Figure 3 - uploaded by Bruno Rossi
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
The interest in the eGovernment initiatives of the European Commission has gained constantly interest among expert and technical professionals in recent years. In this paper, we use the post i2010 action lines as a framework of reference for understanding the interest of the mass in eGovernment. We provide a longitudinal study that answers to quest...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... and Spain follow the trend we found mining the Internet news. Reading the evolution over time (Figure 3), we see a clear peak in number of hits in the last year with Spain that leads the group. Over years, the trend shows a slow pace before 2007 after which a new increase appears. ...
Context 2
... from our results, it seems that population is now aware of the Lisbon agenda and the related strategies toward eGovernment. The interest has reached the mass only about 2005, though (Figure 3). This delay might be motivated by the fact that the European Commission issued a well-defined strategy toward eGovernment only in 2005. ...
Context 3
... this section, we discuss the popularity of the term eGovernment in some European countries (United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, Spain, and France) and in the United States. The popularity concerns people posting and discussing the concepts in Internet. For this, we query Google News archives for the term eGovernment and its modification ( egovernment OR e-government) ( Table 7). For countries like Spain we used also the local term for eGovernment ( egovernment OR e-government OR e-gobierno OR "administracion electronica") and for France we used the query ( egovernment OR e-government OR e-gouvernment OR "administration electronique" ). For each country, we used the specific instantiation of the Google News search engine. The results show a common pattern in the majority of the countries: a decreasing popularity of the term that is particularly evident for UK, and US (Table 4). The highest peak is around 2003. In Spain, there is an evident delay of the popularity and a recent increase. In this section, we evaluate the popularity of the specific concepts established in 2005 with the i2010 Action lines. We considered United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy as target countries – the ones with the majority of data - and we browsed the Internet for the terms in Table 3. For the United Kingdom, the interest of Internet users is particularly high in interoperability and legal frame in eGovernment. The evolution of their popularity is decreasing in time, though (Table 5). They are still the two most important concepts in eGovernment, but they are more popular around year 2003. The interest in eProcurement is large in the UK. Nevertheless, the trend shows that the interest is decreasing gradually starting from year 2002. Conversely, if we look at ePartecipation, the term acquires more importance in the last few years. eInclusiveness has a peak in 2008 but it does not show a precise pattern or a special interest in the ten years considered. For Germany, the response is similar to United Kingdom as to what pertains the legal frame, with peaks in years 2003-2004 and a reduction in interest in subsequent years stabilizing in 2009 (Table 6). The most popular topics result Legal Frame and eInclusiveness. eInclusiveness also shows a decreasing interest in 2008-2009, but has raised the attention of the Internet users constantly in the ten years. There is large interest in eProcurement, but also in this case, the trend is decreasing approaching year 2009. In Germany, eParticipation has never been so considered. There is a peak in 2004 and small interest in 2009. For Italy, the results show a delay in the interest in the first two initial years. Interoperability is the hot topic in eGovernment (Table 7). Legal frames and eInclusiveness have peaks of interest around 2004, but also an increase in interest in 2009. Differently from the other countries examined, the interest for eProcurement is growing in the latest years. Also in the case of Italy, there is a growing interest towards eParticipation in recent years. This is a concept that only recently acquired the interest of the masses. Table 8 reports of the cumulative results (over all the terms in Table 3) of our search in the top three national daily newspapers of the countries under study. These numbers significantly differ from the ones found in the previous section as they refer to articles for non-specialised people found in three specific newspapers per country. For example, the trend in Germany shows a very low pace and a small total number. This might be also due to the newspapers culture in Germany and the circulation of specialised magazine in the country. Traditional newspapers might not be willing to be involved in technical issues. There might be some resistance to publish article that cannot be understood immediately by the mass. As such, we would better focus on the type of trend more than on the number of articles. For Germany, the trend is constantly increasing. In total, Italy has the major number of hits per year followed by Spain and United States of America. Italy and Spain follow the trend we found mining the Internet news. Reading the evolution over time (Figure 3), we see a clear peak in number of hits in the last year with Spain that leads the group. Over years, the trend shows a slow pace before 2007 after which a new increase appears. In our study, we aim at understanding the interest of the mass in eGovernment. Although there is a great ferment among the government, political, and IT professionals, little literature refers of any involvement of non-qualified citizens. Namely, people might not be so excited or aware of this change in public services. To verify our hypothesis, we analysed the information of on-line mass media assuming that journalists write on topics of large and mass interest. As such, we inspected both the internet hits on eGovernment and the corresponding articles in the most circulating daily newspapers of the major countries active in the change of the public services. We also investigated the interest of the Internet users as a comparative means on popularity. Our analysis reveals that the number of articles referring to eGovernment is increasing in the last 10 years after the Lisbon agenda meeting (March 2000). Nevertheless, our data reports that the increase is slow and therefore the interest in eGovernment has not been fast in taking off. In many cases, articles start to grow after 2004 and the majority of the news refers to the last two years. Notice that the US newspapers follow a similar trend. Different is the trend of hits in Internet. The information over the Internet (with no control on the source) has a peak about 2003-2004 stabilizing in the last two years. Furthermore, not all the action lines of the European Commission raise the same interest in all the countries. For example, eParticipation is almost neglected in the Italian and German websites in Internet. People of Internet include experts and researchers that have different access and interest in the specific area. The stable trend of the last two years might be connected again with the expectations for the new strategy toward 2020 of the European Commission. Eventually, when the news on the new actions will be officially issued, professional articles will increase to discuss and support future changes in eGovernment. Overall, from our results, it seems that population is now aware of the Lisbon agenda and the related strategies toward eGovernment. The interest has reached the mass only about 2005, though (Figure 3). This delay might be motivated by the fact that the European Commission issued a well-defined strategy toward eGovernment only in 2005. The interest in eGovernment of the mass is not decreasing and has a peak in 2009. This might be again justified by the forthcoming new Action Plan. Internet users have anticipated the mass interest although not all the action lines have been considered with the same attention. There is an expectation of professionals and researchers for the new forthcoming European plan toward eGovernment. Might it be related to Transformational Government (Russo and Succi, 2009; Cabinet Office of the British Prime Minister, 2007)? We acknowledge the fact that our data collection might have some limits. The first is the use of Google. The search with Google is extremely sensitive to the sequence of actions one performs to define the token and the whole query. We noticed, in fact, that querying several times for the same concept but with a different type of selection of the dates or using a localization of Google, result with some little variations of the final answer. For this reason, we were very careful in repeating exactly the same actions and we used Google international ( www.google.com/ncr ) for all our searches. Furthermore, we are well aware that searching for a specific term like e-participation might result in articles not referring to eGovernment as the term participation is common in other topics and the search engine of Google might find results con cerning the two terms “e” and “participation”. For this reason, we mined Internet for couple or triples of terms containing eGovernment or its modifications together with the specific term eParticipation. We also inspected samples of our data to verify that articles were pertinent. Allan, J.D.O., Rambajun, N., Sood, S.P., Mbarika, V., Agrawal, R., Saquib, Z. 2006. „The eGovernment Concept: A Systematic Review of Research and Practitioner Literature‟. Innovations in Information Technology , 1-5. Botterman Maarten, Millard Jeremy, et al. 2009. „Value for citizens: A vision of public governance in 2020‟. Report for the European Commission, Brussels: Information Society and Media. Cabinet Office of the British Prime Minister, 2007. “Examples of Transformational Government” Last accessed on 2009.05.20 Deloitte Research. 2003. „ At the Dawn of e-Gover nment: The Citizen as Customer‟. From Internet; accessed on 2010.01.16. European Commission, 2005a. „The new Lisbon Strategy,‟ Last accessed 2009.07.10 from conomic_reforms_papers_1.pdf European Commission, 2005b. „ i2010 - A ...
Context 4
... year 2003. The interest in eProcurement is large in the UK. Nevertheless, the trend shows that the interest is decreasing gradually starting from year 2002. Conversely, if we look at ePartecipation, the term acquires more importance in the last few years. eInclusiveness has a peak in 2008 but it does not show a precise pattern or a special interest in the ten years considered. For Germany, the response is similar to United Kingdom as to what pertains the legal frame, with peaks in years 2003-2004 and a reduction in interest in subsequent years stabilizing in 2009 (Table 6). The most popular topics result Legal Frame and eInclusiveness. eInclusiveness also shows a decreasing interest in 2008-2009, but has raised the attention of the Internet users constantly in the ten years. There is large interest in eProcurement, but also in this case, the trend is decreasing approaching year 2009. In Germany, eParticipation has never been so considered. There is a peak in 2004 and small interest in 2009. For Italy, the results show a delay in the interest in the first two initial years. Interoperability is the hot topic in eGovernment (Table 7). Legal frames and eInclusiveness have peaks of interest around 2004, but also an increase in interest in 2009. Differently from the other countries examined, the interest for eProcurement is growing in the latest years. Also in the case of Italy, there is a growing interest towards eParticipation in recent years. This is a concept that only recently acquired the interest of the masses. Table 8 reports of the cumulative results (over all the terms in Table 3) of our search in the top three national daily newspapers of the countries under study. These numbers significantly differ from the ones found in the previous section as they refer to articles for non-specialised people found in three specific newspapers per country. For example, the trend in Germany shows a very low pace and a small total number. This might be also due to the newspapers culture in Germany and the circulation of specialised magazine in the country. Traditional newspapers might not be willing to be involved in technical issues. There might be some resistance to publish article that cannot be understood immediately by the mass. As such, we would better focus on the type of trend more than on the number of articles. For Germany, the trend is constantly increasing. In total, Italy has the major number of hits per year followed by Spain and United States of America. Italy and Spain follow the trend we found mining the Internet news. Reading the evolution over time (Figure 3), we see a clear peak