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1) Introduction:
Main focus and working aims of the WG: The Digital Government Working Group invites innovative papers on the influence of information communication technologies (ICT) on government, public administration, public policy and the public sector at large. The main focus and differentiation of NISPAcee regarding this topic is not only discovering some of the special challenges originating in the CEE region, but also contributing to the general discourses on digital transformation of citizens, institutions and governance.
2) Concrete specific goals for 2022.
Invited topics for 2022: The COVID-19 pandemic affected the way in which public institutions were able to provide services to citizens and companies. The delivery of digital services, already one of the more important objectives of most governments, became much more urgent, especially in the light of on-and-off restrictions and lockdowns. On the other hand, governments have to adapt to a changing world of remote work and reticence for face-to-face interactions. We welcome papers that touch on the challenges and opportunities brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Topics related to the ways in which public institutions coped with the pandemic and their strategies for minimising disruptions, both in their back-office and in delivering services to citizens and companies.
- Topics related to digital data: how it is collected, how it is used and what changes (if any) an increasing amount of data brings to public institutions.
WG Programme Coordinators:
Nicolae Urs, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Place: 29th NISPAcee Annual Conference, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Date: October 21-23, 2021
Main theme of the conference: "Citizens' Engagement and Empowerment - The Era of Collaborative Innovation in Governance"
11 papers were presented in the frame of 3 working group sessions:
The E-government Working Group sessions, and especially the two offline ones, were a success.
This was due to a number of factors:
1. Those who chose to participate in person were anxious to take part in such gatherings after such a long hiatus. The discussions after each presentation were lively and substantial (it seemed to me even more than in previous conferences).
The topics of the papers were pretty diverse, ranging from tools to assess the co-creation services offered by public institutions to bibliometric studies or the effects of social media on government communication. Of course, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were mentioned in almost all papers, as both a hindrance and a catalyst for change (this is actually an idea that appeared over and over again: the pandemic crisis spurred innovation and forced institutions to introduce or expand digital services because they had no other choice).
Call for papers 2020
WG Programme Coordinators:
Nicolae Urs, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania; [email protected]
Main focus and working aims:
2.Topics related to the implementation of digital transformation projects: moving from the planning phase into the real world. We are especially interested in case studies describing how projects are put into practice, what the main obstacles are and how they can be avoided.
3.Topics related to security and privacy; how citizens’ rights are protected and how governments, both national and local, aim to strike the correct balance between increased internal connectedness (essential for more and more sophisticated online services) and the need to safeguard the privacy and security of the collected information (essential for trust between citizens and governments). Within this stream of research we are especially looking for case studies or empirical findings on these topics.
4.Topics related to digital tools that foster citizens’ involvement: bespoke tools or commercial ones (social media, forums, etc.). We encourage authors to submit papers related to the innovative use of such tools in local or central government that help citizens, companies or NGOs to be involved in policy-making processes or project implementation.
Beyond these invited topics, the working group is also open to presentations of other evergreen aspects of e-governance research, such as the concepts of open data, online service design and delivery, transparency, and new dilemmas of multilevel governance. The contributed articles can take the form of a case study, a report of cross-country or cross-sectorial survey, comparative analysis of showcases or policies, even policy proposals or policy analysis. We encourage and advise authors to bravely use interesting new theories applied to e-governance and also the application of innovative qualitative and quantitative research methodologies.
b) Elaborating and thoroughly introducing new, innovative theories which enhance our knowledge of ICT in government and public administration, and which enlighten the challenges differently, leading to a deeper understanding of their nature or of their potential creative solution.
c) Enhancing the methodological rigour of e-government research, by presenting papers with systematically and properly executed quantitative or qualitative enquires in the overlapping domain of ICT, governance, participation, communication or any other relevant topic which might be relevant, not only for NISPAcee, but also to a broader international audience.
d) We would also encourage contributors to amend their abstracts and full papers with a short separate sub-section of practical points for practitioners. These sections should clearly highlight the practical value of the presented research and its results, listing a couple of concrete recommendations for practitioners, typically politicians, as well as public administration employees and leaders.
