No abstract

Electronic services provided by governmental organizations, here referred to as public eservices, are frequently discussed in the e-government literature. There is, however, little consensus on the meaning of the concepts used to describe and discuss these e-services, and hence, the literature is full of synonymous terms and concepts. This paper is conceptual and presents efforts to understand e-services in the public sector domain by unpacking the public e-service concept into three dimensions; as being (1) a service, (2) electronic, and (3) public (as contrasted to being private). Based on a hermeneutic analysis, these dimensions are discussed in a number of combinations, illustrating that a multi-dimensional take on public eservices must be adopted in order to capture the complexity of governmentally supplied eservices and contribute to theory development, as well as practical utility.

Purpose -The purpose of this research is to investigate if, and in that case, how and what the egovernment field can learn from user participation concepts and theories in general IS research. We aim to contribute with further understanding of the importance of citizen participation and involvement within the e-government research body of knowledge and when developing public eservices in practice.Design/Methodology/Approach -The analysis in the article is made from a comparative, qualitative case study of two e-government projects. Three analysis themes are induced from the literature review; practice of participation, incentives for participation, and organization of participation. These themes are guiding the comparative analysis of our data with a concurrent openness to interpretations from the field.Findings -The main results in this article are that the e-government field can get inspiration and learn from methods and approaches in traditional IS projects concerning user participation, but in egovernment we also need methods to handle the challenges that arise when designing public e-services for large, heterogeneous user groups. Citizen engagement cannot be seen as a separate challenge in egovernment, but rather as an integrated part of the process of organizing, managing, and performing egovernment projects. Our analysis themes of participation generated from literature; practice, incentives and organization can be used in order to highlight, analyze, and discuss main issues regarding the challenges of citizen participation within e-government. This is an important implication based on our study that contributes both to theory on and practice of e-government.Practical implications -Lessons to learn from this study concern that many e-government projects have a public e-service as one outcome and an internal e-administration system as another outcome. A dominating internal, agency perspective in such projects might imply that citizens as the user group of the e-service are only seen as passive receivers of the outcome -not as active participants in the development. By applying the analysis themes, proposed in this article, citizens as active participants can be thoroughly discussed when initiating (or evaluating) an e-government project.Originality/value -This article addresses challenges regarding citizen participation in e-government development projects. User participation is well-researched within the IS discipline, but the egovernment setting implies new challenges, that are not explored enough.

The main goals of e-government are to increase agency efficiency and offer benefits to citizens. These

Purpose This study aims to explore recent public sector trends, inter-organizational and cross-sector collaborations, and analyzes these in terms of implications for participative development of information systems (IS). These trends are understood as being part of emerging forms of e-government. Initial suggestions for how to develop IS in the new contexts are provided. Design/methodology/approach Three cases involving the trends described above, taking place in the Swedish emergency response system, are studied and used as basis for identified participative IS development challenges and suggested adaptation needs. Data collection involves semi-structured interviews, focus groups and future workshops. Findings The identified challenges concern balancing ideological versus practical needs, lack of resources, lack of know-how and design techniques and tool challenges. Some practical implications for participative IS development include more extensive focus on stakeholder and legal analysis, need for interdisciplinary design teams, merging of task and needs analysis for yet-undefined user tasks and using on-line alternatives for interacting with users. Research implications/limitations The study is exploratory where the three cases are in different, but at the same time interrelated, collaboration contexts. The identified implications and challenges provide proposals that in future research can be applied, formalized and integrated when developing practically feasible participative IS development approaches. Originality/value It is argued that the results point toward a current emerging form of e-government initiatives directed toward certain demarcated groups of citizens actually carrying out certain tasks for their co-citizens and society rather than the broad masses, having far-reaching practical implications and complicating the issue of IS development.