries over eleven years (1996-
2007) to draw these conclusions [2]. Koutroumpis also studied 22
OECD countries from 2002-2007 to measure broadband’s impact
on economic growth using a structural econometric model
measuring the supply of and demand for broadband infrastructure
[10]. He found evidence for a significant causal positive link
between broadband infrastructure and economic growth [10]. Lehr
et al. found broadband access positively impacts economic growth
through statistical analysis of broadband penetration at the state
level nationwide, individual communities, and a matched sample
analysis of residential and small businesses broadband use [11].
Kolko found similar results in California [9]. Kolko’s research,
however, questioned whether a causal relationship between
broadband infrastructure and economic growth exists [9]. He
noted it is unclear whether there indeed is a causal relationship or
if the correlation is a function of advancements in other areas [9].
Kolko also suggested that while broadband expansion offers some
economic benefits, the economic benefits to individual citizens
are limited [9].
Ford & Koutsky studied the impact municipal investment in
broadband expansion has on economic growth [6]. They used an
econometric model to compare one county, Lake County, who
possessed an extensive municipally-owned broadband network, in
comparison to other counties in Florida [6]. The authors found
Lake County’s economic activity doubled relative to comparable
Florida counties [6]. In addition, the authors also argued
municipal broadband infrastructure is more successful than

private broadband infrastructure in improving economic growth
[6].
Other studies focused on geography and demographics and their
relationship to broadband’s economic impact. Horrigan et al.
found that broadband use increases in larger cities, cities with
large telecommunications-intensive economic sectors and other
demographics heavily influence broadband use [7]. Kandilov and
Renkow question whether an investment made by the US
Broadband Loan Program or sheer proximity to urban areas is a
better predictor of economic growth [8]. They used quantitative
data and an econometric model to measure the impact the US
Broadband Loan Program has had on increasing economic vitality
in rural areas [8]. Their findings suggest the positive outcomes are
not a result of the loan program, but of a specific location’s
proximity to other urban areas [8].
The FCC’s National Broadband Plan suggests the absence of
broadband infrastructure is more important in a business’s
location decision than the presence of broadband. The report
predicts, “Communities without broadband infrastructure will find
it more difficult to attract investment,” [4]. Similarly, in a survey
conducted by the International Economic Development Council,
broadband was determined to be one of many factors that
influence business’s location decisions [14].
Thus, while some studies suggest broadband is important in
stimulating economic growth still others argue proximity to urban
areas is more influential than broadband in increasing economic
growth, indicating the disagreement among scholars on
broadband’s influence on economic health in local communities
[2, 6, 8, 10, 11]. To date, research also suggests businesses
consider broadband during the location decision process, although
the absence of broadband is more important than its presence in
their decision [4, 14]. NC specific research is limited, and the
relationship between broadband and economic growth and
broadband and economic development efforts in NC communities
is currently unknown.
2. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
As long as these gaps in the literature and empirical research
remain, North Carolina local governments have little information
on how their current broadband infrastructure impacts their local
economy and even less information to guide their use of
broadband to improve economic development efforts. This study
seeks to understand the impact broadband has on the economic
health of North Carolina counties and what some communities are
doing to utilize broadband to improve their economic well-being
through economic development efforts. To inform local
governments how to best leverage broadband as an economic
development tool while addressing the gap in the existing
literature on broadband access and economic development this
study addresses the following research questions:
How has access to high speed broadband internet affected North
Carolina communities’ 1 economic health?
1
For the purposes of this study, community(ies) is defined as a
county or a municipality.
380
How are some North Carolina communities’ using high speed
broadband internet to support their economic development
efforts?
3. METHODOLOGY
3.1. Overview
To understand the county level impact and the strategic
implications of broadband on NC communities’ economies and
their economic development efforts, a mixed-method, two phased
approach was employed. North Carolina was chosen because of
the author’s affiliation with the state as a North Carolina native. In
addition, this study focuses on North Carolina as a complement to
the current “Rural Broadband Initiative Evaluation,” of
broadband’s impact in North Carolina being conducted by the
UNC-School of Government’s Center for Public Technology [16].
The county was the primary unit of analysis for phase one, while
the level of analysis in phase two was the community, which
includes two counties and one municipality.
In phase one, a series of correlations were performed to first
determine if a relationship between broadband and the economic
health of communities existed. After a significant relationship was
found, a multivariate regression was performed to determine the
level of impact broadband has on employment growth in North
Carolina’s 100 counties. Employment growth rate, a proxy for the
health or performance of a local economy, from 2005 to 2010 was
chosen as the dependent variable [1, 15]. Data were collected for
the model’s seven independent variables: broadband penetration,
proximity to urban county, projected education level, population
density, median household income, annual average temperature
(a proxy for climate as an influential factor in location decisions),
and average unemployment rate. Each independent variable was
chosen to represent different factors traditionally considered to
impact employment growth rate [1, 15].
In phase two, comparative case studies of three communities
provide an in-depth understanding of broadband’s impact on
economic development efforts at the community level,
specifically addressing the second research question.
