A Components Oriented Method for Evaluation of E-government Information Systems Agility

Abstract

Agility is simply defined as the ability of an entity (system, organization, human, etc.) to quickly accommodate unanticipated changes in order to face threats of its environment. The need for Agility within e-government is mainly due to the permanent changes in the environment (political, societal, economical, technological, etc.) which in turn cause changes in the governments’ regulations and laws that may affect public organization’s processes and systems. A change in one activity in a process or in one part of an e-government system may cause many problems in other parts of the same process or system. E-government information systems (e-GIS) in particular- present a higher degree of volatility in their environment, since requirement changes may stem from a number of sources including legislation changes, organizational reforms, end-user requirements, technological developments, interoperability and distribution concerns and so on. These changes impose from one hand, the need for continuous updating of e-GIS which are heterogeneous, distributed and fragmented to meet Front Office (citizens) and Back Office (internal organization) requirements. On the other hand the need for carrying these updates in agile manner ensuring overall consistency, since the success of egovernment projects depends strongly on the quality of their information systems. This paper deals with a practical method for the evaluation e-government information systems agility. This method is based on method engineering domain; and thus, it is built in the form of method components guiding the process of evaluation.