Hans Jochen Scholl

University of Washington Seattle | UW · Information School

As formulated in the Digital Government Society’s mission statement of 2006, Digital Government refers to “the use of information technology to support government operations, engage citizens, and provide government services.” Although the term “digital” as opposed to “analog” implicitly establishes a relationship between (digital) modern “informati...

The domain of Digital Government Research (DGR) emerged at the end of the 1990s at the intersection of several traditional academic disciplines such as information studies, information systems research, public administration studies, political science, computer science, and business administration among others. While due to their own boundary defin...

Crisis Information Management Systems (CIMS) have been used in Emergency and Disaster Response Management for decades. However, while these systems have emerged and improved over time, they still appear to provide lower efficacy when incidents become more complex, and, in particular, when used in the context of multijurisdictional responses to larg...

In 2014, Scholl and Scholl presented their now frequently cited “roadmap for research and practice” broken down into a matrix of eight “focus areas” and seven “elements of smart governance.” This “Roadmap” intended to help researchers navigate their paths through the relatively complex subject matter of smart governance in the public sector given t...

Prior research has indicated that institutional stakeholders influence the elaboration of regulatory frameworks by seeking to maximize their institutional power to achieve favorable policy outcomes. In recent years, Blockchain services regulation has been issued with the aim at influencing the process of technological change and diffusion. Based on...

This book discusses blockchain technology and its potential applications in digital government and the public sector. With its robust infrastructure and append-only record system, blockhain technology is being increasingly employed in the public sector, specifically where trustworthiness and security are of importance. Written by leading scholars a...

This edited volume discusses smart cities and smart governance within the framework of the 22nd century sustainable city. Written by members of the Smart Cities Smart Government Research Practice Consortium (SCSGRPC), an international multidisciplinary consortium of researchers and practitioners devoted to studying smart governance, this book provi...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 20th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Government, EGOV 2021, held in Granada, Spain, in September 2021, in conjunction with the IFIP WG 8.5 IFIP International Conference on Electronic Participation (ePart 2021) and the International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government Confere...

Digital Government refers to the use of information technology to support government operations, engage citizens, and provide government services, as the Digital Government Society declares in its mission statement. While modern information technologies provide the necessary underpinnings expressed by the terms “digital” or the outdated “electronic...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 19th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Government, EGOV 2020, held in Linköping, Sweden, in August/September 2020, in conjunction with the IFIP WG 8.5 IFIP International Conference on Electronic Participation (ePart 2020) and the International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Governme...

While the financial sector was the first to investigate the potential of Blockchain, and in more general terms, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), with an initial focus on digital currencies including cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether, the study of potential uses of this technology is gradually expanding to also include other areas of ap...

The four-day Cascadia Rising exercise of 2016, which simulated a magnitude 9+ rupture of the almost 700 miles long Cascadian subduction zone with up to 5 min of violent shaking followed by a 20 to 30 feet-high tsunami in the Northwestern United States, was one of the largest response exercises of a catastrophic incident ever conducted in the United...

Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) such as Blockchain appear to have disruptive economic potential to traditional finance-sector and non-financial markets as the success of crypto currencies demonstrates. While traditional financial and securities markets are highly regulated, DLT transactions and exchanges have so far widely remained unregulat...

In a catastrophic incident gaining situational awareness (SA) is the foremost prerequisite that enables re-sponders to save and sustain lives, stabilize the incident, and protect the environment and property from further damage. However, catastrophes severely damage and disrupt critical infrastructures including response assets. Initially and for d...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 18th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Government, EGOV 2019, held in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy, in September 2019, in conjunction with the IFIP WG 8.5 IFIP International Conference on Electronic Participation (ePart 2019) and the International Conference for E-Democracy and Open G...

Field operations in municipal governments have undergone fundamental adjustments. This empirical study investigated the ramifications of the strategic shift in government field operations when mobile information and communication technologies (ICTs) were introduced for field crews in a multiyear process. The implementation had to overcome several s...

Saving and sustaining lives, stabilizing the incident, and protecting both environment and property from further damage are professional responders' first and foremost objectives when responding to any incident including a catastrophic one. Responders need to gain situational awareness (SA) to effectively direct the response. Yet, in a catastrophic...

Pairing two terms such as “electronic” and “government” to name a phenomenon and create the label of “electronic government” was the signature of the early days of the Internet and web in the 1990s, which also witnessed similar creations such as “electronic business,” “electronic commerce,” and “electronic democracy,” among others. In those early d...

