Editorial

Citation

Muhammad, Z. and Kamal, I. (2014), "Editorial", Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, Vol. 8 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/TG-03-2014-0009

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, Volume 8, Issue 2

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the second issue of the eighth volume of Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy (TGPPP). This issue is dedicated to the publication of papers exploring the broad e-Government domain. Over the years, the constant update of the journal's scope to advocate theoretical as well as empirical research has led to an increase in quality of submissions and citations. The papers in this issue of TGPPP are theoretical and exploratory in nature, and provide a rich contextual background into e-Government. These papers outline up-to-date original thinking in the field of e-Government and offer our readers an insight to the pragmatic ideas around e-Voting, e-Government and e-Participation adoption and implementation.

This issue commences with a research paper by Alexander Prosser, entitled “The German Constitutional Court Ruling on e-Voting: Lessons Learnt”. In this paper, the author argues that in addition to safeguarding confidentiality around voting, the potential management of votes including the entire election polling process and results are key issues in e-Voting. For instance:

* During the 2005 Federal Elections in Germany, two complaints were filed against the e-Voting machines (used), resulting in not only barring the voting terminals deployed but also setting some fundamental principles on the auditability of the e-Voting system in general (#B2).

* In its ruling on the use of Internet-based e-Voting in the Austrian student union election, the Austrian Constitutional Court (in 2011) ruled that the use of the e-Voting system is unlawful. The main reason was that the election committees were not able to perform their legal duties in the electronic system and that the electronic part of the election was not reproducible (#B9).

* In regional elections in Finland 2008, more than 200 electronic votes vanished – the Supreme Administrative Court ordered the election be repeated on “paper” (#B5).

The author reports that there are a few Supreme Court rulings available for using the e-Voting process, as it is still a new research area for many regions across the globe. This research analyses the script of the ruling and e-Voting failures and, as a result, proposes a general security framework for e-Voting systems and a formal framework for “auditability”. Some of the aforementioned examples clearly expose the validity of the e-Voting process, as e-Voting appears to have enticed a large degree of disbelief and may have left a trajectory of failed projects. This research contribution attempts to strengthen the trust in e-Voting again by enabling strict auditability and accountability in the electronic media as well.

Following the aforementioned e-Voting research study, we have action design research by Anneke Zuiderwijk, Marijn Janssen, Sunil Choenni and Ronald Meijer, entitled “Design Principles for Improving the Process of Publishing Open Data”. This research reports that not only the private sector but also governments create huge amounts of data while performing their everyday tasks and operations. These government data when published online are referred to as open data and have the potential to create significant benefits (#B11; #B1). The authors argue that the publication of open data is often considered as unmanageable and there are no standard procedures and processes for opening data. This blocks the easy publication of government data. #B12 report that often the publication of data is not an integral part of data collection or creation and it is usually viewed as a separate activity that is not integrated in the daily procedures and routines. Even though some useful procedures for releasing government data were published in the past (#B4), the authors argue that these guidelines cannot be used to enhance the open data publishing process of public organisations. The publication of data by public organisations is a complex and ill-understood activity, which suffers from many impediments, such as the threat of privacy violation and of being legally liable when opened data are misused. As a result of these impediments, the open data publishing process needs to be revisited. This research, therefore, aims to derive design principles for improving the open data publishing process of public organisations.

