J. Ramon Gil-Garcia – författare

In every part of the world information and technology are changing society and challenging the structures, roles, and management of traditional government institutions. At the same time, universal needs for human and social development, environmental protection, commercial and financial stability, and scientific and technological advancement demand governmental attention.

In this complex and changing environment, governments are still expected to provide for the public good through legal and political processes, and public programs and services. Digital transformation, electronic government, government 2.0, and electronic governance are just some of the labels used to characterize the ideas and actions that underlie adaptation, transformation, and reform efforts. This book contributes to the ongoing dialog within the digital government research and practice community by addressing leadership and management challenges through the interplay of five interconnected themes: management, policy, technology, data, and context. These themes are evident in a wide range of topics including policy informatics, smart cities, cross-boundary information sharing, service delivery, and open government, among others. Accordingly, it includes chapters that explore these themes conceptually and empirically and that emphasize the importance of context, the need for cross‐boundary thinking and action, a public value approach to performance, and the multi‐dimensional capabilities necessary to succeed in a dynamic, multi‐stakeholder environment.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Public Management Review.

In every part of the world information and technology are changing society and challenging the structures, roles, and management of traditional government institutions. At the same time, universal needs for human and social development, environmental protection, commercial and financial stability, and scientific and technological advancement demand governmental attention.

In this complex and changing environment, governments are still expected to provide for the public good through legal and political processes, and public programs and services. Digital transformation, electronic government, government 2.0, and electronic governance are just some of the labels used to characterize the ideas and actions that underlie adaptation, transformation, and reform efforts. This book contributes to the ongoing dialog within the digital government research and practice community by addressing leadership and management challenges through the interplay of five interconnected themes: management, policy, technology, data, and context. These themes are evident in a wide range of topics including policy informatics, smart cities, cross-boundary information sharing, service delivery, and open government, among others. Accordingly, it includes chapters that explore these themes conceptually and empirically and that emphasize the importance of context, the need for cross‐boundary thinking and action, a public value approach to performance, and the multi‐dimensional capabilities necessary to succeed in a dynamic, multi‐stakeholder environment.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Public Management Review.

Many countries around the world are investing a great amount of resources in government IT initiatives. However, few of these projects achieve their stated goals and some of them are complete failures. Therefore, understanding e-government success has become very important and urgent in recent years. In order to develop relevant knowledge about this complex phenomenon, researchers and practitioners need to identify and assess what are the main conditions, variables, or factors that have an impact on e-government success. However, before being able to evaluate these impacts, it is necessary to define what e-government success is and what some e-government success measures are. This book presents a review of both e-government success measures and e-government success factors. It also provides empirical evidence from quantitative analysis and two in-depth case studies. Although based on sound theory and rigorous empirical analysis, the book not only significantly contributes to academic knowledge, but also includes some practical recommendations for government officials and public managers.

Theoretically, the book proposes a way to quantitatively operationalize Fountain’s enactment framework. Based on the institutional tradition, the technology enactment framework attempts to explain the effects of organizational forms and institutional arrangements on the information technology used by government agencies. According to Fountain (1995; 2001) the technology enactment framework pays attention to the relationships among information technology, organizations, embeddedness, and institutions. This framework is very well known in the e-government field, but is normally used for qualitative analysis and there is no previous proposal of how to use it with quantitative data. The book proposes variables to measure each of the different constructs in this framework and also tests the relationships hypothesized by Fountain’s theory. Finally, using the advantages of the selected quantitative analysis technique (Partial Least Squares), the study also proposes some adjustments and extensions to the original framework in a theory building effort.

