icegov2012 proceedings

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