increasingly important in both public and private organizations, the need to successfully tackle project management emerges. Without a project management framework, those who commission an e-government project, those who manage it and also those who work on it will not have the necessary tools to plan, organize, monitor and re-schedule tasks, responsibilities and milestones. The present paper outlines a goal-driven and knowledge-based framework to plan and manage the critical aspects of e-government projects. A specifically designed tool supports the framework application and a lighthouse project of the Greek public sector is presented to illustrate the application context, leading to reusable conclusions on achievements and problems faced.

a structured research effort for measuring interoperability readiness in the regions of South Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, supported by the Greek Interoperability Centre. The motivation for this effort derives from the fact that, although interoperability is a key element for public administration and enterprises effective operation, and an important enabler for cross-country cooperation, a standard framework for benchmarking interoperability developments at country level is currently not in place. Interoperability-related information is highly fragmented in different ICT, e-Government and e-Business reports. In this context, in the core of the Interoperability Observatory lies the definition of a structured collection of metrics and indicators, associated with the dimension of interoperability-governance, and a mechanism for gathering with regard to the latter suitable information for a number of countries from various sources. The ultimate goal is the use of this information towards the directions of raising awareness on the countries’ interoperability status, promoting best practice cases and benchmarking.

age” and entered the “information age”, people, enterprises and above all decision makers are constantly trying to get the best out of the opportunities and the technologies offered, for facilitating their life and their work. One of the most active and promising domains nowadays, is eParticipation, which is actively promoted by all stakeholders, as there is a great need of reconnecting citizens with the decision makers and re-engaging them into the democratic procedures, especially as during the last years this gap is expanding, with the most convincing proof being the huge figure of voter turnout during the latest European elections. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues. Design/methodology/approach – A review of the most active and well-known eParticipation action pilot projects funded in the European Union is presented, alongside with a methodological framework that has been followed for mapping, assessing and evaluating those projects, using a beyond the state-of-the-art classification method. Findings – Conclusions of the performed work are in a position to outline the current status quo of eParticipation in Europe, highlighting lessons learned and opportunities for future activities and research. Originality/value – This paper includes valuable information towards practitioners, decision makers and administration officials, based not only on the established knowledge and on the experiences gained, but also on the identified gaps of the domain, aiming to support them in understanding the status quo of the domain and in the design process of future research roadmaps for eGovernace and policy modelling.

implementation and evaluation methods may be used, according to each specific project’s content and context. The evaluated aspects of an eParticipation project should focus on both the technological acceptance by the users and its contribution towards participative decision making and deliberation. In this context, we present a prototype eParticipation system, as it was implemented in the National News Agencies of Albania, Fyrom and Serbia. The novelty of this electronic participation system, that allows citizens to comment and discuss the news items as they appear in the News Agencies’ web sites, inspires focusing on user reaction and investigating the suitability of the proposed eParticipation model in practice. Focusing on the user perspective, the paper presents how the Technology Acceptance Model was used to evaluate this system that spans in multiple countries, languages and cultures. The evaluation results pinpoint several technical and societal challenges that relate to the implementation of eParticipation systems in developing countries.

worldwide, following the efforts of Governments to provide citizens and businesses with high quality one-stop services, there is a growing need for the systematic management of those newly defined and constantly transforming processes and electronic documents. eGovernment Interoperability Frameworks usually cater for the technical standards of eGovernment systems interconnection, but do not address service composition and use by citizens, businesses or other administrations. An Interoperability Registry is a system devoted to the formal description, composition and publishing of traditional or electronic services, together with the relevant document and process descriptions in an integrated schema. Through such a repository, the discovery of services by users or systems can be automated, resulting in an important tool for managing eGovernment transformation towards achieving interoperability. The chapter goes beyond the methodology and tools used for developing such a system for the Greek Government, to population with services and documents, application and extraction of useful conclusions for electronic Government transformation at global level.

revolution to enhance services for their citizens. However, the development of quality e-services and delivery systems that are efficient and effective is only one aspect of e-government. The essence of the latter lies as well in engaging citizenry into the use of e-government services. This chapter studies the impact and actual utilization of e-government services in certain countries of the Balkans (Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Romania, and Slovenia) using fuzzy numbers and statistics. Building on the elementary concept of the time that citizens/businesses spend on their transactions with public administration and taking into account the current sophistication stage of online public services, the chapter provides a framework for evaluating (a) e-government services in terms of the benefits that their use involves for citizens/businesses compared to the use of conventional ones and (b) the actual adoption (take-up) of e-government services by the aforementioned stakeholders. In this context, the scheme proposes the use of data expressed in linguistic terms with regard to the time citizens/businesses spend on transactions with public administration using either conventional or e-services, which are then converted to fuzzy numbers to be further processed so as to incorporate the uncertainty factor which is innate in the relevant estimations. The proposed framework is then applied for each one of the aforementioned countries for a basket of 20 basic public services (12 for citizens and 8 for businesses), exploiting the current sophistication stage and the actual utilization of e-government services per sophistication stage, provided by the corresponding e-government factsheets and Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Communities, respectively, and allowing for useful conclusions to be reached.