Methodologically, the book reports on one of the first multi-method studies in the field of e-government in general and e-government success in particular. This study uses a nested research design, which combines statistical analysis with two in depth case studies. The study begins with a statistical analysis using organizational, institutional, and contextual factors as the independent variables. An overall score representing e-government success in terms of the functionality of state websites is the dependent variable. Second, based on the statistical results two cases are selected based on their relative fitness to the model (residuals) and their position in the general ranking of website functionality (which includes four different measures). In order to complement the results of the statistical analysis,case studies were developed for the two selected states (New York and Indiana), using semi-structured interviews and document analysis. In terms of the statistical analysis, the book constitutes one of the first applications of Partial Least Squares (PLS) to an e-government success study. PLS is a structural equations modeling (SEM) technique and, therefore, allows estimating the measurement model and the structural model simultaneously. The use of this sophisticated statistical strategy helped to test the relationships between e-government success and different factors influencing it, as well as some of the relationships between several of the factors, thus allowing exploring some indirect effects too.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the study of sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT) from a government and public policy perspective. Since 2011, federal spending on IoT has been growing at a compound annual rate of ten percent. New technologies, such as sensors, and new kinds of data, such as big data, are creating new ways to systematically capture data and to use it to respond to complex problems. Some of these new technologies and applications have been identified and studied in recent literature in terms of their relevance to government. 

This volume adds to the literature by presenting sound theories and concepts for understanding the opportunities and challenges governments face when seeking to improve public services and government operations through the use of IoT. It also includes innovative methodologies for building understanding of the potential of a smart and connected government. In addition, the book offers relevant case studies and practical recommendations for the development, management, and evaluation of public policies and government programs.

The 23 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions. The papers are clustered under the following topical sections: digital transformation; digital services and open government; open data: social and technical perspectives; smart cities; and data analytics, decision making, and artificial intelligence.

Chapters "Perceived and Actual Lock-in Effects Amongst Swedish Public Sector Organisations when Using a SaaS Solution" and "Ronda: Real-time Data Provision, Processing and Publication for Open Data" are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 23rd IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference, EGOV 2024, held in Ghent, Belgium, during September 3–5, 2024. 

The 29 full papers presented were carefully selected from 69 submissions. They were categorized under the topical sections as follows: Foundations, Digital transformation, Public Services, AI in government, Open government, Emerging topics.  

This book provides key strategic principles and best practices to guide the design and implementation of digital government strategies. It provides a series of recommendations and findings to think about IT applications in government as a platform for information, services and collaboration, and strategies to avoid identified pitfalls. Digital government research suggests that information technologies have the potential to generate immense public value and transform the relationships between governments, citizens, businesses and other stakeholders. However, developing innovative and high impact solutions for citizens hinges on the development of strategic institutional, organizational and technical capabilities. Thus far,  particular characteristics and problems of the public sector organization promote the development of poorly integrated and difficult to maintain applications. For example, governments maintain separate applications for open data, transparency, and public services, leading to duplication of efforts and a waste of resources. The costs associated with maintaining such sets of poorly integrated systems may limit the use of resources to future projects and innovation. This book provides best practices and recommendations based on extensive research in both Mexico and the United States on how governments can develop a digital government strategy for creating public value, how to finance digital innovation in the public sector, how to building successful collaboration networks and foster citizen engagement, and how to correctly implement open government projects and open data. It will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, students, and public sector IT professionals that work in the design and implementation of technology-based projects and programs.

This book provides a comprehensive approach to the study of policy analytics, modelling and informatics. It includes theories and concepts for understanding tools and techniques used by governments seeking to improve decision making through the use of technology, data, modelling, and other analytics, and provides relevant case studies and practical recommendations. Governments around the world face policy issues that require strategies and solutions using new technologies, new access to data and new analytical tools and techniques such as computer simulation, geographic information systems, and social network analysis for the successful implementation of public policy and government programs. Chapters include cases, concepts, methodologies, theories, experiences, and practical recommendations on data analytics and modelling for public policy and practice, and addresses a diversity of data tools, applied to different policy stages in several contexts, and levels and branches of government. This book will be of interest of researchers, students, and practitioners in e-government, public policy, public administration, policy analytics and policy informatics.