Citizen-Centric E-Government

Abstract

Electronic government or e-government in this chapter can be defined as the delivery of government information and services to citizens through the Internet 24 hours a day, seven days per week. This definition has been used in other empirical studies of e-government adoption (Moon and Norris, 2005a). This chapter adds to this definition Grant and Chau’s (2005) interpretation of e-government as a broad-based transformative initiative, which is consistent with creating more citizen-centric government. Gronlund (2005) reviews the various definitions of e-government and has found they share a common theme of the need for organizational transformation through technological implementation. Citizen-centric e-government is the delivery of government services continuously to citizens, businesses, and other government agencies through the Internet (Seifert and Relyea, 2004). Citizen-centric government through e-government acts as a transformational tool that provides a new government model based on being citizen focused (Schelin, 2003). Some scholars have argued that for e-government to fully realize its capabilities, it must transform government from agency-centric to citizen-centric (Seifert and Relyea, 2004). The term e-government emerged in the late 1990s. It was born out of the Internet boom. The literature on information technology (IT) use within government is different from e-government because it more often focuses on external use, such as services to citizens’ and organizational change (Gronlund and Horan, 2004). Definitions of e-government that focus exclusively on service delivery components fail to capture the more complex aspects of government transformation because of IT (Grant and Chau, 2005). The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the e-government literature with a focus on how it influences citizens. In order to understand some of the issues associated with Homeland Security Information Systems (HSIS), we need to provide information on e-government and its impact on government. There is a discussion in this chapter of the evolution of the roles and responsibilities of federal CIOs. There also is a description of how the public sector CIO’s environment is uniquely different from what can be found in private sector. In this chapter, we identify what it means to create a more citizen-centric government through e-government. A conceptual framework is outlined explaining what factors one would expect to be associated with creating a more citizen-centric government. This chapter articulates how these findings can be used to move e-government to higher stages of development. There also are examples of HSIS creating more citizen-centric government towards the end of the chapter.