eGovernment

As well as the movement of Enterprise 2.0, governments are trying to make a maximum use of capability of internet technologies. Wide-ranging application can be considered.

Jeong Chun Hai classified the e-Government delivery models as follows:*1

• G2C (Government to Citizens)
• G2B (Government to Businesses)
• G2E (Government to Employees)
• G2G (Government to Governments)
• C2G (Citizens to Governments) 

Especially, G2C (Government to Citizens) is most important model considering the role of governments, and internet technologies can make substantial contributions in this field. Nowadays many governments around the world run their own website for provide their services.

Building website is not everything. Recent advancement in technology provide further capability of high quality and low cost services to governments. Keeping up with technology can offer governments more opportunities to improve their IT platform.

One of these cases is the websilte of federal government of the U.S. USA.gov. Using innovative technologies enable governments to provide better services at low cost. For example, USA.gov significantly cut the cost at significant level by using cloud platform for their website.

"Deputy Associate Administrator of The Office of Citizen Services, Martha Dorris, has estimated that the move to Terremark’s cloud platform will cut costs by 90%, while improving capabilities with the newfound infrastructure flexibility." *2

Also, in other areas, enthusiastic discussions are held involving not only public sector but also private companies such as IT and contusing companies. In 2010, O'reilly held gov2.0 summit in Washington, where major IT companies including Google, IBM, Microsoft, and people from government got together.


What is the future of eGovernment. Let's have a look at near future visions provided by governments. European Commission shows its action plan between 2011-2015 on the website. There are four main categories in this action plan as follows:

• Empower citizens and businesses
• Reinforce mobility in the Single Market
• Enable efficiency and effectiveness
• Create the necessary key enablers and pre-conditions to make things happen

We can know that an eGovernment aims at more than just providing governmental services and information to their citizens. For example, in the "Empower citizens and business" section, there is a description as follows:

"Other crucial milestones to focus on are" ... "effective means enabling the active involvement of citizens and businesses in the policy-making process based on newly available technologies."

This message shows they consider that IT enable a new form of policy making process in a few years. In this sense, IT cannot be consider as just a technology, rather it need to be considered along with governmental strategy.

References:
*1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Government
*2 Case Study: USA.gov Achieves Cloud Bursting Efficiency Using Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud