A Strategic Benchmarking Process for Identifying the Best Practice Collaborative Electronic Government Architecture

Abstract

The rapid growth of the Internet has given rise to electronic government (e-government) which enhances communication, coordination, and collaboration between government, business partners, and citizens. An increasing number of national, state, and local government agencies are realizing the benefits of e-government. The transformation of policies, procedures, and people, which is the essence of e-government, cannot happen by accident. An e-government architecture is needed to structure the system, its functions, its processes, and the environment within which it will live. When confronted by the range of e-government architectures, government agencies struggle to identify the one most appropriate to their needs. This paper proposes a novel strategic benchmarking process utilizing the simple additive weighting method (SAW), real options analysis (ROA), and fuzzy sets to benchmark the best practice collaborative e-government architectures based on three perspectives: Government-to-Citizen (G2C), Government-to-Business (G2B), and Government-to-Government (G2G). The contribution of the proposed method is fourfold: (1) it addresses the gaps in the e-government literature on the effective and efficient assessment of the e-government architectures; (2) it provides a comprehensive and systematic framework that combines ROA with SAW; (3) it considers fuzzy logic and fuzzy sets to represent ambiguous, uncertain or imprecise information; and (4) it is applicable to international, national, Regional, state/provincial, and local e-government levels.