The Significance of Law and Knowledge for Electronic Government

Business Process Modelling and Enactment for Task-Specific Information Support

“…In the case of "normal citizens" or not deeply specialized operators interacting with a system, the active delivery fosters democracy since it allows to profit from and be part of complex processes without having all required background knowledge in advance. Moreover, it supports legal validity and transparency even in such cases as described in Lenk and Traunmüller's "innovative ways of service delivery" [Lenk and Traunmüller (2000)]. …”

“…The idea of weak workflow structures is required, since normally, legal regulations only provide a process skeleton while specific knowledge-intensive tasks [Buckingham (1998)] are below the granularity normally modelled [Dellen et al (1997)] -this is what Lenk and Traunmüller see as a specific characteristic of egovernment processes: "They are partly … structured by legal rules which how-ever, often demand interpretation …" [Lenk and Traunmüller (2000)]; or because during long-living administrative process instances rules may change [Dellen et al (1997)]; or because specific exceptions may occur once for the first time.…”

Rethinking e-Government Research: The ‘ideology-artefact complex’

“…The l 8 Computer based technologies (CBTs) contribute to a reformed world; the improvement of CBTs will reform society; no-one loses from computerization; more computing is better than less and there are no conceptual limits to the scope of appropriate computerization; perverse or undisciplined people are the main barriers to social reform through computing -the last statement is often reworked as the 'digital divide'. l9 It thus goes against the recommendations of analysts such as Lenk [22] who suggests that egovernment and e-business are different as the former emphasises law enforcement and the regulation of society rather than the delivery of public services to individuals. 20 This scheme is due to absorb 4% of the health budget by 2008 project is eventually completed years late, way over budget, and fails to deliver the promised benefits -or is scrapped altogether.'…”

“…Many large corporate contracts in e-government are awarded not on the basis of requirements analysis, but on the basis of industry ecology (a phenomenon that has been charted elsewhere [e.g. 28]), 22 The distinction between the two types ('interest' and 'practice') of community can be elaborated using the 'ideology-artefact' axis that we describe above. The ideology of (or discourse that defines) an 'interest' community will tend to simplify the issues involved in systems implementation, and downplay risk by emphasizing the track record of those who share the rhetoric.…”

The Italian e-government action plan: from gaining efficiency to rethinking government

“…In [18], the differentiating factors between the public and the private sector, are classified in five categories: the high degree of legal structuring of administrative work, the different decisional processes in the democratic institutions, as opposed to private corporations, the state monopoly of many government services, the lack of transparency of public administration, the different type of customers. These arguments are more extensively treated in [5], [7], [8] and [17]. In summary, experiences and methods inspired by the private sector can offer valuable instruments for a reform of the Public Administration, and the astonishing experience of the US government NPR initiative ( [19], [6]) testifies it.…”