Communities with known investments in high-speed connectivity
were explicitly chosen so lessons on how to best use broadband as
an economic development tool could be gained. Experts in the
field identified several communities satisfying this requirement,
after which a standardized selection method considering
geography, jurisdictional type, economic tier level, as defined by
the North Carolina Department of Commerce, and broadband
ownership further narrowed the list of qualified communities [13].
Catawba County, Rutherford County and the City of Wilson were
selected based on their fulfillment of the selection criteria. Data
were gathered through eleven semi-structured interviews with
local government officials 2 and other experts identified through
expert selection and snowball sampling. The interviews consisted
of a standard set of fifteen pre-tested interview questions. Content
analysis was performed then coded for theme development.
3.2. Limitations
2 Interviewees identities are anonymous and confidential, thus any
identifier such as their position or title is not listed to further
ensure their anonymity.

The methodology contains inherent limitations. The standard data
available for measuring broadband penetration in the United
States is a scaled measure rather than an exact number of
households subscribing to broadband services, or the penetration
rate. 3 The scaled measure is inherently a weak measure because
of its inability to account for slight differences in the penetration
rate. It only encapsulates large differences, thus a granular
investigation of broadband’s impact on employment growth is not
possible with the available data. However, until more granular
data is made more widely available to researchers, the use of this
data is standard. In addition, data for the penetration rate is not
available at the county level prior to December of 2008 [5]. By
2008, much of the broadband infrastructure had been installed in
North Carolina, thus determining the precise economic effect
broadband has on economic growth is not possible with the
current data.
The employment growth rate and unemployment rate data were
skewed due to the financial recession between 2008 and 2010. As
such, employment and unemployment growth rates were
calculated from 2005-2010 to account for any variance the
recession may have caused. The interviews were subject to
respondent induced biases as most interviewees had a vested
interest in their community’s high-speed broadband infrastructure
and thus strongly believe it improves their economic development
efforts. Finally, due to time and resource constraints,
representatives of the business communities were not included in
the interview sample. As such, secondary sources provide
information on broadband’s effect on business’ location decisions.
4. ANALYSIS
4.1 Quantitative Analysis
Understanding how broadband currently affects the local
economy fosters the design of policies and strategies that more
comprehensively address issues facing broadband expansion and
its relationship to the local economy and economic development
efforts. For this reason, a quantitative analysis, consisting of
correlations and a multivariate regression, was undertaken to
explore the relationship between broadband and the overall
economic health of North Carolina counties.
The correlation for broadband penetration and employment
growth was .327, demonstrating a relationship between broadband
and employment growth rate exists. The multivariate regression
model, which controls for variables that typically influence
employment growth, indicates broadband availability does not
significantly influence the employment growth rate between 2005
3 FCC Form 477 measures Residential Fixed High-Speed
Connections at least 768 kbps downstream and greater than 200
kbps upstream per 1000 Households (BTOP/BIP Definition) on
a scale of zero to five on the following scale: 1=Greater than
0 and less than/equal to 200 households connected per 1000
households 2=Greater than 200 and less than/equal to 400
households connected per 1000 households 3=Greater than 400
and less than/equal to 600 households connected per 1000
households 4=Greater than 600 and less than/equal to 800
households connected per 1000 households 5=Greater than 800
households connected per 1000 households
381
and 2010. As shown in Figure 1, the model’s adjusted r squared
was .364, however, broadband penetration’s significance was
.266, indicating it has no influence on the employment growth rate
between 2005 and 2010.
Model Summary
Model R R Square Adjusted
R Square
Std. Error
of the
Estimate
1 .639 .409 .364 5.19031
Figure 1. Regression Model Summary
Many factors could cause broadband’s lack of significance in
influencing the employment growth rate. However, its lack of
significance in the current model is at least in part due to the high
level of penetration in North Carolina by 2008. For example, a
2007 e-NC Authority report found that at that time broadband was
available to 79.64 % of residents in rural counties and 86.98% of
residents in urban counties [3]. As access increases, the relative
level of its impact on economic growth diminishes or decreases
[12]. Thus, it is likely North Carolina has already realized the
majority of the possible economic gains broadband, as it is
currently measured, fosters. Henceforth it is likely broadband’s
impact on economic growth will be more localized, occurring at
an individual community or even sub-community level; which
may not hold significance at the county level if economic gains
are not widespread.
4.2 Qualitative Analysis
The qualitative analysis’s primary goal is to provide an in-depth
understanding of how broadband affects economic development
efforts at the community level. The case studies were compared
and contrasted on the following dimensions: background and
contextual information, broadband’s use in supporting business
recruitment, retention and expansion, and its use in other
economic development efforts.
4.2.1 Catawba County
Catawba County’s broadband infrastructure was primarily
installed by private providers who continue to provide services to
both citizens and businesses. Between 400 and 600 residents per
1000 residents have access to broadband in Catawba County. 4
Catawba County primarily uses broadband to recruit, retain and
expand businesses, specifically high-tech data centers. One
interviewee explained broadband’s importance in the process in
the following way: “Well, certainly with our focus on data
centers, the broadband is not simply a requirement it is one of the
most important priorities. Behind power, broadband availability
with redundancies is the most important issue. That’s one of our
three primary target markets. And so, the access to broadband is
mandatory to be able to target that sector, and we’re counting on
that sector as a strong component of our future economy.”
