Organizational Requirements for Building Up National E-Government Infrastructures in Federal Settings

Abstract

The present paper focuses on the interplay between the organizational dimension of e-government and the development of national e-government infrastructures. The discussion is aimed at clarifying whether and how a decentralized vs. central development of re-usable basic services raises different requirements with regard to establishing interorganizational arrangements and coordination. Current challenges in the development of decentralized, federal Switzerland are compared to other federal and non-federal countries, based on document analysis and interviews with e-government experts in Switzerland, selected European countries and Canada. Against this background, an organizational framework is developed that is aimed at overcoming common obstacles for developing an integrated e-government approach across national tiers in Switzerland. The cross-country comparison reveals considerable similarity regarding pressing challenges. The framework may therefore be suited as a theoretical model for further analyses on the guidance, design and governance of e-government infrastructures. Practitioners might apply it as an analytical tool.

Conceptualizing a national data infrastructure for Switzerland

“…In the context of e-government, the development of shared infrastructures enabling interagency collaboration is a core issue when it comes to improving public service provision [3,26]. This is illustrated by the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), which provides a conceptual model for public services and considers data-related services as a basic component for service provision [20].…”

Digital Strategies in Action

“…Infrastructure development is a core issue for improving public service-provision in the context of e-government. The focus is on shared infrastructures for enabling interagency collaboration [11]. A shared e-government infrastructure lays the ground for interoperable and re-usable solutions that allow for providing public services seamlessly, for example through web portals [22].…”

Having the Mind in the Cloud: Organizational Mindfulness and the Successful Use of Desktop as a Service

“…Initially provided as virtualized computing power and storage of under-utilized capacities via the Internet by companies such as Google, Amazon, and IBM [7,10], cloud computing recently gained increasing importance in the public sector [3,5,6,16]. Essentially, cloud computing comprises "ubiquitous, convenient on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources" [9, p. 6].…”

“…Recently, cloud computing moved into focus of public agencies as promising technology to meet the aforementioned requirements for more reliability and flexibility [3,4] while at the same time reducing costs [5,6]. In essence, cloud computing provides computing power, storage, and applications via the Internet [7][8][9][10].…”

“…Being particularly interested in the individual benefits rather than in economical or technical aspects, resulting from a mindful use of reliable, flexible IS we focused on the internal view of e-government and thus the government to employees (G2E) perspective in our study [3,11]. In so doing, we deemed Desktop as a Service (DaaS) as appropriate for our purpose due to its universal use across all hierarchic levels.…”