of e-government website evaluation in terms of providing a decision making framework. Built around the concepts of website evaluation and e-government, the proposed framework deploys Multi-Attribute Decision Making (MADM) methods and Fuzzy Sets Theory to overcome the subjectivity and inaccuracy that characterizes the conventional models for e-government website quality assessment. The framework offers also the possibility of performing comparisons with regard to the overall quality of different implementations either at national or international level. The chapter presents a holistic and scalable approach to e-government website evaluation and it is anticipated to be of great interest to both researchers and practitioners requiring an understanding of the factors influencing the quality of e-government websites or allocating resources to the relevant implementations respectively.

researchers’ and practitioners’ interest as open data and citizen engagement initiatives try to capitalize the wisdom of crowds for better governance, policy making, or even service provision. In this context, interoperability between public organizations, citizens, and enterprises seems to remain the center of interest in the public sector and national interoperability frameworks are continually revised and expanded across the globe in an effort to support the increasing need for seamless exchange of information. This paper outlines the current landscape in eGovernment interoperability, analyzing and comparing frameworks that have reached a certain degree of maturity. Their strengths and weaknesses at conceptual and implementation level are discussed together with directions for reaching consensus and aligning interoperability guidelines at a country and cross-country level.

the essential prerequisites for joined-up and web-enabled e-government, providing the basic standards that every public authority must adopt. Today, their scope has been extended to facilitate the seamless exchange of information and the deployment of interoperable systems in Central and Municipal Government. In the scope of this paper, the interoperability frameworks released by eight countries are presented, and a comparative analysis among their findings is conducted to indicate the similarities and differences in their philosophy and implementation, resulting in a set of recommendations for any interested party willing to create or update an Interoperability Framework.

in public sector organisations is a challenging task, due to technical, organisational and cultural specificities of the domain. Research shows that such IT projects have higher failure rates than similar approaches in the private sector, also indicating the lack of a method to transfer knowledge and apply best management practices in an effective way. The proposed management approach aims to recognise structure and reuse past successful attempts, in ways that support the overall viability of an e-Government project. After stating the fundamental principles of project management that apply to public sector IT projects, the authors present a conceptual model for e-Government project management, including entities such as dimensions, goals, activities, deliverables and roles that can be structured and adapted to cover all types of relevant projects in an out-of-the-box approach. This knowledge base of predefined project components can then be populated and utilised in making more informed decisions for effective project management of e-Government initiatives. This way, the proposed method supports public officials and practitioners in learning from past experience projects and in designing and running e-Government projects in a more systematic manner, thus, significantly increasing the likelihood of project success.

identified as the ones that were able to adapt their processes and ways of conducting business to the needs of their environment and the technological achievements of their times. This statement has not changed during recent years, but today, due to the major breakthrough of the internet and the possibilities it offers for a unified electronic marketplace, enterprises have to take advantage of the new technological tools offered, in order not only to adapt to this new emerging environment, but also to benefit from it and expand their operations in parallel with minimising costs. Achieving interoperability of the various production systems, and not only enabling hard-wired connectivity, seems to be the key that will unlock the gates leading to this newly established global market, and therefore enterprises need to focus more on their already established processes in order to be able to formulate a global standard for executing business transactions and cooperating smoothly with each other.

a critical success factor for the adoption of inter-organizational systems. This article presents a knowledge-based methodology for constructing readiness assessment instruments for B2B integration solutions and examines its validation by conducting structural equation modeling analysis with input data from wholesale trading firms in Greece. Strong emphasis is given to the usability and appropriateness of the produced indicators and the relevant gap in literature is addressed. The B2Bi success factors that are presented and the final set of their underlying indicators can provide a starting point for conducting organizational readiness evaluations for the successful adoption of multi-enterprise integration solutions. Our methodology and findings can assist enterprises and public bodies to utilize, share, and enrich a knowledge base about B2Bi organizational readiness, throughout their evolution as part of the Knowledge Society.

