E-Government Developments in Turkey for Supporting Public Sector Transformation

Abstract

This work presents the specific case of Turkey for public sector transformation by e-Government services development. The Turkish case will be presented with an aim to provide interesting and useful information for practitioners as well as academicians in the field of e-government and public transformation, and a focus on central government examples and policy orientations affecting daily lives of citizens. The rationale and perspective of the paper reflects practitioners’ viewpoint, and assumes that the experiences of Turkey case will have echoes on other places, as the experienced and discussed issues have common characteristics with other cases. This practitioner analysis chapter is then based on the co-authors’ personal involvement in and reflections on the various aspects of the Turkish case, while the chapter is written mostly as a result on secondary research. These reflective analyses are embedded within background information about e-government development in Turkey, presented together with academic perspective of transformational government. E-Government Gateway, MERNIS, UYAP, e-tax projects in Turkey are specifically highlighted. A discussion of policy orientations that affect daily lives of citizens follows, and suggestions for future work and directions are also provided. The discussion especially underlines the shared service and citizen-oriented approach to e-government service development with implications for process integration and improvement, if not yet for thorough transformation. It is hoped that the reflections and directions with respect to Turkish case presented in this work provides useful guidelines for new e-government initiatives in Turkey and all around the world.

Turkish Case of E-Government Strategy Development and Policy-Formulation Process

“…However, as of the paper writing, latest report on needs analysis and suggestions for the new strategy development (Ministry of Development 2013) is available for public access, and all stakeholders are encouraged to comment and contribute. Moreover, in general, further information on Information Society, e-government and e-transformation initiatives in Turkey can be found in the recent studies of Medeni et al (2012); Balci and Medeni (2012); Medeni et al (2011); Balci and Medeni (2010); Balci et al (2009).…”