Interviewees indicated without Catawba County’s broadband
infrastructure Apple would not have located there. One
interviewee said, “Let’s just say, the world’s largest technology
4 As of December 2010. From FCC Form 477. The date is the
same for Rutherford County and the Wilson.

company is now located in Catawba county and in North Carolina
only as a result of having broadband capabilities. Every iPhone
and iPad application is being shipped through Catawba County
and North Carolina now. So that’s a pretty dramatic reality that
we would have missed had broadband infrastructure not been in
place.” While another interviewee described broadband to be as
important as other utilities in terms of economic development
when they said, “It’s a utility that’s expected.” In addition, the
county experiences direct economic benefits in the form of jobs
and capital investments as several firms responsible for fiber
production are located in Catawba County.
Catawba County also uses broadband to improve the citizens’
quality of life and enable businesses to offer employees the option
to telecommute, and to attract employees wishing to telecommute.
As one interviewee explained, broadband enables people who
want to relocate to Catawba County to do so even if their job is
not located in the county. The interviewee said, “We’re finding at
this point there’s a number of people relocating to Catawba
County. And they’re relocating there because their job is actually
giving them enough flexibility that they can work anywhere.”
4.2.2 Rutherford County
The primary broadband infrastructure in Rutherford County was
funded and installed through a partnership with the county, the
Golden Leaf Foundation and other funders, and local non-profits
Polk Area Network for Government Academic and Enterprise
Activities, PANGAEA, and Foothills Connect. Based out of Polk
County, PANGAEA provides and sells fiber fostered broadband
services to local government agencies, education facilities,
healthcare providers, first responders and other non-profits [17].
The broadband infrastructure serves between 200 and 400
residential connections per 1000 households.
Like Catawba County, Rutherford County uses their broadband
network to recruit and retain high-tech firms. Rutherford County
recruited Facebook and the State Data Center, two large
organizations that interviewees said would not have located there
but for their broadband network. As one interviewee said,
“Indirectly I can definitely say Facebook would not have located
one of their server farms in Rutherford County had there not been
adequate broadband infrastructure in the county. The same can be
said of the state data center which is also located in Rutherford
County.”
Rutherford County also uses broadband to support entrepreneurial
development. A non-profit, Foothills Connect, used broadband to
set up a website for local farmers to sell their produce to regional
buyers. The program enables farmers to sell to customers and
markets they would not have access to without the broadband
facilitated program. An interviewee described the program as a
place, “Where people will go online, they’ll register as customers
and clients and they will order online directly from the farmers.
And it all comes through the Foothills Connect Farmer’s Fresh
Market website program. And this allows farmers who ordinarily
would not have had access; you know easy convenience access, to
these markets and these people and buying clubs, so that they can
sell their produce. And what the Farmer’s Fresh Market Program
does is it connects these clients with these farmers.”
4.2.3 The City of Wilson
Private providers and Greenlight, the city-owned broadband
network established in 2008 by the City of Wilson, built Wilson’s
infrastructure. As one of the only city-owned broadband providers
382
in North Carolina, Greenlight competes with private companies
such as Time Warner and Century Link in selling broadband
internet as well as television and phone services to Wilson’s
citizens and businesses. Between 400 and 600 per 1000 residents
have access to broadband in Wilson.
Similar to Catawba and Rutherford Counties, Wilson also uses
broadband to attract businesses, particularly high-tech firms.
However, among the three communities, Wilson is the most
proactive in using broadband to retain, expand, and support
existing businesses. Wilson prides itself in providing high-quality
products at a low cost, competitive with private providers, through
Greenlight. Interviewees indicated local businesses subscribing to
Greenlight’s services realize significant monetary savings, which
can then be reinvested into their businesses. In addition, Wilson
also uses their network to improve the quality of life their
community offers citizens. One interviewee explained the network
improves quality of life in the following way, “When you’re
trying to attract pharmaceutical companies, high end technical
companies, their employees and their staff are going to want very
good connectivity at home as well so that they can telecommute
when necessary or when that’s available to them. And we can do
that through our broadband network.”
5. FINDINGS
5.1 Broadband Does Not Significantly Impact
Employment Growth
Similar to other studies, the quantitative analysis suggests a strong
relationship between broadband and economic health does not
exist. However, some studies have found it may impact some
industry sectors, such as information technology, more than others
[15]. Thus, analyzing broadband’s impact on each industrial
sector could yield different results. In addition, as employment
growth has been used as a proxy for the economic health of a
community in this and other studies, and results have not been
found, it is possible that employment growth rate is too broad or
rough as a measure of economic health. Thus the use of a different
dependent variable, such as the number of new business startups,
could yield different results. Indeed, the qualitative analysis
suggests there is a stronger relationship between broadband and a
community’s economic health than the quantitative analysis
demonstrates.