WG Programme Coordinators:
Robert Krimmer, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia
Nicolae Urs, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Place: 27th NISPAcee Annual Conference, Prague, Czech Republic
Date: May 24-26, 2019
9 papers were presented within 2 WG2 sessions:
Session 1: From Policy Design to Policy Practice in the European Integration Context (ERASMUS+ Jean Monnet Project PRACTIC)
Session 2
Within the sessions there were fruitful discussions, including on how e-government in Eastern Europe is developing/will develop and how the conference can increase the quality of the submissions.
WG Programme Coordinators:
Andras Nemeslaki, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary
David Duenas-Cid, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia
Place: 26th NISPAcee Annual Conference, Iasi, Romania
Date: May 24-26, 2018
This year, the E-Government Working Group meeting comprised two sessions:
1. E-voting, social media, and digital administration:
a. Duenas-Cid, David: Cost Analysis of the Estonian Municipal Elections.
b. Urs, Nicolae: Patterns of Social-Media Use in Local Governments in selected CEE Countries.
c. Sandén Johan: Digital School Administration: Productive, destructive or irrelevant for Interaction?
d. Nasevski, Sanja: A stepping Stone to a new Generation of proactive Disclosure of Information of Public Importance in Serbia.
2. E-participation and Cybersecurity:
a. Szadeczky, Tamas: Regulation of Cybersecurity Governance.
b. Duenas-Cid, David: Methodology for the Calculation of Costs in Multi-Channel Elections.
c. Malec Tomáš: Advanced Assessment of the Level of Websites´ Development of Chosen Slovak Municipalities.
The discussion was very fruitful within each of the above sessions. Each of the sessions also had participants from other WGs amongst the participants.
It was a major achievement to see the results of last year’s plan - a joint paper presented by Dr. Urs which had been initiated last year in Kazan with the cooperation of Dr. Spacek, Dr. Jukic, Dr. Todorovski and Dr. Nemeslaki to analyse social media presence in the local municipalities of Romania, Slovenia, Czech Republic and Hungary.
This year, the E-Government Working Group meeting was held in four sessions:
1. Social media with three papers presented.
2. E-government and E-services with three papers presented.
3. E-participation and Open data with two papers presented.
4. Technical and Security Issues in E-government with three papers presented.
Altogether, 11 papers were presented. The discussion was very fruitful within each of the above sessions. Participants from other WGs were also among the attendees. What we have learned is that in the future, presenters should be informed about the length of their presentations (one presentation was very short).
Future plans: we will encourage more international cooperation between WG members. The social media topic was identified as the topic with the highest potential in this regard. It has gained considerable attention in the e-government research arena in the last five years, and the NISPAcee conference is no exception (a separate session on social media was held in 2016 and 2017).
We believe that all of the presenters received many useful inputs into their research work, including emphasis on regional issues (in the case of some authors) and inclusion of more apparent implications for governments where it was necessary (in the case of some managerial cases). We have emphasised further deadlines twice (at the beginning of the first, and at the end of the last session).
This year, only four papers were presented. On the other hand, we have never had so many participants (approx. 35). So, even though the number of papers presented wasn’t high, the discussion was very fruitful – probably one of the best eGovernment WGs from that point of view. We were lucky to have associate editor of the Government Information Quarterly, as well. We believe that all of the presenters have received a lot of useful inputs into their research work.
For the 2016 NISPACee conference, we plan to promote our WG more aggressively – hopefully, this will result in higher number of papers.
Ljupco Todorovski, Faculty of Public Administration, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
This year, we have received twenty-two abstracts in the first round of submissions; authors of twelve of these abstracts, submitted full papers that were included in the final program. Majority of these papers addressed relevant research and/or practical issues related to e-government and more broadly, using information-communication technology (ICT) in the public administration domain. Authors of the papers employed appropriate theoretical and methodological frameworks to approach them. This is in contrary to previous years, where majority of papers were focusing on ad-hoc, descriptive analysis of a specific ICT-based solution. Authors now compare different ICT solutions and approaches to problems of public administration in different sectors, regions or countries. We clustered the papers in four thematic sessions entitled "Setting goals for e-government”, "Change of procedures and processes”, "From policies to e-governance” and "Challenges”. More than twenty participants from numerous countries, including Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Georgia, Estonia, Hungary, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, United Kingdom and the United States of America, actively discussed these topics during the sessions. This year, following the initiative of John Taylor, the editor of the Information Polity journal, we grant a best-paper award to the authors of the paper entitled "The Quest for Success of e-Government: What Structure and Allocation of IT Spending Tell Us”: Márta Aranyossy, Adrienn Fekó and András Nemeslaki. They received a one-year subscription to the Information Polity journal.
