Syllabus

The course covers: reasons to embrace e-government, challenges to e-government, planning of e-government, front-office and back-office implementations, and the management of e-government projects.

In particular:

1. Reasons to embrace e-government include: more efficient use of public funds, improved quality of public services, more effective ways to obtain desired policy outcomes, greater engagement with citizens, and better tools to carry out public management reform and to build Information Society.
2. Four factors that can impede the uptake of e-government are: absent or inadequate legislations, unfavourable budgetary arrangements, frequent technology changes, and growing digital divide.
3. Planning starts with creating a vision statement for e-government, and continues into more concrete objectives - programs, targets and outcomes, providing the framework for the actual implementations.
4. As part of the front-office implementation, we introduce a four-level service maturity model, and discuss service quality measures, strategies for service delivery channels, and citizen engagement issues - access, consultation and public participation.
5. As part of the back-office implementation, we discuss: organisational change, leadership to motivate and break down barriers to change, central coordination to promote government-wide e-government development, inter-agency collaboration to create seamless services, e-government skill-sets for managers, technical staff and citizens at large, and public-private partnerships to mobilise funds and skills for the development of e-government.
6. At the end, we discuss the issues related to the management of e-government, such as: management of risks and costs in e-government projects, project evaluation and monitoring, predicting and facing problems, principles to guide project decisions, and setting priorities for action.

The course also includes illustrations from the practice of e-government in several countries worldwide, and provides exercises to apply the concepts introduced to one's own agency.