The evaluation of systems or artifacts as “outcomes” of software engineering (SE) projects has been a focus of study in SE-related research for quite some time. In recent years, evaluating artifacts, for example, mobile applications or websites has become more important, since such artifacts play increasingly critical roles in generating revenues f...

The larger the scale, scope, and duration of a disaster, the higher is the number of response units. However, with more units involved in the response also the heterogeneity of responder units drastically increases in terms of capabilities, experiences, practices, techniques, tactics, and procedures. As a result, the coordination and overall manage...

In disasters, and more so in catastrophes, one of the most daunting problems to professional respond-ers is gaining situational awareness. Unfortunately, truly actionable information (intelligence) is missing in the first days and even weeks of responding. Consequently , incomplete situational awareness brings on a distorted common operating pictur...

From its earliest stages on, scholars immersed in Electronic Government Research (EGR) have cared for the study domain’s reputation and academic standing. With the publication of “Forums for Electronic Government Scholars” a few years ago, it was established, which academic outlets in EGR (both journals and conferences) the most prolific and influe...

Civil servants in government front offices frequently lack subject matter expertise as well as necessary skills to meet modern citizen-centric service demands. Using design research, we discuss how front offices can change the service paradigm from administering government-centric and transaction-oriented services to providing truly citizen-centric...

Around the end of the first decade in the 21st century, quite a few city governments in municipalities of various sizes began conducting so-called smart-city initiatives. While many of these initiatives have successfully reached for low-hanging fruits and easy wins when responding to the growing demand of smart online services, others have identifi...

Quite a number of smart-city initiatives from around the world have been analyzed and documented, and a growing body of academic knowledge is evolving around the phenomenon of the smart city. Smart-city government is seen as an important driver for developing a smart urban environment. The eCityGov Alliance in the Pacific Northwest of the USA repre...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Government, EGOV 2016, held in Guimaraes, Portugal, in September 2016, in conjunction with the 8th International Conference on eParticipation, ePart 2016. The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 87 sub...

While the term 'Smart City' had been used in academia and practice rather casually as a summary label for all types of technology-supported innovation in urban spaces and City governments for quite some time, more recent research rigorously delineated the concept of a Smart City via an eight-category framework, which was developed by several resear...

City governments around the world have increasingly engaged in “smart city” initiatives. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are at the core of these initiatives. City governments appear to play important roles in making the urban spaces, in which they are embedded, more attractive, more competitive, more livable, and smarter. The aut...

The body of practical and academic knowledge in e-government has significantly grown over the past decade. New publication outlets in e-government have emerged, and the research agenda has deepened and widened. The paper assesses the current topical orientations and trends in e-government and also updates an earlier study, which profiled the resear...

For more than a decade, professional sports teams have mainly used their own websites as online vehicles in support of marketing efforts in services, communications, research and sales. Meanwhile, social media and mobile computing have been added to the mix of online as a response to raised service expectations and changing functional requirements...

Once an academic study domain has accumulated a certain volume of domain-specific knowledge, a number of outlets emerge as preferred outlets for publication. Electronic government research (EGR) is no exception. After developing for some 15 years from its early beginnings in the late 1990s, this multi-disciplinary academic domain appears to have re...

The authors investigated the unfolding of an innovation project in field operations of City government, which introduced mobile information and communication technologies (ICTs) for field crews. The implementation of mobile technology had to overcome several serious socio-technical challenges, the lessons learned from which were instrumental for th...

In the unfolding of a catastrophic incident, also known as extreme event (EE), resilient information infrastructures (RIIs) have the capacity to continue providing actionable information, which is a time-critical resource of greatest value. Despite the recognized importance of RIIs, however, their role in providing actionable information under the...

Purpose – Disasters of catastrophic scope and scale have occurred more frequently in recent years. Governmental and non-governmental response management has struggled, and affected communities have severely suffered during extreme events. Colossal damage and loss of lives have been inflicted, and the recovery efforts require extended periods of tim...

In the early 21 st century, societies and their governments around the world have been meeting unprecedented challenges, many of which surpass the capacities, capabilities, and reaches of their traditional institutions and their classical processes of governing. Among these challenges are the need for an accelerated transition of the global economy...