Ljupco Todorovski, Faculty of Public Administration, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Ljupco Todorovski, Faculty of Public Administration, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
The three-years effort of the e-government workgroup focused on building the learning platform for exchanging showcases and best practices of using information and communication technologies (ICT) in the public sector has shown that ICT induced a number of important changes in a variety of government domains and sectors. However, these changes are not always reflected in positive impact on governance practices, citizens satisfaction with the availability of electronic public services, and their readiness to adopt and use them. To address the issue of lack of impact his year conference mostly focused on two relevant topics of evaluating e-government efforts and e-participation.
The first topic is evaluating e-government efforts in terms of their intensity, effectiveness, and impact. Five papers on evaluation dealt with a variety of aspects: e-government practices on local level in Romania and Turkey, e-government institutional planning in Czech Republic, e-government effectiveness in Russia, international e-government indexes and respective rankings of Romania, and analysis of different evaluation approaches used worldwide. The second topic of e-participation was presented in two papers:
one focusing on citizen participation in the process of constitutional changes in Turkey and the other presenting a guide for implementing e-participation in local administrations around Europe. Finally, one of the papers presented a showcase of using data warehouse technologies for collecting and aggregating data from different sources in the statistical office in Macedonia.
This year selection of eight presented papers was based on twenty-three submitted abstracts. Nine of the abstracts were lated updated to full papers. The papers were presented and discussed within three working sessions in front of about fifteen participants.
The programme of the group consisted of 11 presentations from nine countries: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia and Uzbekistan. The papers were collected into two thematic clusters: the first consisted of five comparative studies, whilst the second included six descriptions of showcases.
During the course of three years, approximately half of the papers presented at the meetings of the working group were related to the topic of the learning platform on e-government; most of them describe show cases with a few comparative studies. The collected papers are planned to be published by NISPAcee.
This was the third meeting of the working group dedicated to the general theme of the NISPAcee learning platform on e-government. The platform represents a common framework for facilitating a more formal exchange of best practices of using information and communication technologies in the public sector, where the transfer of knowledge can be monitored, documented, and evaluated. The platform can also facilitate a comparative analysis of showcases and good practices which would go beyond single country borders. With the call for papers for this year’s meeting, we solicited further candidate showcases to be considered for inclusion in the learning platform, as well as comparative studies of those already existing.
The programme of the group consisted of 11 presentations from nine countries: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, and Uzbekistan. The papers were clustered into two thematic clusters: the first cluster consisted of five comparative studies, while the second included six descriptions of showcases.
In the course of three years, approximately half of the papers presented at the meetings of the working group were related to the topic of the learning platform on e-government; most of them describe show cases with a few comparative studies. The collected papers are planned to be published by NISPAcee.
Date: May 12-14, 2010
During this meeting, the working group continued efforts towards building the NISPAcee learning platform on e-government. The platform represents a common framework for facilitating a more formal exchange of best practices with using information and communication technologies in the public sector, where the transfer of knowledge can be monitored, documented, and evaluated. The platform can also facilitate a comparative analysis of showcases and good practices that would go beyond single country borders. With the call for papers for this meeting, there were solicited further candidate showcases to be considered for inclusion in the learning platform.
New and existing working group members responded positively to the initiative by submitting 21 abstracts. After sending the authors of these submitted abstracts comments for improvements and preparation of the full papers, there were 15 full paper submissions presented during the meeting in Warsaw. Authors of the 15 full papers who attended the meeting came from ten countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Macedonia, The Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, and Turkey). The presentations were grouped into four thematic clusters. In the largest one, we used the presentations of eight candidate showcases to be considered for inclusion in the learning platform. We dedicated the second cluster to the papers on presenting and evaluating national-level development of e-government; the third thematic cluster to the papers on models and methods for evaluating e-government projects, and finally, the fourth cluster included papers on advanced e-government topics.
In Warsaw, a total of 35 participants attended the working group sessions. Each session had an audience of about 20 participants; some of whom actively contributed to the discussions. Some participants of the previous meetings in Bratislava and Budva also attended the meeting in Warsaw; six of the authors of full papers also had full papers in Budva. The trend of establishing a community around the working group, observed last year, seems to be stable and it would appear that the learning platform increases the cohesiveness of this community.