5.2 Broadband is Important in Attracting and
Retaining Businesses
The qualitative analysis’s most significant finding is that
broadband is used as a business attraction and retention tool by
local government leaders involved in the business recruitment and
retention process. Similar to findings from the literature, the case
studies’ findings suggest broadband ranks as important as water,
sewer and electricity to communities as they work to attract and
retain businesses [6]. As one interviewee said, “…honestly I think
that everyone needs to look at it as basic infrastructure like a
water line or a sewer line because in the last few years that is
basically what it has become.” The remaining ten interviewees
echoed this sentiment, saying they viewed broadband as a utility
or an essential part of their basic infrastructure in their
communities. They also all said they use broadband to recruit
businesses, especially high-tech data centers and firms. They do
so through a variety of means, but primarily by providing

information about their broadband system’s speeds, rates and
access. Each community stressed the importance of a high-quality
broadband system with the capacity for high-speed uploads and
downloads in attracting high-tech industries.
All three communities also use broadband as a tool in aiding
business retention and expansion, albeit less so than it is for
business attraction. Interviewees from Catawba and Rutherford
indicated the proliferation of broadband contributes to business
satisfaction and enables expansion, thus improving business
retention and expansion efforts.
While it is evident broadband is important in business recruitment,
retention and expansion, its importance relative to other factors
influential in business location and expansion decisions is unclear.
Some respondents indicated broadband was the most important
factor in recruiting certain businesses while others believed it was
important to have, but was not the most important factor. As one
respondent stated, “I’ve had some other industries who have said
it was not a significant factor or deciding factor, but was among
the factors that led to their decision to locate.” Conversely,
interviewees from Catawba and Rutherford County indicated that
without their broadband infrastructure neither Apple nor
Facebook, respectively, would have located in their communities.
While it is unclear whether broadband is more important than
other business location decision factors, it may create a serious
disadvantage for communities without an existing adequate
infrastructure. As one respondent noted, “Despite the economic
downturn that we have been experiencing, not one person or
business is using less data than they were using before the
downturn. Every one of us expects to have more power,
computing power, and communications power in our hands or on
our desk despite the downturn. And so a community that doesn’t
realize their future is tied to communications facilitated by
broadband, they’re probably missing the biggest opportunity
coming down the pipes.” Similarly, another respondent said, “If it
(broadband infrastructure) is not there, they (businesses) won’t
locate there.” Similar to findings in the literature, the negative
impact of not having broadband seems it may be more significant
than the positive impact of having broadband available in one’s
community [4]. Through this study, it is evident some businesses
view broadband as an essential utility or piece of infrastructure
that needs to be present if they are to locate there. Thus, as the
FCC’s National Broadband Plan predicted, it is possible
broadband’s absence may be more significant as a deterrent than
its presence is as an attraction for businesses [4].
5.3 Broadband Can Support Other Economic
Development Activities
The qualitative analysis suggests broadband also affects nontraditional
economic development activities or strategies such as
entrepreneurial development and attracting quality employees
improving citizens’ quality of life. Several interviewees noted
broadband improved their citizens’ quality of life through the
provision of faster internet access, and the provision of the
opportunity to telecommute. As an interviewee from Wilson
explained, the opportunity to telecommute is particularly
important in attracting pharmaceutical and high-tech firms
because their employees want and expect to be able to
telecommute if permitted.
383
6. RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE
RESEARCH AND CONCLUSION
6.1. Recommendations for Future Research
Although this study’s findings add to the existing literature on
broadband’s impact on the economic health of local communities
and its relation to economic development activities in some
communities, many questions surrounding broadband and
economic development remain. More research is needed to
determine broadband’s importance relative to other business
location decision factors, whether the lack of broadband indeed
disadvantages communities and if so how it does so. In addition,
more research is needed to determine whether the lack of
broadband indeed is more significant as a disadvantage than its
presence is as an advantage for communities. Future research
should also focus on businesses and how different types of
businesses use and view broadband.
6.2. Conclusion
While many questions remain, this study explores the relationship
between broadband and the economic health and economic
development activities in North Carolina, using quantitative and
qualitative methods. The quantitative data shows there is no
significant correlation between employment growth rate and
broadband in North Carolina’s counties, however, the case studies
indicate there is more to the story. Broadband may not impact
total employment growth at the county level, but at a more local
level, it is influential. As an interviewee said, “It particularly
matters to those who either do not have an existing broadband
network, or whose network does not meet the community’s
needs.” Understanding broadband’s utility as a business
recruitment, retention and expansion tool, as well as its ability to
serve as an economic development tool in other ways can aid
North Carolina communities in improving their overall economic
health and become a competitive player in the local, state, national
and global economies.
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to recognize and thank my committee members:
Shannon H. Tufts (chair), William Lambe, and Jonathan Morgan.
8. REFERENCES
[1] Coomes, Paul. A. “Economic Performance Measures for
Metropolitan Areas,” Journal of Economic and Social
Measurement, 24, 1998, 157-179.
[2] Czernich, N., Falck, O., Kretschmer T., and Woessmann., L.,
Broadband Infrastructure and Economic Growth. The
Economic Journal, Vol. 121(552), 2011, 505-532.
[3] E-NC Authority. High Speed Internet Access in North
Carolina. 2007. Accessed on 2/24/12.
http://ncbroadband.gov/baller_footnotes/34.html
[4] Federal Communications Commission. (2010). Connecting
America: The National Broadband Plan. Washington, DC:
US Government Printing Office. 2010. p291.
