A Review of Standardization Frameworks for Electronic Government Service Portals

Abstract

E-Government service portals have a challenging and unique mission, focused on public access, for an unknown group of users who vary greatly in terms of the information and services they seek, as well as their education, background, and access to technology. Within this context public organizations at central, regional or local level initiate many efforts towards the development of government portals in order to offer electronic services to citizens and businesses. However, even if these efforts are in most cases successful, the portals that are developed do not follow a common set of specifications. On the contrary, each public agency follows its own design, set its own functional and technical specifications and most of all put its own needs before the needs of its users. The need for e-Government frameworks, as a prerequisite supporting tool for e-Government portals implementation becomes more apparent worldwide, when considering the added complexity of procedures, information needs and systems, technologies used, security aspects, legal frameworks, organizational structures, and other special issues which have to be taken into account. In this chapter a comparison framework is proposed, extending and adopting existing approaches, to the national standardization framework’s needs. Applying the proposed comparison framework an assessment and extended review of some of the most significant standardization efforts undertaken worldwide are considered in an attempt to assist decision makers, politicians, public and IT managers to design their own Standardization Framework for Electronic Government Service Portals.