The main theme of this year’s working group meeting was the establishment of a NISPAcee learning platform on e-government. The platform represents a common framework for facilitating a more formal exchange of best practices in the use of information and communication technologies in the public sector, where the transfer of knowledge can be monitored, documented, and evaluated. The platform can also facilitate a comparative analysis of good practices that would go beyond single country borders.
With the call for papers for this year’s meeting, a process was initiated to establish the learning platform by soliciting an initial set of candidate showcases to be considered for inclusion in the learning platform. The authors of the 12 papers who attended the meeting come from seven countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Turkey). The papers were proposed in five thematic sessions. We dedicated one thematic session (three slots of the conference programme) to e-learning platform showcases and presentations of specific e-government projects (also to be considered for inclusion in the platform). One session was dedicated to the models and methods for evaluating e-government projects, another session to a general analysis of country-level development of e-government, and yet another session to applications of knowledge management technologies in e-government. The WG will continue its efforts to build the NISPAcee e-government learning platform in years to come by soliciting papers on a further comparative analysis of showcases or the analysis of their transferability to other governmental sectors, regions or countries.
Date: May 15-17, 2008
our call for papers, we encouraged evaluation of other aspects of e-government projects and strategies:
(2) transforming the traditional government practices in more efficient ones;
(3) intensifying the G2G (government to government) collaboration.
The initial response of the authors to our Call for Papers was satisfactory: authors from 12 countries (Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Turkey, and Ukraine) submitted 17 abstracts. Out of these 17, 10 were very well aligned with the Call for Papers, outlined above, so we accepted
them without conditions. We accepted 4 papers conditionally, requesting them to take into account comments we provided on how to align their papers with the main theme of this year meeting. Due to incomprehensibility or over-generality of the 3 remaining abstracts, we rejected them, but also provided comments and encouragement to resubmit the papers for the next year meeting. The 14 accepted abstracts could be clustered in four groups:
(1) presentation of show cases (particular e-government
project),
(2) evaluation of e-government projects and national-level strategies,
(3) critical factors of e-government development, and
(4) advanced topics and future prospects of e-government development.
Authors of the 7 full papers from 7 countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, and Turkey) participated in the meeting. We groped the papers in three sessions – two of them were dedicated to the theme evaluation of e-government projects and national-level strategies, one to future prospects of egovernment development. Authors from Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and Turkey analyzed the national-level e-government strategies in their countries. They mainly focus on identifying the critical issues in implementing these strategies; some of them also analyze the effects of implementing the strategies. The David Spacek’s paper (Czech Republic) reports on a comprehensive analysis of benchmarking e-government, identified a number of limitations thereof, and proposed approaches to overcome them.
The paper from Slovenia is an empirical study of efforts for digital archiving documents in Slovene public sector, while Austrian paper provides glimpse into usability of trusted computing platforms for improving the security of e-government projects. In Bratislava, about 30 participants, in total, were present at our sessions.
We identified two major problems with the e-government workgroup this year that we will try to address in future. First, there is an obvious lack of comparative studies that would go into analysis of projects/strategies from different countries; namely, all the presented papers focus on a single country. The second problem is the inability of potential participants to attend the conference due to financial issues. We plan to address both issues by proposing a new workgroup program that would focus on building an egovernment learning platform. The platform to be build by the workgroup members would include collection of innovative e-government projects from CEE countries and would let workgroup members to conduct comparative studies and identify critical development (success and failure) factors. The next years Call for Papers would be planned to encourage contributions to the learning platform. We will also apply for financial support for the workgroup that would further motivate participation.
Date: May 17-19, 2007
This was the third and the last meeting of the WG under coordination of these coordinators.
This year 11 papers were presented. Four papers were oriented towards policy analysis concerning e-government development in individual countries (Russia, Hungary and Estonia). Seven papers were focused on different aspects of e-service delivery and e-participation. In this group three papers were dealing and empirically analyzing quality of e-services and public portals. In other four papers topics like users satisfaction, factors influencing take-up of e.-services, social factors influencing e-participation and assessing of e-services were addressed.
Most papers were based on valuable empirical data assembled from the countries in the region (Estonia, Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, Slovenia ) which can serve as a solid base for further research in the field. WG believes that this field is getting momentum in PA in the region and suggests SC to support work of the group for the next three year period and appoint new coordinators of WG.
