E-Government: Challenges and lost opportunities

Abstract

The e-government systems are the largest software systems ever used. They influence almost all aspects of the life of a society. The analysis of the capabilities they provide indicates that e-government does not provide enough tools for the strategic aspects of the development of states and societies. Examples include control and optimization of education system, crisis prediction and control, and analysis of administrative processes. It is amplified by the delayed application of modern software architectures and e-government. We show that the precondition of any solution of these issues is a proper treatment of data collection and a reasonable data security policy in e-government systems. It should lead to an architecture of e-government having three well-developed virtual tiers: user, application, and data tier. Current systems have almost no data tier. The condition for it is an explicit formulation of measurable aims regarding strategic aspects of the use of e-government systems. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.