E-government global readiness report 2008 from e-government to knowledge management

ABSTRACT

ICTs can help reinvent government in such a way that existing institutional arrangements can be restructured and new innovative arrangements can flourish, paving the way for a transformed government. This supposedly transformed government is more responsive to the needs of citizens and businesses, more efficient, more transparent and participatory. The questions that arise then are what is the implementation pace of e-government initiatives around the world and how can the real needs of citizens be met. The UN Global E-Government Readiness Report, 2008, seeks to provide answers to these questions by quantitatively assessing the strengths and weaknesses in e-government initiatives worldwide. The 2008 Report deals with these issues from the perspective of leveraging the knowledge of public organizations, since knowledge management has the potential to improve the electronic provision of services.

In their effort to provide public value to citizens, governments throughout the world face a number of challenges. Such challenges range from thoughtful IT planning, providing finance and adequate physical infrastructures in a rapidly changing technological environment, confronting problems related to existing IT infrastructure, reducing the operational cost structure of services that they provide, retaining and retraining staff, leadership and other human resources issues, data mining issues and providing for the adequate protection of data, and security and privacy issues. E-government provides a vision and a strategy for addressing these challenges and for creating an environment for the transformation of government activities by applying ebusiness methods on the public sector.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.m MISCELLANEOUS

General Terms:
Human Factors, Security

Keywords:
IT planning, citizens, data mining, data security, governments, human resources, leadership, physical infrastructures, privacy issues, public sector, public value, strategy, training and retraining, vision