This year 11 papers from 9 different countries were presented. WG started its work by Leo Aadel presenting his paper under a bit provocative title ‘The success and failure of electronic governance: the case of
On the other hand there were also presentations from the countries where e-government is still at the very beginning of its development. Ivanna Atamanchuk presented the case of
Date: May 19-21, 2005
Theme: Specific problems and conditions of e-government development in CEE countries
According to its initial plans Working Group on E-government started its new three-year cycle of work in
Sessions were thematically divided in 'country reports' and 'field specific' reports. In the first thematic group focus was on presentation of country based studies concerning e-government development, among them some very well designed empirically based studies were presented. Under the second thematic area some more narrowly focused issues like e-government development in the local communities and bigger cities were addressed.
- facilitate an integrated knowledge handling,
- reduce the inherited vagueness and fuzziness of the policy making process, and
- create a systemic framework for addressing bottlenecks and inconsistencies
a. Shortcomings identified in various stages of the overall public policy circle.
b. The breach between public policy analysis and implementation, cases, practices and methods to overcome it.
c. Knowledge management theories, techniques and practical examples for ameliorating the policy making process.
d. ICT applications that can improve,
- the policy making process,
- the information flow from society to the administrative and political system and vice versa, and
- the provision of public services
Over a dozen of research papers were submitted and presented by the participants during the three days of the Working Group’s work, with the daily turnout being of some 30 participants. Apart from the presentations made by specialists representing the NISPAcee members from Central Eastern, South Eastern Europe and the CIS, the additional presentations were made by the guest speakers from OECD, the Dublin University’s Trinity College (Ireland) and the e-Governance Academy in Tallinn, Estonia, addressing such issues as public officials’ competency and training needs to deal with the information society challenges, a leading role of senior executives to lead the change management process to accommodate all the potential benefits engendered by the information society advances into the public sector.
List of the presented papers in Vilnius, Lithuania (with abstracts and links to paper files).
Place: 11th NISPAcee Annual conference, Bucharest, Romania
Date: April 10-12, 2003
Theme 2003: Towards integrated public policy for e-Government development
E-government has become a popular topic in countries all over the world, regardless their development stage. Politicians and public officials, design and support the implementation of e-Government. Though there is not one single way for implementing e-Government. The public policy for e-Government development (the management of e-Government) differs a lot, when moving from one country to another.
In the Working Group, alternative approaches for developing an e-Government policy will be identified and lessons-learnt by each country will be presented. Theoretical papers addressing the issue of the diversity of public policies for implementing e-Government, or practical papers presenting country-specific public policy for e-Government would be accepted.
Questions that could be addressed follows (indicative):
- Centralized versus decentralized e-Government development.
- The management of e-Government: structures, processes, resources.
- National e-Government master plans: lessons-learnt and best practices.
- National strategies for e-Government in CEE&CIS countries and eEurope.
Within the main topic of the Bucharest Conference the central theme of the "Transitional e-Government Working Group” was: "Towards integrated Public Policy for e-Government Development”, aiming to the discussion of critical questions and problems related to the development of a global policymaking strategy based on the use of information and communication technologies in the public sector as well as the adaptation of such a strategy in view of the specificities of the transitional countries.
Presentations were organized in three panels:
Panel No.1: National Strategies and Policies for e-Government
Panel No.2: Facets of e-Governance Policies
Panel No.4: E-Government Decision-making and Evaluation
The main conclusions of the fourteen presenters and about ten discussants that took part in the working group No 6 on e-Gov meetings are the following:
Methodological remarks
The use of ICT in order to improve policy-making is not merely a technological issue: technology is important but is not enough to improve policy-making. It is not, also, a pure legal issue. Legal frameworks for e-Government are necessary but do not suffice alone to enhance policy-making capacity through ICT. Organizational and Political issues are equally important coupled with human resources and cultural aspects.
All these dimensions have to be integrated into a coherent policy design and policy implementation framework in order to promote public action efficiency through modern technologies.
An overall strategy for e-Gov development has therefore to combine technological, legal, organizational, political, H. R., cultural and social issues. Most important, the e-Gov development strategy has to be designed in view of effective implementation and use of technological enablers for better government. Therefore e-Gov development has to be viewed as a coherent Public Policy. An effective e-Gov has to be based on a roadmap at different levels including local-centre relations, unified communication codes and common language definitions (referring to policy field ontologies, semantic web etc), process and content linkages etc.
A critical point is that an effective e-Gov development strategy has to be content driven and not process driven: namely policy field priorities and global social and political considerations -and not just available technologies- have to drive and orient resource allocation and prioritize e-Gov options and alternatives.
Current situation
Referring to the current situation the WG members concluded that the great majority of e-Gov applications, not only in CEE and CIS countries but worldwide are front-office applications: they are focusing on service delivery and constitute what is called Customer Relations Management Systems. There is, also, a limited number of Transaction Process Systems as back office application (eg. automated income tax processing system)
However, by compiling interactive web pages with some on line income tax processing you don’t really get enhanced Capacity to Govern. Capacity to Govern means capacity to produce better Public Policies namely accurate and qualitative outcomes ensuring satisfied public service users, performing businesses and prosperous communities. Getting the above mentioned results involves a complex process including:
· Effective social input and monitoring at the citizens’, communities’ and businesses’ level
· Speedy and extensive data processing at the agency level
· Multi-source integrated reporting at the ministerial level
· Multi-criteria decision making at the government and parliamentarian level
· Effective implementation and operational planning at the agency level
· Multiple-outlet service deliver at the users’ level
The most important is that all these steps must be integrated in a coherent framework permitting effective linking and interaction between policy making stages and intermediate outputs and leading to effective and efficient out sources.
Future activities
The working group defined an action plan based on the development of a comparative research in selected countries in order to develop a taxonomy of pitfalls, bottlenecks and drawbacks at the current policy making process.
In a second stage the WG is going to try to match detected pitfalls with potential technological solutions in an integrated perspective.
However as technological solutions in reality are nothing more than enablers and are not perceived as a kind of panacea, , the WG is determined to coordinate it’s research agenda with other working groups, mainly the one on Political Administrative Relations in order to integrate Political, Social, and cultural dimensions in it’s approach.
List of the presented papers in Bucharest, Romania
Theme: Applying the e-Government framework in transitional countries
Electronic Government (eGovernment) is an emerging force today, all over the world. Politicians and administrators have to realize that the eGovernment framework is much more than establishing a website and performing transactions via the Internet. The required process standardization and reengineering together with the organizational redesign that are prerequisites for moving towards the eGov direction will surely affect the way Public Administration is organized and functions. Moreover, in the emergence of the Information Society, the mission statement, the goals and the legitimacy of the State may be arise once again.
What will be the new role of the State?
How democracy will be implemented in the e-era?
What about the rights of the e-citizens?
Is there a need for revising the relation between private and public sector?
These are only some of the questions that sooner or later have to be addressed by the States.
In this framework, Central European and CIS countries are facing critical additional questions due to the specific characteristics of the region:
Is it possible for a Country in Transition to follow these changes?
Should these countries address first the "transitional” (institutional, financial, cultural, etc) problems they experience and then move towards e-society?
An interesting and vivid dialogue on e-Government issues took place amongst the members and the audience of the WG. Through a heavy program of seventeen papers/ presentations, all participants witnessed a fruitful and unique exchange of experiences emanating from eleven CEE & CIS countries.
The WG members concluded that e-Government is a complex and multi-dimensioned challenge for governments all over the world. So, several issues have to be addressed.
A short list follows:
- Ethical & Cultural issues
- Legal issues
- Policy formulation
- Human Resources
- Knowledge management & learning processes
- Technological infrastructure
- Public agencies reengineering
- Funding
- Private - Public - Partnership
- E-Government Management
Especially for the CEE & CIS countries, participants agreed that despite the low Internet penetration rate, the lack of resources and the important cultural, organisational and institutional barriers within public agencies, these countries do not have to wait for their general economic, social and political problems to be resolved before engaging in e-Government initiatives.
On the contrary, Information and Communication Technologies properly introduced and implemented in public administration can facilitate general economic and social development, thus e-Government can be effectively used as a leverage towards democracy and prosperity.
Finally, WG co-ordinators presented five possible directions for future work that could be supported by the UNTC:
- Projects and pilots showcasing an e-Government perspective
- Research related to ICTs and public administration
- Publications (Public Management Forum, UNTC Technical Papers, etc)
- Knowledge documentation and dissemination (through UNTC Transitional Portal, accessible at www.transitional-portal.org)
- Transitional e-Government Knowledge Network expansion
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