[5] Federal Communications Commission. Form 477 website.
Retrieved on 10/20/12.
http://transition.fcc.gov/wcb/iatd/comp.html

[6] Ford, G. S., & Koutsky, T.M. Broadband and Economic
Development: A Municipal Case Study from Florida. Review
of Urban & Regional Development Studies, Vol. 17(3), 2005,
219-229.
[7] Horrigan, J. B., Stolp, C., & Wilson, R. H. Broadband
Utilization in Space: Effects of Population and Economic
Structure. The Information Society, Vol. 22(5), 2006, 341-
354.
[8] Kandilov, I. T., & Renkow, M. Infrastructure Investment and
Rural Economic Development: An Evaluation of USDA’s
Broadband Loan Program. Growth and Change, Vol. 41(2),
2010, 165-191.
[9] Kolko, Jed. “Does Broadband Boost Local Economic
Development? Public Policy Institute of California,” January
2010. 1-34.
[10] Koutroumpis, P. The Economic Impact of Broadband on
Growth: A Simultaneous Approach. Telecommunications
Policy, 33, 2009, 471-485.
[11] Lehr, W.H., Osorio, C.A., Gillett, S.E, & Sirbu, M.A.
Measuring broadband’s economic impact. Tepper School of
384
Business. Paper 457, 2005.
http://repository.cmu.edu/tepper/457.
[12] Mankiw, G. The Principles of Economics, 4 th Edition.
Thomas-South-Western. 2007.
[13] North Carolina Department of Commerce website. Retrieved
on 9/1/11. http://www.nccommerce.com/researchpublications/incentive-reports/2011-county-tier-designations.
[14] Settles, Craig. Community Broadband Snapshot Report,
“Broadband’s Impact on Economic Development: The Real
Deal,” International Economic Development Council, Sept.
2010.
[15] Shideler, D., Badasyan, N. and Taylor, L. “The Economic
Impact of Broadband Deployment in Kentucky,” Federal
Reserve Bank of St. Louis Regional Economic Development,
2007, 3(2), pp. 90.
[16] Tufts, Shannon. “Golden LEAF Rural Broadband Initiative
Annual Evaluation Report,” December 2011. p26.
[17] PANGAEA website. Retrieved on 12/12/2011.
http://www.pangaea.us/company/history.php.

Session 13
E-democracy & Participation 2

An e-Democracy experience: Digital Cabinet Office of Rio
Grande do Sul State (Brazil)
Marie Anne Macadar
Pontifical Catholic University of
Rio Grande do Sul
Av. Ipiranga, 6681, Prédio 50
Zip Code: 90.619-900
Porto Alegre – RS - Brazil
Phone: (55) (51) (3320-3524)
marie.macadar@pucrs.br
ABSTRACT
This paper aims to identify the influence of institutional factors in
implementing e-Democracy practices at the Digital Cabinet Office
of Rio Grande do Sul State (Brazil). Institutional theory is used as
the theoretical framework in this case study and supported the
construction of the conceptual model based on some propositions.
This is a research in progress and, therefore, just a few initial
issues are pointed out. However, they show that the researchers
must continue working in this case study in order to bring some
contributions to e-Government theory.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4.1 [Computers and Society]: Public Policy Issues - Use/abuse
of power
General Terms
Management, Theory
Keywords:
e-Government, e-Democracy, Participation
1. INTRODUCTION
In the last decades, the social setting of human life has been
remodeled by the technological revolution produced by
Information and Communication Technologies [4]. Considering
current technological changes, one feels the need for an effective
ICT management in government. The Brazilian reform in public
management idealized in 1995 has emphasized such a need. The
term electronic government (e-Gov) has been introduced to refer
to the use of ICT in public management for improving
administration, for delivering government information and
services, and also for introducing citizen engagement and
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Gabriela Viale Pereira
Pontifical Catholic University of
Rio Grande do Sul
Av. Ipiranga, 6681, Prédio 50
Zip Code: 90.619-900
Porto Alegre – RS - Brazil
Phone: (55) (51) (3320-3524)
gabiviale@terra.com.br
385
participation in government [5][10].
Vanessa Marques Daniel
Pontifical Catholic University of
Rio Grande do Sul
Av. Ipiranga, 6681, Prédio 50
Zip Code: 90.619-900
Porto Alegre – RS - Brazil
Phone: (55) (51) (3320-3524)
nessa.daniel@gmail.com
Heeks and Bailur [11] regard the acknowledgement of contextual
factors - besides technological ones - as a positive aspect in e-
Government research. This study is, therefore, relevant since it
aims to analyze the relation between institutional factors and the
implementation of e-Democracy practices in Brazil.
This research is in the context of IT government adoption and
management for widening communication channels between these
organizations and society by means of web portals for citizen
participation. Our goal is to identify the influence of institutional
factors in the implementation of e-democracy practices. The
theoretical framework used here is institutional theory, which
postulates that organizations tend to adopt similar structures
forming a homogeneous field in order to get the recognition in the
environment they are inserted. Institutional theory has constructs
which allow the analysis of the organizational environment of
public management and the influence of institutional factors in the
adoption of technology in organizations.
