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The eGovernment Concept: A Systematic Review of Research and
Practitioner Literature
Jennifer Decruz Owen Allan1, Narainee Rambajun2, Sanjay P. Sood3, Victor Mbarika4,
Rajeev Agrawal5 and Zia Saquib6
1,2,3C-DAC School of Advanced Computing (University of Mauritius), Quatre-Bornes,
MAURITIUS 4Southern University and A&M College, Baton Rouge, LA, USA, 5Kettering
University, Flint, MI, USA, 6C-DAC, Mumbai, INDIA
bluejen@intnet.mu ; narainee@gmail.com ; sood@spsood.com
Abstract
The term eGovernment is widely used by many
individuals, academic institutions, and professional
bodies, governmental and private agencies. It has
become an agreed neologism despite the fact that till
now there has not been a universal understanding
about the concept behind the term “eGovernment”.
We firmly believe that awareness about a concept
originates from its understanding and that the
awareness and adoption can be significantly increased
by communication among the stakeholders who
frequently use the term. The paper reports the results
of a systematic review of published suggested or
proposed definitions of “eGovernment”. Index Terms
— E-Governance, eGovernment, ICT, Internet, Public,
Government.
1. Introduction
Information Technology researchers and
practitioners have largely argued that eGovernment
applications have the ability to transform the
relationship between government and its citizens
(G2C), government and legal entities (G2B), and the
relationships between the various institutions of
governance within a country (G2G). Given the history
of poor governance in developing nations for instance,
eGovernment applications may provide a feasible and
affordable platform to enhance governance in these
countries [36]. Some specific examples of
eGovernment use include:
• Improved Public Sector Perception: Providing
people with the convenience of 24/7, fast access to
services potentially improves citizens’ perceptions
of government [37].
• Improved Efficiencies: Providing a means for
citizens to interact with the government via a
website reduces time, transaction costs, and labor
costs. Transaction costs and time are reduced
when citizens no longer have to stand in lines to
conduct business with public sector entities.
• Enabler of People, Businesses and Government
Interactions: eGovernment initiatives facilitate
availability of government resources. In turn,
citizens are able to make informed and accurate
decisions [38].
Despite the great promise of eGovernment as
portrayed in existing literature, there is hardly a clear
understanding of what the term represents. Using
largely an Internet based data collection approach, this
paper examines the eGovernment term from multiple
perspectives using a systematic review of relevant
research and practitioner publications.
2. Background
The Intern et is progressivel y influencin g the pattern
of living and working of the human race on both the
sides of the digital divide. Mushrooming of the
addition of the prefix ‘e’ is a testimony to that affect.
Owing to this pandemic called internet the day is not
far when the term ‘world’ may also have the prefix ‘e’
to give us another ‘e’ term as eWorld.
There are at least three different approaches to
understanding eGovernment which exist in the
academic literature [39]. The first view describes a list
of elements that contains the main characteristics of
what is, or what should be, electronic government,
second approach lists the different applications of
electronic government, whereas the third approach
considers electronic government as being evolutionary.
In a particular case of the term ‘Government’ we
have observed that the ‘e’-version of this term is being
used in 11 ways: “eGovernment” or “e-Government”
or “E-government” or “EGovernment” or
“Egovernment” or “EGOV” or “E-GOV” or “e-Gov”
or “e-gov” or “egovernment” or “egov”. [For the
purpose of our paper we have referred to electronic
government as “eGovernment”.]. Looking at the gamut
of similar sounding terms in this case, we believe that
there is a need to demystify the essence behind the
concept that acts as a common thread amongst these
terms. We have thus reviewed various published
definitions of eGovernment. Preliminary research
reflected that the meaning varied with the context in
which the term was being used. For this reason, we
also feel that there is a need for a universally
acceptable definition which englobes all the essential
components those need to be included in the concept of
eGovernment. One investigative way of facilitating the
accomplishment arriving at a universally acceptable
definition is by reviewing various published
definitions. Anoth er aim of th is systematic endeavor is
to find an answer to the question: “What is
eGovernment?” Besides this we have also tried to
determine the context and setting in which the term has
been used. A better understanding of the term
eGovernment can be achieved only after analyzing the
different definitions available in different contexts.
Only then we can come to a consensus of the exact
meaning of eGovernment and all that it encompasses.
For this particular reason we collected, examined and
qualitatively analyzed various definitions of the term
‘eGovernment’.
3. Review
In this section, we present the process of extensive
review we followed to analyze the concept of
‘eGovernment’. The eGovernment is not a very well
defined concept. In order to analyze its different
dimensions, we have to rely on a large body of
literature. We initiated our research with a systematic
review of relevant eGovernment literature. We
searched the databases pertaining to Digital
Governance, World Bank, United Nations, UNDP
(United Nations Development Program), OECD
(Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development). Using these databases, we also looked
at the definitions proposed by non-governmental
organizations, which have played an important role in
the development and implementation of eGovernment
in many countries and provide yearly reports,
publications, case studies and papers on eGovernment.
In addition, we also looked at the research papers
published in conferences. For each database we
queried “eGovernment publications”. The summary of
result is presented in Table 1 and we reviewed first 100
publications for each. We found 18 unique definitions
of eGovernment in these databases.
