Information systems in Japanese government

Abstract

In this article we focus on information systems (IS) in Japanese government. We concentrate on the nature of IS-use and the major challenges faced for the future path of IS-use in local government. The governments have low budgets for IS use, a low penetration rate, and almost no IS use in the communication with citizens, companies, other departments, or inside the organizations. Impacts are accordingly restricted to mainly conventional IS applications such as word processing, accounting, and taxation. However, local governments and national governments are determined to increase their utilization and we have found emerging visible signs of these changes such as one-stop shopping, tele-access to governmental information, digital libraries, office automation, etc. We identify four major challenges facing local governments: (1) rebuilding the organizational content, procedures, and frontier; (2) using IS applications to support intra- and interorganizational communication; (3) developing a clear IS-strategy with respect to goals, means, time-span and evaluations and (4) having politicians supporting the IS strategy.