Just like other businesses, so do professional sports teams use multi-functional websites and other online vehicles to connect to their audiences providing news, match day information, player statistics, and shopping opportunities among others. However, with the rapidly grown popularity of social media and mobile computing, the service expectations...

Social media have increasingly been used for information exchange during extreme events (EEs). Yet, until recently it had not been systematically studied how government has used and can use social media under circumstances of extreme duress. This research describes how government actually engaged citizens through social media during and in the afte...

City governments around the world have increasingly engaged in “smart city” initiatives. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are at the core of these initiatives. City governments appear to play important roles in making the urban spaces, in which they are embedded, more attractive, more competitive, more livable, and smarter. The aut...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Government, EGOV 2014, held in Dublin, Ireland, in September 2014. The 26 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: foundations;...

We surveyed the worldwide e-Gov researcher community and collected data on disciplinary backgrounds, topical orientations, and publication preferences from over 200 scholars including more than 80 percent of the most prolific scholars in the domain. The results demonstrate the richness and diversity of electronic government research worldwide. Some...

Democratic government of the 21st century is believed to head towards more agility, leanness, responsiveness, accessibility, openness, and participation than its predecessors in the 20th century. However, at the same time democratic government has to cope with new challenges and trends, which are unprecedented in their potential impacts (positive a...

Smart city initiatives have been launched on every continent. That notwithstanding the concept of “smart city” has remained ambiguous. We systematically interviewed officials of an acclaimed Smart City (Seattle) and explicitly asked the officials for their own definitions of “smart city,” which we then compared to the respective projects run by tha...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Government, EGOV 2013, held in Koblenz, Germany, in September 2013. The 27 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: re...

This study presents the first results of an analysis primarily based on semi-structured interviews with government officials and managers who are responsible for smart city initiatives in four North American cities—Philadelphia and Seattle in the United States, Quebec City in Canada, and Mexico City in Mexico. With the reference to the Smart City I...

In recent years, government agencies on all levels and in all branches have increasingly engaged in harmonizing business processes, standardizing information sharing, and interoperating their information systems, which indicates a rising need for intra- and inter-government collaboration. Simultaneously, the technical capacity for process integrati...

Democratic government of the 21st century is believed to head towards more agility, leanness, responsiveness, accessibility, openness, and participation than its predecessors in the 20th century. However, at the same time democratic government has to cope with new challenges and trends, which are unprecedented in their potential impacts positive an...

E-government initiatives have been stepping forward in governments of all levels around the world. One of the most important strategies that are being carried is that of providing citizens with a single entry point for services that involve different government entities. The Smart Cities and Service Integration project (hereafter, SmartCities) aims...

Over the past decade professional sports teams around the world have used the Internet and the Web with increasing sophistication to better connect their sports and businesses to fans and the general public with the aim of providing team-related information, fostering fandom and team reputation, and expanding the commercial side of the business. Al...

For HICSS-46 the volume of submissions to the e-Gov track represented 10 percent of all submissions to the conference making this track the fifth-largest track. For the second year e-Gov paper sessions need to go parallel for a full day. So, the e-Gov track at HICSS maintains its strong position among the other conference tracks as well as the lead...

Making a city "smart" is emerging as a strategy to mitigate the problems generated by the urban population growth and rapid urbanization. Yet little academic research has sparingly discussed the phenomenon. To close the gap in the literature about smart cities and in response to the increasing use of the concept, this paper proposes a framework to...

Extreme events include both natural and man-made emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes of exceptional and unthinkable magnitude, which would surpass the ca-pacity of local government to effectively respond. Often organizations plan and prepare for 'average' disasters, which, as the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami exemplified, can lead to unseen vu...

It has been argued that hierarchical 'command and control' leadership is required to coordinate massive and rapid military or disaster response. Against this, the concept of leaderless 'social media revolution' refers to the wide-spread use of Web 2.0 social media by ordinary citizens to transform the public sphere and engage in collective politica...

In recent decades, the frequency of large-scale catastrophic disasters or extreme events has dramatically increased. Extreme events overwhelm entire regions and communities to the extent that traditional disaster preparedness and response planning prove insufficient during and after an event. The devastation from an unfolding extreme event can be s...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference, EGOV 2012, held in Delft, The Netherlands, in September 2012. The 23 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more then 80 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on foundations; adoption and diffusion; o...