Then we have Zaheer Khan, David Ludlow, Wolfgang Loibl and Kamra Soomro presenting their research, entitled “ICT Enabled Participatory Urban Planning and Policy Development: The UrbanAPI Project”. This research presents state-of-the-art literature on the extant participatory approaches and their contribution to urban planning and the policy-making process. Furthermore, an UrbanAPI project-based case study is presented to identify new visualisation and simulation tools applied at different urban scales. The authors argue that these tools are applied in four different European cities – Vienna, Bologna, Vitoria-Gasteiz and Ruse – with the objective to identify the data needs for application development, commonalities in requirements of such participatory tools and their expected impact in policy- and decision-making processes. This research further reports that the political systems in several representative democracies have become more responsive, are accessible to public and are incorporating more participatory elements. #B7 report that citizens' participation in urban planning and policy-making has developed the traditional top-down governance model via promotion of bottom-up approaches to policy development and decision-making, often based on a well-defined e-Democracy framework. This evolution drives social innovation in support of planning initiatives and results in more public-oriented policy specifications for better governance and sustainable urban environments. Despite the evident dynamic and optimistic future orientation, at the city level, there is as yet only limited evidence of the direct effects of information and communication technology (ICT)-enabled innovations on city governance systems, and in many respects, this revolution is still in its infancy and clearly more research, particularly at the pan-European level, is required. As a result, this paper presents new ICT-enabled participatory urban planning tools at different urban scales to support collaborative decision-making and urban policy development.

Thereafter, we have Pradeep Suri presenting his research, entitled “Flexibility of Processes and E-governance Performance”. In this research, Pradeep argues that the prevailing government processes are often not able to cope-up with the vigorous context of e-Governance due to their inflexible oddity, as reflected in the murky performance of e-Governance projects (#B8; #B3; #B10). Even though technology-related challenges are progressively becoming less critical (#B6), resolving of non-technological problems still remains an overwhelming task. As a result, this research aims to analyse flexibility of processes and e-Governance performance from the perspective of government officials involved in the planning of agriculture-related national/multi-state-level e-Governance projects in India. This research has the following two objectives:

* to propose validated constructs for measuring flexibility of key processes and performance of e-Governance in the study context; and

* to analyse flexibility of processes, performance of e-Governance and relationship between them in the context of the study.

Based on the analysis of the relevant literature, new constructs are proposed and hypothesis is formulated to study flexibility of processes and performance of e-Governance. The empirical part of the study involves an opinion survey of officers involved in planning of the identified projects. The proposed constructs have been validated based on reliability and confirmatory factor analysis and used further for statistical analysis and interpretation. This paper addresses the gap with respect to lack of measures for analysing relationship between flexibility of processes and performance of e-Governance projects. This research unlocks the door for further research in terms of defining additional constructs such as “changing situation” and “competence level of actors” and exploring their predictive relationships with “performance of e-Governance”.

We then have a paper by Aggeliki Tsohou, Habin Lee and Zahir Irani, entitled “Innovative Public Governance through Cloud Computing: Information Privacy, Business Models and Performance Measurement Challenges”. E-Government aims to provide public administrations with the ability to offer an increased portfolio of public services to citizens, businesses or other public agencies in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Nonetheless, in several European regions, citizens and businesses are faced with the difficulty of finding information and services provided by local public authorities on the Internet. Innovative technologies, such as federation of services and cloud computing, can contribute to resolving this problem. Cloud distribution offers highly scalable databases for applications, ubiquitous network access, location independent resources and rapid elasticity. Embracing the aim of bringing the advantages to the public governance, the EU-funded project Openly Accessible Services for an Interacting Society (OASIS) facilitates access to information, public services and economic promotion by grouping online services in a unified portal following a user-centred logic. The authors argue that although public authorities can strongly benefit from the vision of OASIS project and using federation of services to foster flexibility and scalability, it should be noticed that such organisational and technical change is not as straightforward. Several challenges impede the realisation of such innovative e-Government provision such as:

* information privacy concerns;

* re-engineering of business processes;

* introducing new business models; and

* difficulty in measuring the performance of a dynamic system.

The purpose of this paper is therefore to identify and analyse these challenges as they emerge during OASIS design and present the identified solutions for the OASIS platform. The results are based on conceptual analysis and focus group interviews, including privacy requirements, proposed business models and key performance indicators (KPIs) for public services on cloud computing. The authors claim that this is the first study that discusses – from multiple perspectives and through empirical investigation – the challenges to realise public governance through innovative technologies.

