IESI Canada - e-Gov Portal

Products & Solutions

◄

e-Gov Portal

What is meant by the term e-government?

It involves government agencies delivering better programs and services online, more efficiently, through the use of new information and communications technologies. E-government also harnesses the use of these technologies to improve government administration as well as enabling more effective engagement with the community.

e-Government Portal

Automating and Improving Processes for Government Agencies and the constituents they Serve.

Benefits of e-Government

The benefits of e-government are many, and include:

Users can have one-stop access to all the services they need in daily life.
Compared to non-electronic means, this one-stop access is more convenient (24-7) and more efficient through automation.
E-government improves the choice that people have to access government services by adding Internet access to conventional means such as postal mail and telephone.
E-government gives people access to expanded services made possible through computerization, for example access to new tools for job search.
E-government can provide better and much more responsive government by increasing opportunities for citizen engagement – citizens can provide instant feedback on government policy or the services they use and identify areas needing improvement.
E-government can act as a powerful stimulant for e-commerce by familiarizing the population with online transactions and services.

Challenges of e-Government

In order for the above benefits to accrue, e-government must first be implemented or deployed. Here we find some obstacles and challenges to full implementation. We list some of these as follows:

Many people are still computer and IT illiterate.
Not everyone has adequate access to the Internet. This may be due to lack of appropriate equipment, or the speed/bandwidth of the access may be inadequate.
To be widely used, e-government services requiring private information must be reliable, secure, and protect the privacy of the information. In short, people must trust the service. This is the challenge we address in this chapter.
There are legal, administrative, regulatory, social, and political hurdles that lead to a delicate mix of stakeholders of e-government. Managing these stakeholders is a daunting task (Accenture, 2002).

e-government is an exciting area for applying information and communication technologies (ICT). ICT can improve the efficiency and effectiveness in the provision and delivery of citizen services. A critical issue for the e-government implementation is the interoperation problem among heterogeneous legacy government systems. In this aspect, the universal system interoperability supported by the XML-based Web service technologies can be a useful component in a holistic
e-government infrastructure.

A key requirement of the e-government systems is the establishment and the implementation of the right access policy to the government resources. This in turn requires an appropriate mechanism to specify the access rules. Due to the nature of Web service and the specific requirements in the e-government context, it proposed that a more powerful and flexible mechanism is required to express the access policy more effectively in a Web services e-government infrastructure.