To broaden our search space, we used Google
search engine, which ranks retrieval by importance and
relevance. We filtered out the papers found earlier
using databases and restricted our results to first 400
for each query. We used various variants of the word
‘eGovernment’ to find various definitions of electronic
government; some of them were ‘eGovernment’, ‘e-
gov’, ‘digital government’, ‘electronic government’.
Again, we extracted 54 unique definitions of
eGovernment from these results. After combining both
sets of results, we recovered 72 definitions. In this
paper, we refer only 35 unique definitions, which
represent the whole spectrum of eGovernment. We
classified a definition as unique only if the definition
highlighted a unique aspect of the concept
‘eGovernment’. Owing to the paucity of space we
could not include the list of definitions retrieved,
however the list of all 72 definitions may be obtained
from authors at no. 1, 2 or 3(*).
Table I. Summary of Databases Searches
Databases Citations Sources
reviewed
Unique
definitions
Digital
Governance
200
100
9
World Bank
57
57
5
UNDP
200
100
1
UN
1360
100
2
OECD
158
100
1
Total
1975
457
18
4. Qualitative Analysis
We identified two universal themes: eGovernment
and Technology and seven less general: service
delivery, public, improve, efficient, business,
interaction, and transaction. Since the technology
aspect enables the eGovernment, it is natural to have
these two terms as common themes in almost all
published literature. We give brief introduction of
other seven themes as follows: Service Delivery: use
of technology to deliver government services to the
citizens.
Public: community as a whole. They are the main
stakeholders in any eGovernment system.
Improve: the basic idea to have eGovernment is to
improve the quality of service delivery.
Efficient: any eGovernment system is designed to
increase the efficiency of the government, which is
considered as a big improvement in our traditional
system.
Business: transforming of government as a business.
Interaction: to establish a platform to improve the
interaction between general public and government
officials through the means of technology.
Transaction: to provide means to pay bills, taxes etc.
Upon collection of all definitions, we proceeded in
analyzing and comparing each definition for reliability,
consistency and also searched for patterns, matching of
keywords, novel ideas and most commonly used words
in a systematic way using above mentioned themes.
5. Results
From the 35 definitions collected, 30 of them
include the term ‘government’ once or more than once,
except [3, 6, 13, 23, 24] which do not include it at all.
Two definitions [2, 19] refer government as public
sector, while only one [35] uses public agency. Three
definitions [9, 10, 12] refer to government as
government agencies. Definitions [1, 5, 7, 10, 14-18,
20, 28-30, 34] refer directly to government itself while
7 of them [4, 8, 17, 18, 21, 25, 34] associate
government to services only and few definitions [18,
26, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33] refer to both services and
information in connection with the word government.
The term ‘ICT’ (Information and Communication
Technology) has been used in 11 definitions [2, 4, 9,
10, 11, 15, 18, 21, 27, 29, 30] either in abbreviated or
expanded form. The term ‘Internet’ or ‘network’ has
been used in 18 definitions explicitly [1-7, 11-13, 15-
17, 27, 28, 30, 33, 34]; some of these definitions
include the term as examples of ICT. Furthermore,
some definitions also use the term ‘Internet’ as an
adjective ‘Internet-worked’ [1], internet-based [3, 5],
Internet economy [5], and web-based Internet
application [28, 32]. Some definitions list specific
technologies like Wide Area Network [12], mobile
computing [12], World Wide Web (WWW) [16] and
Intranet [2]. [30] uses examples like telephone,
community centers and wireless devices. [4, 5, 6, 17,
22, 26, 31] have referred to technology by using the
term ‘electronic’ or ‘electronically’ while [4, 13] have
used the term online, three authors in their definitions
[2, 14, 16] have used the term ‘digital’ or digitize [14].
One definition [16] has even used the term ‘automated
system’ eGovernment has been defined in several
ways, [1, 3, 5, 7-10, 16, 21, 22, 25, 27, 29, 30, 33, 34]
start the explanation of eGovernment followed by ‘is
just’ and [6, 12, 13, 14, 32, 35] have used the term
‘refers’ while [2] uses the term ‘encompasses’, [17]
uses the term ‘combines’, [19-20] uses ‘can/can be’,
[24, 28] use the term ‘means’. Three authors interpret
eGovernment as the use of ICT, [15, 29, 30] refer to
eGovernment as a concept that involves simply the
“use of ICT”; [27] explains that eGovernment is the
“use of the most innovative ICT”, [9] puts it as
“application of ICT”, definition [18] goes a step further
by using “use of new and emerging ICT”. Some
definitions collected have used the term ICT as a
means of improvement in the Government by creating
a wealth of new digital connection [2], or ICT
transforming internal and external relationship through
technology [7]. Some authors have used the term
‘technology’ as a means to enhance access to services
and information [8, 28, 32 34], to improve [9, 10, 11,
21], transform government [9, 10, 12, 15, 21 and 29].
