Foresights and practice in technology development for e-government applications: A global compendium of approaches

Although a lot has been achieved with regards to technology development for e-government applications, there are still no global technological conceptual frameworks and models that define e-government platform design and implementation the world over. This has partly been attributed to the differing local contexts and organisational cultures in the public services departments (even within the same government). Because of this scenario, there is need to review the different technology design endeavours geared towards achieving process automation and application integration in the different government departments to achieve meaningful and robust e-Government development. This lead chapter intends to review the different approaches that have been done on the technology front of e-Government (especially design of interoperability frameworks and ontology platforms) in different parts of the world and outlines the future works that e-Government researchers and practitioners need to concentrate on. This chapter sets the tone for the remaining chapters of this book, which discuss various aspects of e-Government implementation from the technological front (deployment, design, and customization of e-Government solutions). The chapter posits that with the current pace of technological advancements and efforts by the OASIS forum and other interested parties, it is not difficult to notice that global technological models of e-Government are to be realized in the foreseeable future.