ISSUES WITH E-GOVERNANCE

Issues with E-Governance

Issues with E-Governance

Introduction

In its most panoptic sense, digital governance or electronic governance, more commonly referred to as e-governance, is the use of communications technologies by governments to operate more transparently and effectively; to supply more and better services and information to the public; and to alleviate the involvement and participation of businesses, individuals and groups throughout society in their own governance. Another, more compact way of putting this may be that e-governance is the use of electronic technology to help and facilitate better and more open government and governance. There is now a common understanding of e-governance as encompassing most or all of the components, even if there is still some level of controversy among academics and practitioners as to the proper scope and definition of e-governance and its subcomponents in practice (Reece, 2006). For about the past 15 years, governments across the globe have been delivering information and services, providing transactions, and enabling interactions between the governed and their governments electronically. For the most part, they do so through official governmental sites on the World Wide Web. This has become known as electronic government, or e-government. Today, e-governance is ubiquitous. Although no single definition exists, a consensus of sorts has developed around the basic understanding of e-governance as the provision of governmental information and services electronically 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Some view e-governance more broadly and ascribe normative elements to it. Yet the foregoing definition captures the descriptive essence of e-government: the availability of governmental information and services by electronic means (usually the Web), without restriction as to place and time (Heeks, 2005). Some conflate e-governance with its antecedent, information technology (IT) in government. Although e-governance is an IT based phenomenon, the two are quite different. Traditional IT in governance is inward looking and addresses mainly internal governmental applications: mundane and not so mundane things such as basic record keeping; managing large databases; billing, accounting, and payroll; 911 and 311 systems; GIS applications in planning; word processing; and many more applications that essentially support the internal operations of public organizations (Wilhelm, 2004).

Discussion

Conversely, e-governance is outward looking and characterized by terms such as G2C, G2B, and G2G (governance to citizens, businesses, and governments, respectively), meaning the provision of information and services primarily to external stakeholders. Although governments may have multiple motives when implementing e-government, the motive that leads all is electronic access (online versus in line) by external parties to governmental information and services. E-governance is outward looking and characterized by terms such as G2C, G2B, and G2G (governance to citizens, businesses, and governments, respectively), meaning the provision of information and services primarily to external stakeholders. When it first came on the scene, e-governance was cause for great optimism and a fair amount of hyperbole, especially about its potential impacts. Indeed, many early e-governance writings predicted simply incredible outcomes from e-governance (David, 1999). After claims that e-governance would promote greater efficiency and effectiveness came predictions that it would produce ...