One author has used the term ICT as a means to build
closer relationships between government and citizen
[18] while others associate ICT to promote government
to be more efficient and effective [30]. Among the 35
definitions collected some authors define eGovernment
[5] as a birth of a new market and th e advent of a new
form of government, [7] defines eGovernment as the
continuous optimization [16, 33] as a process, [21] is
the transformation of the public sector, [22] is a form
e-business in governance, [27] as a label, [34] as smart
government. Definition [5] talks about eGovernment
as closing the gap between citizen and business
expectation. 26 definitions [3-8, 10-15, 17, 18, 21, 22,
25-34] mentioned about delivery of services and
information. The public is not excluded but referred as
citizens or public [3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19,
20, 22, 23, 25, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 ] while [1, 9] refer
as customers, [9] as suppliers and some as businesses
[1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 17, 20, 22, 32, 33, 34, 35] and
employees [ 7, 8, 20, 32 ]. [10] refers as private sector,
which is not an inclusive term. [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14,
19, 21, 22, 34] talk about eGovernment as improving
the services provided to the public or the citizens and 7
definitions [10, 12, 17, 19, 27, 28, 30] talk about
increasing the efficiency of the services. Only four
definitions [12, 17, 20, 29] have talked about the
interaction between the government and the public
whereas only six [4, 5, 9, 16, 20, 22] have talked about
the transaction which takes place in eGovernment.
Some authors included the term ‘transparency’ like
[10, 29, 34], increase accountability [10, 19, 29, 30,
34], cost effective services [27], less corruption [29].
Only two definitions [26] have used the phrase “24
hours per day, seven days a week” though some
authors have mentioned about the geographic
boundaries in a different way in [1], the author
describes the linking of government information
infrastructure externally with everything digital and
with everybody, definition [2] creating a wealth of
digital connection and definition [4] which explains
about everything being performed online, still without
talking about distance or places. [5] explains that
citizen and business expects service delivery in Internet
time, [14] mentioned about network system, [15]
mentions networking potentials, [16] mentions about
Internet network, [17] mentioned online services that
eradicate those barriers that prevent citizen and
busin ess from using government services an d replace
those with convenient access.
From our research and analysis, we found that out
of the 35 definitions, 11 describe eGovernment as
improving the services, 9 as increasing the efficiency
of service delivery, but only 8 definitions has included
the word transactions and 5 has included the word
interaction. Two important components that is,
‘Government’ and ‘Technology’ were mentioned in
almost all definitions as well as ‘Service Delivery’.
We discovered that eGovernment has wide ranging
interpretations suggested by different authors. This can
be an objective term depending on the viewpoint of the
person, who is describing it. The common theme of all
these definitions points to an attempt by government
local, state, or federal to help their citizens in some
way, which can be just facilitating bill payment,
accepting complaints or up to the level of voting.
6. Conclusion and Future Research
After analysing the results, we have found out that
the term certainly is centred on the word government,
either as government itself or have termed it as public
agencies/bodies/authorities or the public sector which
is an essential component for the purpose of defining
eGovernment in order to prevent ambiguity. All
definitions associate eGovernment as the use of ICT or
related technologies, a few have cited examples too.
These help to transform/improve/enhance/increase
access to government services and information,
primarily for a better service delivery. Almost all
definitions have given the Intern et as an example of
ICT usage in eGovernment thus showing the Internet
as the main approach to practice of eGovernment. We
have found that ICT has been used as a means to
proliferate and assist or advance human activities
rather than an alternative for them. The main
stakeholders are defined as citizens, businesses and
government employees in any eGovernment business.
All definitions assume that eGovernment is about
improving and increasing the efficiency of the service
delivery by the government and the enormous benefit
that it brings to the public. There are several examples
of eGovernment business mentioned like filling a
busin ess form online, paying tax, claiming and
receiving benefits and getting passport online etc. The
examples are more helpful in understanding the
concept of eGovernment.
None of the definitions has talked about
eGovernment as being a harmful, disadvantageous or
negative for the public or mankind. In this report, we
do not report the frequency with which certain
definitions were used by others or the impact of each.
But during our search we noticed the most commonly
used ones were the definitions of the World Bank,
Gartner Group, Deloitte’s, Fraga’s and Darell’s. While
we have noted many authors defining eGovernment in
a paragraph of at least 4-5 lines, Darrell West [6] has
defined in one line .The shortest definition we
encountered was that of Marc Strassman which
consists of only 6 words “eGovernment means online,
not in line”. The widespread use of the term suggests
that eGovernment is an important concept. But the
anxiety here is that eGovernment is written is several
ways. We believe that all stakeholders should reach a
consensus about the spelling and eventually come to an
agreement on a standard universal meaning of the term
eGovernment. Most of the definitions covered in this
research had a broad perspective but there were some
definitions which are too brief and are partial, this
tends to give a limited clarity especially to those who
have limited knowledge about IT. Providing a
universally accepted definition, which is
understandable by everybody, could speed up the
adoption of the concept.
The research has been an enriching experience for
us to analyze different aspects of eGovernment, which
show a varying degree of understanding depending
upon the context it was used. We believe that this
compilation of existing definitions can be a useful
resource to facilitate communication, discussion and
stimulate further research. Since there are still several
questions, which remains unmasked.
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