. Its purpose is to bring together best practices investigating the organizational, semantic and technical aspects of interoperability in the worlds of e-business and e-government. The book also targets novel approaches for achieving interoperability of organizations and systems in an international environment that could be applied both by enterprises and administrations, exploiting the commonalities, while respecting the peculiarities or each domain. The book includes 6 chapters that convey new research ideas on interoperable information systems as well as experience papers that justify their findings through solid experiments.

levels, interoperability became a key characteristic of the new electronic government systems and services, over the last decade. As a crucial prerequisite for automated process execution leading to “one-stop” e-Government services, interoperability has been systematically prescribed, since the dawn of the 21st century: Standardization frameworks, that included guidelines ranging from simple statements to well defined international Web-Service standards started to appear at National and Cross-Country levels, powered by governments, the European Union or the United Nations. In parallel, most international software, hardware and service vendors created their own strategies for achieving the goal of open, collaborative, loosely coupled systems and components. The paper presents the main milestones in this quest that shaped electronic government during the last years, describing National Frameworks, key Pan- European projects, international standardization and main industrial and research achievements in the EU. Moreover, the paper describes the next steps needed to promote interoperability at technical, semantic, organizational, legal or policy level – leading to the transformation of administrative processes and the provision of low-cost, high-quality services to citizens and businesses.

support to open data initiatives and web 2.0 channels for engaging citizens, researchers orient themselves towards future internet, wisdom of crowds and virtual world experiments. In this context, the domain of ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling has recently emerged to achieve better, participative, evidence-based and timely governance. This paper presents a taxonomy classifying the research themes, the research areas and the research sub-areas that challenge this domain in order to deal with its diversity and complexity. Taking into account advancements in research, policy and practice, the taxonomy brings together the open, linked data and visual analytics philosophy; the social media buzz taming collective wisdom in decision-making; and the future internet approaches around cloud computing, internet of things and internet of services, while embracing the collaborative policy modelling aspects and the safeguarding against misuse implications.

the digital revolution and place a wide range of materials on the web, from mere information to actual online services for the convenience of citizens, expectations of the service levels that sites should provide have been considerably raised, bringing up the issue of their quality evaluation. In most evaluation approaches, users are asked to provide their opinion on or weigh selected criteria through appropriate questionnaires; however their answers contain a certain level of un-determination. To this end, this paper develops an evaluation framework that overcomes this impediment by using triangular fuzzy numbers. The paper adopts Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process, a fuzzy multiple attribute decision making method, to assess the quality attributes of e-government websites.

the impact of interoperability on digital public services is emerging as an important research challenge in electronic government. The eGOVSIM model that is proposed in this paper aims to provide administrations with a tool to calculate the gains from digitising and making interoperable services for citizens and businesses. The paper presents existing methods for calculating the cost of services for the administration and the service consumers, such as the Standards Cost Model (SCM) and the Activity Based Costing (ABC). Then it goes on presenting a toolset for analytical cost calculations based on the various process steps and the information needs of each governmental service. The tool supports the definition of several service provision scenarios, such as front/back office system interoperability, cross-system or cross-organisational interoperability allowing the calculation of time, effort and cost elements and relevant gains from the application of each scenario.

multi-enterprise integration projects are unbearably costly for many companies. With a view to realizing lower integration costs and resources, enterprises are seeking partner attributes that display the ease of B2B collaboration. This paper examines the relationship of B2B interoperability to integration effort. It breaks down enterprise interoperability into five layers (network, data, process, application, business) and investigates the particularity and effect of each. The research model is validated by a field study using data from 239 firms. Interoperability at the business, process, and data levels is found to be significantly but negatively associated with integration efforts. Interoperability at the application level showed little relation to integration efforts, and interoperability at the network level had a nonsignificant positive relationship with integration efforts. The research model and findings are a starting point for assessing interoperability with a potential partner at each layer and for estimating the involved integration effort, with a view to aiding e-partnership decisions and B2B integration management.

portals combines two of the most active, promising and upcoming research fields; providing governmental services to citizens with the use of modern technologies and achieving interoperability which will result in the seamless cooperation of existing heterogeneous systems. The final outcome of such attempts should be fully functional and expandable information systems undertaking the task of offering governmental services to the wider public. Those systems should be user-friendly to both the end users (the citizens and the business) and public servants and should be regarded as virtual holistic systems, where ‘black boxes’ take care of the whole process of implementation and the interconnection with various existing systems being used by public administrations. This paper, presents a complete methodological approach for deploying and operating such systems, as piloted in two Greek municipalities with over 50,000 citizens and 3,000 businesses in each.

