Electronic Government: Design, Applications and Management

Although there is a growing literature on aspects of electronic government appearing in a range of journals, across a spectrum from political science to information science, there are very few books on the subject, and any new addition to this small corpus should be welcome. But, as in all emerging fields, the reader needs to pick a careful path through a minefield of new ideas and theoretical frameworks which may or may not form part of the new discipline. Both of these observations apply to Åke Grönlund’s contribution to the e‐government literature – a welcome contribution, but demanding some discrimination on the part of the reader.

The book reflects the interest that researchers from many different fields are showing in e‐government. It is an eclectic and somewhat uneven collection, representing a largely Eurocentric view that is a useful counterpart to much of the US‐based literature that was first to emerge on this subject. The contributors are a mixture of academics and government employees from Canada, Scandinavia, the UK and elsewhere in Europe. The attempts of some of these contributors to apply theories used in other disciplines are less successful than those who take up the subject as a new field which requires new evaluative and analytic frameworks.

The first chapter is the editor’s summary of the 16 contributions to the volume and links these to the central model which informs the philosophy of the book (a triad of formal politics, administration and civil society, derived from Molin, Mansson, and Stromberg). This introductory chapter also outlines the division of the volume into three sections: design, application and management (although contributions stray between all three), a division which sits uneasily alongside the triad proposed by Grönlund as the underlying model of analysis of e‐government.

The second chapter, also by Grönlund, further expands the triad model, with reference to numerous e‐government applications and initiatives around the world, although without greatly illuminating what the emerging issues are. This is partly because of a lack of definition and consistent terminology. Definitions, and indications of scope, that would help the reader navigate though the complex Web of terminology, are sorely lacking.

Nevertheless, despite the lack of an adequate unifying thread throughout the volume, many of the chapters make a serious contribution to the field. In the first section (Design) Janlert reflects on the process of decision‐making in an electronic context, and Lenk, Traunmuller, and Wimmer on general theories of government, although these are not well related to the new context of electronic government. However, Riera, Sanchez and Torras’ chapter on Internet voting is a sensible and practical account of issues to be considered in the development of online voting systems. This section concludes with an excellent contribution from Detlor and Finn, who present a very useful analytical framework on which to base a government portal design.

The second section (Applications) opens with a contribution from Galindo on trust in e‐government – an important topic that perhaps could have benefited from a general introduction, setting out the basic issues very clearly. This is followed by Svensson, on legal expert systems in administrative decision making, and a case study of the Dutch General Assistance Act (social welfare legislation), a fairly specialised but otherwise successful application of IT to administration. A similar application of IT – in this case a Web‐based job employment market for government agencies – is outlined by Gates and Nissen. A more conventional approach to e‐government is described by Leenes, who reports on a “virtual” public counter or “one‐stop shop” interface with government developed in Ole, The Netherlands.

Two useful contributions are made by Macintosh and colleagues at the International Teledemocracy Centre in Scotland, who describe some initiatives that use technology to promote citizen participation in democracy, and develop some useful evaluative criteria to apply to such initiatives, and by Tom Gross, who focuses on Web‐based community networks. The final section (Management) includes an excellent essay by Ari‐Veikko Anttiroiko on strategic knowledge management in local government, which is followed by a similar paper by Nilsson and Ranerup on applications of IT, specifically groupware, to the internal workings of government, and a final paper by Grönlund and Wiberg on the use of ICT by government agencies in Sweden to streamline their operations. In the final two papers, Kieley et al. revisit the Canadian situation (one of the few papers to attempt any definitions, and to “scope” the field), and Poupa describes proposals for electronic voting in Switzerland.

In sum, the volume covers a very wide‐ranging set of IT applications in government, in a wide range of contexts, not all of which are commonly encompassed by the term e‐government. It is probably useful to try to extend the term to a wider scope, and the volume will certainly expand most readers’ understanding of e‐government. Overall, however, the book suffers from a lack of definition, focus and organisation, and poor editing and design. Several contributions could have been cut, or eliminated. A totally inadequate index – three pages, consisting of two columns in large type, to index 350 dense pages of text does poor service to the contents of the volume. Although there are some useful chapters in the volume, overall it makes for a disappointing whole.