Executive summary

D71: A Framework for e-Government Services

This document presents the SmartGov framework for e-government services. The overall aim of the SmartGov project is to specify, develop, deploy and evaluate a knowledge-based platform to assist public sector employees to generate online transaction services. It achieves this by simplifying their development, maintenance and integration with already installed IT systems.

The SmartGov project, through its software platform, aims to minimise the reliance on IT skills to develop e-government services. However, e-government also brings new styles of communicating, new behaviours, new organisational structures, new processes, new paradigms, new threats and new opportunities.

The framework for e-government services includes reference models for:

the processes behind the design and delivery of e-government services
co-operation in public authorities, both internal and external
social acceptance of e-government services

It is intended to benefit any public authority that is planning or already delivering electronic transaction services, whether or not they have access to the SmartGov platform. It is designed to help improve co-operation, effectiveness and efficiency The framework is underpinned by the e-government services ontology. This is intended to provide a common understanding of the principles of e-government services, an understanding from which people can communicate, discuss and build models of their own.

In building our framework, we made use of interviews and workshops within the City of Edinburgh Council and the Greek Ministry of Finance.

Our framework is based on the premises that:

public services meet the needs of citizens and businesses;
public authorities co-operate -with the public and private sectors- to jointly deliver services;
services are constrained by legislation and resources;
better services are the result of monitoring both the quality of services and the satisfaction in services
the monitoring of costs and benefits is a key part of the affordability and sustainability of e-service projects

Recognising that that there is much more to success in e-government than getting the technology right, the framework takes a sociotechnical approach, in which we describe the social and cultural aspects of services, rather than only the technical artefacts and knowledge of artefacts.

Our framework explores the part played by the various roles in the processes behind e-services. The main roles in e-services are managers, domain experts, IT staff, service workers and end users (the citizens or enterprises that make use of the service). The processes in the life cycle of e-services are: identify the service, carry out a feasibility study, prepare the business case, implement, deploy, operate, monitor and improve, and finally discontinue.

Developing e-transaction services requires the establishment of multi-disciplinary relationships in which parties co-operate. Many different co-operative structures are possible: internal to public authorities, with other public authorities, with the voluntary sector and with the private sector. There are a handful of different modes of cooperation and many different justifications for co-operating. Some principles remain the same across all modes of co-operation: be clear about the shared purpose; be clear about the justifications; be clear about the roles; acknowledge complexity and learn to cope with it. We have developed new models of social acceptance, based on trust. Our models cover internal trust relationships and external trust relationships. There are significant differences in the models when services become electronic. The modes of trust are latent trust (not context-specific, existing for a long time) and situational trust (context specific, existing for a limited period).

The full e-government services ontology is provided as an appendix.

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Last updated: October 2003