issues still remain unsolved. As various initiatives trying to address how the underlying business information should be modelled, named and structured are being realised throughout the world, the importance of moving towards a holistic approach in eBusiness magnifies. In this paper, an attempt to clarify between the standards prevailing in the area is performed and the XML Data Standards providing generic XML Schemas are presented. Based on this “XML Data Standards Map”, a multi-faceted classification mechanism is proposed, leading to an extensible taxonomy of standards. A set of facets is analyzed for each standard, allowing for their classification based on their scope, completeness, compatibility with other standards, openness, ability to modify the schemas and maturity, to name a few. Through populating and querying this multi-faceted classification, a common understanding of Data Integration Standards can be ensured and the choice of a standard according to the requirements of each business can be systematically addressed.

many European member states, their operation in converging regions is still a problem. Socio-economic conditions, familiarisation with new democratic processes and low penetration of information technology still pose barriers for these eParticipation applications and their successful deployment calls for joint participation and cooperation of citizens and organisational bodies in order to form a unified framework consisting of guidelines and common codes of ethics. This paper presents a case study of the establishment of an eParticipation platform based on the cooperation of national news agencies in the converging regions of the Balkans.

across the globe. However, a review of the IS literature reveals the inability of public administration organizations to complete information technology projects successfully. Unless governments learn to manage the government transformation projects, these e-dreams will turn into global nightmares. The shortage of studies on eGovernment implementation presents a knowledge gap that needs to be plugged. This paper describes and analyzes the computerization of the existing paper-based criminal record system in a public organization in Greece. Our intent is to present anapplication of a goal driven project management methodology named eGTPM in order to use it as a methodological reference when navigating in the open sea of information technology project implementations in the area of public administration. The successful implementation of the specific project indicates that the application of eGTPM approach could provide a solution to achieve government transformation objectives more effectively and efficiently.

transform manual into electronic services, semantic interoperability issues pose as a key challenge: system-to-system interaction asks for standardized data definitions, codification of existing unstructured information and a framework for managing governmental data in a unified way. Integrating and extending recent developments in Germany, Hong-Kong, UK and US governments - but also eBusiness interoperability research results in Europe, the proposed approach is applied within the Greek e-Government Framework and bears the following steps: (a) Gathering and analysis of governmental service forms at field level, so that common structures can be identified, (b) Customization of UN/CEFACT Core Components, (c) Semiautomatic XML Schema Definition (XSD) files creation, using sets of naming, structuring and verification rules, (d) Adoption of international or development of country-specific Codelists, (e) Development of guidance material for the application of the approach by government officials at central or local level. Discussion on the results is targeting best practice examples that can be drawn at scientific and organizational level, but also the key difficulties that have to be tackled – in relevance with the administrations and industry readiness in each country. Future steps include enhancing the paradigm in order to cover vertical data standards and applying the approach to other EU or associated countries.

a holistic approach in electronic transactions, as long as the semantics confusion, the lack of a common understanding of the underlying data and the business standards dilemma prevail and prevent data interoperability issues from being resolved. As various e-Government initiatives are being realized throughout the world, an imperative need for creating unified governmental data models that will facilitate the seamless exchange of information and the deployment of interoperable systems in Enterprises and Central, Regional and Municipal Government emerges. After attempting to identify relevant research that has been undertaken in the field of data modeling, the present paper analyzes the scope and the objectives of the business information modeling oriented towards governmental data. Based on UBL (Universal Business Language) and CCTS (Core Components Technical Specification), a component-based data modeling methodology enhancing business-to-government interoperability is proposed, creating the basis for a repository of governmental data models. The approach adopted may also serve as guidelines for creating and transitioning between "generic - harmonized" and "specific - contextualized" documents. A real world paradigm extracted from the Periodic VAT Statement document finally comes to prove the soundness of the proposed methodology.

along with the continuous advancements in ICT, push enterprises and administrations to move towards networked paradigms and leverage electronic transactions in their everyday practices. Although technical solutions providing the necessary interoperability means to enable such practices have been rigorously provided during the last years, their adoption and application by the foregoing stakeholders still remains limited. Several qualities of the existing solutions in technical and business level concerning the way the manage workflows, data mappings, business and legal rules along with the use of proprietary technologies and their inability to be readily set up and deployed, act as the main inhibitors for any potential users. The present work discusses the characteristics of the predominant centralized and decentralized architectural patterns for eTransactions, identifies the weak points of every case and proposes a hybrid architectural approach that brings together the "best of breed" of both paradigms. Additionally, specific insights, methodologies and underlying technologies are proposed with an objective to support the effective implementation of the proposed architecture and its basic components.