This paper is an early study about the Digital Cabinet in Rio
Grande do Sul (Brazil) and, as pointed out before, institutional
theory will provide our theoretical basis, briefly presented in
sections 2 and 3 below. Section 4 shows the methodological
aspects of the research and the propositions to be tested. The case
study is then introduced in section 5 and final considerations are
made in section 6.
2. THE INSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVE
AND GOVERNANCE
There is a consensus that influential organizations have the power
to legitimate others in their social environment and the ability to
influence their decision-making process. In this context,
governments are regarded as the organizations with more power
to intervene in others [14]. However, King et al. [12] argue that
institutional factors are essential components to understand the
adoption of innovations in IT that cross-organizational borders.
According to Scott [16], regulative, normative and cognitive
factors exert influence on the adoption of IS in public
administration. Regulative factors "involve the capacity to
establish rules, inspect others' conformity to them, and, as
necessary, manipulate sanctions-rewards or punishments-in

attempt to influence future behavior" (p.52)[15]. Processes
attached to laws, norms or sanctions bring about pressure for
adjustment in the organizational field. The normative pillar is
conditioned to certification and accreditation. As pointed out by
Scott: “These beliefs are not simply anticipations or predictions,
but prescriptions-normative expectations of how specified actors
are supposed to behave” (p.55)[15]. Last but not least, the
cognitive system is related to common beliefs and shared logic
and is supported by culture.
Thus, institutional theory is concerned with aspects of social
structure, reflecting on the processes by which structures –
schemes, rules, norms and routines – are set as guidelines for
social behavior [15]. Avgerou [1] suggested that new
institutionalism provides a conceptual platform to analyze actions
resulting from cultural processes and from the power underlying
organizations and their social environment.
2.1 Institutions and Organizations
DiMaggio and Powell [6] questioned what makes organizations so
similar to one another. For them, institutions in a given
organizational field become homogenous in an effort to get
legitimacy through isomorphism. The authors identified three
mechanisms from which isomorphical institutional changes take
place: coercive isomorphism, mimetic isomorphism, and
normative isomorphism. As far as the adoption of technology is
concerned, there is a tendency for similarity through different
isomorphisms.
One of the main propositions in institutional analysis is that
organizations tend to be grouped together in fields and each field
tend to develop similar structures and processes [1]. DiMaggio
and Powell [6] define organizational field in institutional analysis
as organizations which form a recognized area and undergo a
process of homogeneity through isomorphism in order to become
legitimate. This is a strong tendency for public organizations,
which need to be legitimate to remain active in government, to
share some similarities in structures and services.
As pointed out before, DiMaggio and Powell [6] identified three
mechanisms according to which institutional isomorphic changes
occur: coercive isomorphism, which derives from political
influences, mimetic isomorphism, which results from models of
other organizations, and normative isomorphism, associated with
professionalization.
According to the authors, coercive isomorphism results from
formal and informal pressures by organizations on which others in
the same field depend, providing legitimacy to organizational
structures, to their processes and results. Avgerou [1] adds that
government mandates and legal systems in regional, national and
international organizational contexts constitute forms of coercive
pressure, and rules are the mechanism which determines
structures and processes in the public sector.
Avgerou [1] states that normative pressures refer to the effects of
professional practice. DiMaggio and Powell [6] point out that an
important aspect of professionalization, which provides
isomorphism, is the support to formal education and the
legitimacy provided by a cognitive basis coming from university
specialists. They argue that normative mechanisms generate
groups that occupy a similar position in the organization and share
similarities in terms of orientation and control [6].
386
Mimetic mechanisms are defined by Avgerou [1] as the
acquisition of structural and process characteristics from
successful organization models. DiMaggio and Powel [6] believe
that mimetic mechanisms can arise due to uncertainties resulting
from the lack of understanding of organizational technologies
taking other organizations as models. The authors claim that
homogeneity in organizational structures derives from active
search for models like the ones belonging to older organizations.
2.2 Governance
Following Bresser-Pereira [3], managerial public administration
has come to existence at the end of the 20th century with the
challenge to make the public sector more efficient and transparent
to society. According to Diniz et al. [7], the use of IT has made a
change in the model of public management possible with the
arising of e-Government. This challenge for public organizations
to remain in a complex and dynamic environment has driven
organizations to adopt models focused on governance principles
that ensure a more transparent result based management. The need
for transparency and for results has emerged from environment
pressure that public organizations should consider issues like
efficiency, efficacy, transparency, and mechanisms of control and
accounts of government. In order to do so, it is necessary for such
organizations to adopt ICT resources as essential tools to
strengthen governance and transparency in public organizations
[2].
2.3 Electronic Governance
The use of ICT in the public sector, which used to be called
electronic government in 1990, is now referred to as electronic
governance or e-Government since it encompasses broader
concepts like, for example, the application of ICT in public
governance [5; 2]. According to Barbosa et al. [2], there are
currently other IT applications to be considered besides the access
to public services on the internet like, for instance, improvement
of administrative processes, increase in efficiency, control of
public policies, integration between governments and electronic
democracy.
Electronic governance comprises the use of IT not only for
improving management of resources and governmental processes
(public e-Administration) but also for upgrading citizens e-
Services and for increasing citizens democratic participation in
governments practices (e-Democracy) [5].