Finally, we have a mixed method-based research paper by Euripidis Loukis, Yannis Charalabidis, Aggeliki Androutsopoulou, Vangelis Karkaletsis and Anna Triantafillou, entitled “Passive Crowdsourcing in Government using Social Media”. This paper reports that government agencies have been increasingly attracted towards exploiting the capabilities provided by ICT, and especially the Internet, for engaging the citizens in their public policy-making processes, and this has led to the gradual development of the e-Participation domain. This paper, therefore, aims to develop a novel approach towards e-Participation, which is based on:

* passive crowdsourcing by government agencies; and

* exploiting the extensive political content continuously created in numerous web 2.0 social media by citizens without government stimulation, to understand better their needs, issues, opinions, proposals and arguments concerning a particular domain of government activity or public policy.

The authors assert that a novel approach towards e-Participation can lead to a third generation of it (that can be however combined with the first two), based on the exploitation of the social media by government agencies, but in a totally different manner, for conducting “passive crowdsourcing”. This approach is developed and elaborated through cooperation with potential users experienced in the design of public policies from three countries (Austria, Greece and the UK), using a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques: co-operative development of application scenarios, questionnaire survey, focus groups and workshops and, finally, in-depth interviews. As a result, a process model for the application of the proposed passive crowdsourcing approach has been developed, which is quite different from the one of the usual active crowdsourcing.

We hope you will find this issue interesting and thought-provoking, and hope to receive your valuable contributions for the forthcoming issue.

Zahir Irani
Editor and

Muhammad Kamal
Editorial Assistant

References

Bertot, J.C. and Jaeger, P.T. (2006), “User-centered e-government: challenges and benefits for government web sites”, Government Information Quarterly, Vol. 23 No. 2, pp. 163-168.
Bundesverfassungsgericht (2009), “Rulings BVerfG, 2 BvC 3/07 and 2 BvC 4/07, Karlsruhe”, available at: www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/cs20090303_2bvc000307.html (accessed February 27, 2014).
Gauld, R., Goldfinch, S. and Horsburgh, S. (2010), “Do they want? Do they use it? The ‘demand –Side’ of e-Government in Australia and New Zealand”, Government Information Quarterly, Vol. 27 No. 2, pp. 177-186.
Kalampokis, E., Tambouris, E. and Tarabanis, K. (2011), “Open government data: a stage model”, in Janssen, M., Scholl, H.J., Wimmer, M.A., and Tan, Y.-H. (Eds), The 10th Conference on Electronic Government (EGOV 2011), LNCS, Delft.
Karhumäki, J. and Meskanen, T. (2008), Audit Report on Pilot Electronic Voting in Municipal Elections, University of Turku, Turku.
Rose, W.R., and Grant, G.G. (2010), “Critical issues pertaining to the planning and implementation of e-government initiatives”, Government Information Quarterly, Vol. 27 No. 1, pp. 26-33.
Suree, F. and Wichian, C. (2009), “The framework for sustainable eDemocracy development”, Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 16-31.
Verdegem, P. and Verleye, G. (2009), “User-centred E-Government in practice: a comprehensive model for measuring user satisfaction”, Government Information Quarterly, Vol. 26 No. 3, 487-497.
Verfassungsgerichtshof (2011), “V 85-96/11-15 – 13.12.2011, Vienna”, available at: www.vfgh.gv.at/cms/vfghsite/attachments/7/6/7/CH0006/CMS1327398738575/e-voting_v85-11.pdf (accessed February 27, 2014).
Weerakkody, V., Janssen, M. and Dwivedi, Y.K. (2011), “Transformational change and business process reengineering (BPR): lessons from the British and Dutch public sector”, Government Information Quarterly, Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 320-328.
Zhang, J., Dawes, S. and Sarkis, J. (2005), “Exploring stakeholders’ expectations of the benefits and barriers of egovernment knowledge sharing”, Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Vol. 18 No. 5, pp. 548-567.
Zuiderwijk, A. and Janssen, M. (2013), “A coordination theory perspective to improve the use of open data in policy-making”, in Wimmer, M.A., Janssen, M. and Scholl, H.J. (Eds), 12th Conference on Electronic Government (EGOV), IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013, Koblenz.