When coupled with direct stakeholder participation, transparency and open government have been touted as among the key drivers in the evolution of a less secretive, less single-handed, more responsive, and in essence more democratic government of the 21 st century committed to preserving the public good, serving citizens and business, and also curt...

Government represents a unique, and also uniquely complex, environment for interoperation of information systems as well as for integration of workflows and processes across governmental levels and branches. While private-sector organizations by and large have the capacity to implement “enterprise architectures” in a relatively straightforward fash...

Various research studies devoted towards the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in many cities in different cultural and social contexts around the world are presented. Bouras et al., 2009 and Hudson 2010 aimed to build network infrastructures and applications initially for achieving higher administration productivity and inter...

Interoperability of ICT systems presents a complex, fuzzy, multi-dimensional, and multi-disciplinary phenomenon. So, some structuring of perspectives appears to be necessary to reduce the phenomenon’s complexity. While we propose to distinguish differing perspectives, we also propose that some perspectives might be complementary. Interoperability f...

Interoperability frameworks (IFs) recommend or prescribe the adoption of certain standards for networks, data, or workflows in the development of IT applications. When presenting our basic ideas for a re-conceptualization of what so far has been labeled organizational interoperability we emphasized that direct data exchanges between organizations w...

For more than 10 years, expectations about the Internet’s potential to change the relations between citizens and their governments at the political, democratic level and with regard to public services for citizens and business have been high.

For decades and among other principles, the jurisdiction of public administrations has been organized according to the principle of geography. Hundreds or thousands of local municipalities provide the same public services to citizens and business according to the same basic rules with only few variations. This organizational structure is proven and...

For more than 10 years, expectations about the Internet’s potential to change the relations between citizens and their governments at the political, democratic level and with regard to public services for citizens and business have been high.

In Chap. 3 we have shown that interoperability frameworks (IFs) similar to the ISO Reference Model for Open Systems Interconnection assign different standards for data exchange to three or four different layers of interoperability, which build upon each other. For our re-conceptualization we have proposed a four-layer framework (Table 3.5 and Fig....

In this chapter we turn our attention to the choices of governance regimes for interoperated electronic government services on the national or regional level. As outlined in Chap. 2, the cooperating partners, for example, need to define the services, distribute the tasks, and share the cost. Also, the model of overall governance needs to be specifi...

So far, we assumed that for setting up a new or improved electronic public service, actors from different government units would select or develop interoperable components of these particular services. We have called these cases “specific-service cases”. For these cases we could identify certain patterns in political and IT governance summarized in...

When e-government services are planned and interoperability requirements arise, IFs shall provide guidance about how to proceed and what options are available. Many NIFs provide information about standards to be applied, as well as potential building blocks for services. To a lesser degree they deal with IT governance options, and if they do, NIFs...

As shown in the introduction interoperability in government is a complex, multi-dimensional, and multi-disciplinary phenomenon. Focused on the technical side, in particular CIOs in national and regional governments appear to share an understanding of interoperability, in which IFs play a central role. In order to understand what today’s IFs are wha...

When establishing requirements for interoperability, the traditional approach endeavors to employ a perspective of objectifiable or technical needs. An actor-centric view on interoperability requirements, which also regards subjective wants and needs of main actors engaged in an e-government project, would hence complement the traditional perspecti...

E-government advancements have not fully resolved the challenge of providing citizens with a single entry point for services that involve different government entities. The Smart Cities and Service Integration project (hereafter, SmartCities) aims to establish a framework for smart city service integration that would assist in the management of lar...

Developed in the early 1980s—well before Internet and web-based technologies had arrived—Taylor's Value-Added Model introduced what is now better known as the human-actors' needs perspective on information systems/information technology (IS/IT) artifacts. Taylor distinguished six top-level criteria that mattered most to human actors when using IS/I...

I have a few spare copies of the printed book to give away for free. If you are interested pleae send me an e-mail to kubicek@lifib.de

This paper investigates the prospects and compares the potential pathways of the open government, transparency, collaboration, and citizen participation initiatives in the US and in Mexico. The study aims at increasing the understanding to what extent and under which circumstances these initiatives might successfully establish or re-establish the b...

In recent years, public organisations have been challenged to offer electronic services. This has caused a proliferation of disconnected web sites or web portals, often reflecting the internal structures (departments or sections) of these organizations. This paper shows that electronic public services can be improved if these services are designed...