2.3.1 Electronic Democracy
Electronic democracy is concerned with a more interactive
environment, creating opportunities for cooperation between
citizens and social groups and, therefore, increasing political
participation in decision-making processes [10]. For Frey [10], the
governmental sector must have an active role in devising
electronic governance practices meant to freshen up democracy.
Furthermore, discussion forums should approach topics related to
citizens' real life problems in order to make them engage in
democratic practice.
Digital forms of participation are mapped by Pell [14], who
relates electronic democracy practices with information, enquiries
and deliberation baselines. As far as baseline information is

concerned, Pell [14] makes reference to web sites, search engines,
data bases and online discussion forums. On web search queries
there are e-mails, referendums, electronic enquiries and electronic
petitions. As for baseline deliberation, there are discussion groups,
teleconferences, and community pages on the web. According to
Pell, digital technologies can increase the number and the mode of
such participation methods even further.
3. METHODOLOGY
This is a qualitative research which aims to understand an issue by
examining a case study. Flick [9] states that in qualitative research
there is a mutual interdependence of isolated parts in the process
and, therefore, it is not possible to regard research stages as linear
but rather continuous and related to one another.
The research strategy chosen here is case study since it is our goal to
focus on the study of a specific phenomenon, as pointed out by
Eisenhardt [8]. The case was selected following Flick [9]’s criteria in
the sense that a particularly typical single instance was chosen and
analyzed consistently before any comparative analysis was carried
out.
Primary data will be collected during field research for
investigating different facets of the case study. Then semistructured
interviews with different stakeholders and the main
actors involved in the implementation of the web portal will be
conducted. Another research tool that will be used is document
analysis since documents can provide important information to
corroborate research results.
The current research is still getting under way. A preliminary
theoretical study has been made and an interview with the
executive coordinator of the Digital Cabinet was conducted in
December 2011.
Proposition
P1:
Proposition
P1a:
Proposition
P2:
Proposition
P2a:
Proposition
P3:
Proposition
P3a:
Public organizations dependent on
funding and on political influence are
coerced into implementing e-Democracy
practices due to coercive pressures
Political influence and retention of
funds by dominant organizations have
an impact on coercive pressure for the
implementation of e-Democracy
practices by dependent public
organizations.
Public organizations which need
acceptance in their organizational field
tend to implement e-Democracy
practices due to normative pressure.
The existence of a desired behavior in
the organizational environment reflects
in normative pressure for the
implementation of e-Democracy
practices in public organizations.
Public organizations that need
legitimacy tend to use successful models
in the implementation of e-Democracy
practices due to mimetic pressure.
The existence of successful models of e-
Democracy practices in organizational
environment result in mimetic pressure
on the implementation of such practices
by public organizations.
387
4. CONCEPTUAL MODEL
On the basis of the theoretical framework adopted in this research,
a conceptual model and some propositions were defined with the
aim to analyze the influence of institutional pressures on the
implementation of e-democracy.
Figure 1: Conceptual model
Table 1: Theoretical propositions
5. THE DIGITAL CABINET: AN
INTRODUCTION TO THE CASE
The Digital Cabinet is the web portal to the State Government of
Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). It follows the concept of e-
Democracy since it is characterized as a means of citizen
engagement and participation. It is, as stated in the web portal
(2011), "a space for participation which aims to encourage a new
culture of governance in the public sector by creating new
channels of communication and cooperation with society through
the use of digital tools". It started operating in 2011 and has four
tools: "Governor listens", “Collaborative Agenda”, "Governor
answers" and "Governor asks".
The tool "Governor listens" offers public hearings on the Internet
for citizens to participate and chat with the government. The
"Collaborative Agenda” consists in contributions from citizen
members to bring issues forward and help make the governor's
agenda on his visits to the countryside. The tool "Governor
answers" constitute an environment in which members of the
public can ask questions to the Governor and choose by vote a
question they want to have answered on a video at the end of each
month. Finally, “Governor asks” is a tool through which the
Governor puts forward a given topic and citizens are asked to
discuss it and give their contribution to the discussion of
important local issues. The authors of the most voted
contributions meet the governor personally and debate the topics
with him.
5.1 The Institutional Perspective of the Digital
Cabinet
The initiative of creating the Digital Cabinet, according to its
executive coordinator, Mr. Fabricio Solagno, follows similar
experiences around the world, especially in Obama's government
in the US and in Canada. There are also reports of a similar
experience by the Secretary for Communications in Ceará, Brazil.
One of the main differences between the Digital Cabinet in Rio
Grande do Sul (RS) and similar initiatives in Brazil is that
participation tools are managed by Secretaries for
Communications, which is not the case in RS. As pointed out by
Solagno, "we are inside the Governor's cabinet and that's where all
decision-making comes from".

Evidence shows that cognitive factors affect the implementation
of e-Democracy practices. The cognitive pillar can be observed in
the existence of a common sense on the benefits of creating a web
portal for organized public participation in view of the legitimate
experience of other successful web portals. The influence of web
portals from other countries, for instance, the USA, was thus
identified as a positive model to be followed and adapted to
different demands.