in number of hits in the last year with Spain that leads the group. Over years, the trend shows a slow pace before 2007 after which a new increase appears. In our study, we aim at understanding the interest of the mass in eGovernment. Although there is a great ferment among the government, political, and IT professionals, little literature refers of any involvement of non-qualified citizens. Namely, people might not be so excited or aware of this change in public services. To verify our hypothesis, we analysed the information of on-line mass media assuming that journalists write on topics of large and mass interest. As such, we inspected both the internet hits on eGovernment and the corresponding articles in the most circulating daily newspapers of the major countries active in the change of the public services. We also investigated the interest of the Internet users as a comparative means on popularity. Our analysis reveals that the number of articles referring to eGovernment is increasing in the last 10 years after the Lisbon agenda meeting (March 2000). Nevertheless, our data reports that the increase is slow and therefore the interest in eGovernment has not been fast in taking off. In many cases, articles start to grow after 2004 and the majority of the news refers to the last two years. Notice that the US newspapers follow a similar trend. Different is the trend of hits in Internet. The information over the Internet (with no control on the source) has a peak about 2003-2004 stabilizing in the last two years. Furthermore, not all the action lines of the European Commission raise the same interest in all the countries. For example, eParticipation is almost neglected in the Italian and German websites in Internet. People of Internet include experts and researchers that have different access and interest in the specific area. The stable trend of the last two years might be connected again with the expectations for the new strategy toward 2020 of the European Commission. Eventually, when the news on the new actions will be officially issued, professional articles will increase to discuss and support future changes in eGovernment. Overall, from our results, it seems that population is now aware of the Lisbon agenda and the related strategies toward eGovernment. The interest has reached the mass only about 2005, though (Figure 3). This delay might be motivated by the fact that the European Commission issued a well-defined strategy toward eGovernment only in 2005. The interest in eGovernment of the mass is not decreasing and has a peak in 2009. This might be again justified by the forthcoming new Action Plan. Internet users have anticipated the mass interest although not all the action lines have been considered with the same attention. There is an expectation of professionals and researchers for the new forthcoming European plan toward eGovernment. Might it be related to Transformational Government (Russo and Succi, 2009; Cabinet Office of the British Prime Minister, 2007)? We acknowledge the fact that our data collection might have some limits. The first is the use of Google. The search with Google is extremely sensitive to the sequence of actions one performs to define the token and the whole query. We noticed, in fact, that querying several times for the same concept but with a different type of selection of the dates or using a localization of Google, result with some little variations of the final answer. For this reason, we were very careful in repeating exactly the same actions and we used Google international ( www.google.com/ncr ) for all our searches. Furthermore, we are well aware that searching for a specific term like e-participation might result in articles not referring to eGovernment as the term participation is common in other topics and the search engine of Google might find results con cerning the two terms “e” and “participation”. For this reason, we mined Internet for couple or triples of terms containing eGovernment or its modifications together with the specific term eParticipation. We also inspected samples of our data to verify that articles were pertinent. Allan, J.D.O., Rambajun, N., Sood, S.P., Mbarika, V., Agrawal, R., Saquib, Z. 2006. „The eGovernment Concept: A Systematic Review of Research and Practitioner Literature‟. Innovations in Information Technology , 1-5. Botterman Maarten, Millard Jeremy, et al. 2009. „Value for citizens: A vision of public governance in 2020‟. Report for the European Commission, Brussels: Information Society and Media. Cabinet Office of the British Prime Minister, 2007. “Examples of Transformational Government” Last accessed on 2009.05.20 Deloitte Research. 2003. „ At the Dawn of e-Gover nment: The Citizen as Customer‟. From Internet; accessed on 2010.01.16. European Commission, 2005a. „The new Lisbon Strategy,‟ Last accessed 2009.07.10 from conomic_reforms_papers_1.pdf European Commission, 2005b. „ i2010 - A European Information Society for growth and employment,‟ COM(2005) 229, final. Brussels. European Commission, 2007. „ The User Challenge Benchmarking The Supply Of Online Public Services. 7th Measurement, ‟ September. 2007, prepared by Capgemini. European Council, 2000. „ Presidency Conclusion of the Lisbon European Council ‟ (23 -24 March 2000). Lisbon. Fang, Z. 2002. „ E-government in digital era: Concept, practice and development ‟ . International Journal of the Computer, the Internet and Management 10 (2): 1-22. Hu, G., Pan, W., Lu, M., and Wang, J. 2009. „ The widely shared definition of e-Government: An exploratory study,‟. The Electronic Library , 27: 968-985. Metaxiotis, K., Psarras, J. 2004. „ E-government: new concept, big challenge, su ccess stories‟. Electronic Government, an International Journal , 1:141 - 151. Orientation Paper, eGovernment Sub- group working document, 2009. „Visions and priorities for eGovernment in Europe. Orientations for a post 2010 eGovernment Action Plan ,‟ Last Accessed on 2009.07.15 from 210-pvt.pdf Russo, B. and Succi, G. (2009) “A Cost Model of Open Source Software Adoption” in Weerakkody, V., Janssen, M. Dwivedi, Y. K.(eds.) “Hand book of Research on ICT-Enabled Transformational Government: A Global Perspective”. Directorate. Varghese, A., 2005. „Interoperable Electronic Identity Management and Authentication for eGov services - an EU perspective ,‟ L -SEC - Electronic Identity Card, visions, challenges and realisations May 19, 2005 at Stella Artois Brewery, Leuven, Last accessed on ...