6. CONCLUDING REMARKS
Considering the present situation of web collaboration, e-
Democracy practices tend to be a requirement for new forms of
government in order to meet the demands of contemporary
society. Collaboration in e-Democracy digital environments can
be seen as a gain not only for the population, which looks for
ways of effective participation, but also for governments that
expect to achieve legitimacy and recognition in the web.
This paper reports a research in progress and, therefore, it is not
meant to present an analysis of the case. It has been possible,
however, to establish directives for further reflections on the
matter. The first directive refers to the peculiarity of this case
study, in special to its structuring (being inside the Governor's
Cabinet), which being examined in the light of Institutional
Theory, can shed light into important questions. A second aspect
to be explored concerns the limitations of national and
international cases of collaboration in government virtual
environments and the effective participation of citizen in public
decision-making. Limited experiences entail a specific and
peculiar outlining to cultural, social, and political conditions.
Once again Institutional Theory can be proved useful as a
guideline to analysis. In the analysis of the only interview that
has been carried out so far, it is possible to identify some
influence of mimetic pressures in the implementation of e-
Democracy practices which will be corroborated in a further stage
of this research.
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Our thanks to CNPq and FAPERGS for partial support for this
research. The authors also want to thank CAPES for the financial
support given to take part in ICEGOV 2012.
8. REFERENCES
[1] Avgerou, C. 2002. Information systems and global diversity.
Oxford University Press, New York.
[2] Barbosa, A. F.; Faria, F. I.; Pinto, S. L. 2007. Governança
eletrônica no setor público. In: Knight, P. T.; Fernandes, C.
C. C.; Cunha, M. A. (Orgs). e-Desenvolvimento no Brasil e
no mundo: subsídios e Programa e-Brasil. São Caetano do
Sul: Yendis Editora.
[3] Bresser-Pereira, L. C. B. 2002. Reforma da nova gestão
pública: agora na agenda da América Latina, no entanto...
Revista do Serviço Público, 53,1.
[4] Castells, M. 2000. A The Rise of the Network Society: The
Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume I
(Information Age Series), Wiley-Blackwell; 2nd edition.
[5] Cunha, M. A.; Annenberg, D.; Agune, R. M. (Prestação de
serviços públicos eletrônicos ao cidadão. In: Knight, P. T.;
Fernandes, C. C. C.; Cunha, M. A. (Orgs). 2007. e-
Desenvolvimento no Brasil e no mundo: subsídios e
Programa e-Brasil. São Caetano do Sul: Yendis Editora.
388
[6] Dimaggio, P. J.; Powell, W. W. 1983. The iron cage
revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality
in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48,
2, p.147-160.
[7] Diniz, E. H.; Barbosa, A. F.; Junqueira, A. R. B.; Prado, O.
2009. O governo eletrônico no Brasil: perspectiva histórica a
partir de um modelo estruturado de análise. Revista de
Administração Pública (RAP), Rio de Janeiro, 43, 1, p.23-
48.
[8] Eisenhardt, K. M. 1989. Building Theories from Case Study
Research. Academy of Management Review, 14, 4, p.532-
550.
[9] Flick, U. 1998. An introduction to qualitative research.
London: Sage.
[10] Frey, K. 2009. Perspectivas da democracia local na era
digital. In: Cunha, M. A. V. C.; Frey, K.; Duarte, F. (Orgs.).
Governança local e tecnologias da informação e
comunicação. 1. ed. Curitiba: Champagnat.
[11] Gil-Garcia, J. & Luana-Reyes, L. 2006. Encyclopedia of E-
Commerce, E-Government and Mobile Commerce. IDEA
Group Reference.
[12] Heeks, R.; Bailur, S. 2007. Analyzing e-government
research: Perspectives, philosophies, theories, methods, and
practice. Government Information Quarterly, 24, p.243-265.
[13] King, J. L.; Gurbaxani, V.; Kraemer, K. L.; McFarlan, F. W.,
Raman, K. S.; Yap, C. S. 1994. Institutional Factors in
Information Technology Innovation. Information Systems
Research, 5, 2, p.139-169.
[14] Peel, D. 2009. Utilizando tecnologias digitais para a
ampliação da participação pública no planejamento. In:
Cunha, M. A. V. C.; Frey, K.; Duarte, F. (Orgs.).
Governança local e tecnologias da informação e
comunicação. 1. ed. Curitiba: Champagnat.
[15] Rodriguez, C. L.; Diniz, E. H.; Ferrer, F. 2007. Influência
governamental e estratégias institucionais na difusão de
inovações em economias emergentes. Revista de
Administração de Empresas (RAE), 47, 1, p.10-21.
[16] Scott, W. R. Institutional theory P408-14 In: Encyclopedia of
Social Theory, George Ritzer, ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
2004.
[17] Scott, W. R. 2008. Institutions and organizations: ideas and
interests. 3. ed. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Social Inclusion and Digital Divide: eParticipation
dilemmas in municipalities
Lukasz Porwol
DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland
lukasz.porwol@deri.org
John Breslin
DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland
john.breslin@deri.org
ABSTRACT
Citizen-participation faces a large number of obstacles.
eParticipation is considered to be one of the key tools to ensure