Ten emerging e-government challenges today: the future may be sober and not hype

The paper gives an overview of the e- government scenario and identifies ten emerging e-government challenges. The ten challenges facing e-government are:

• achieving the objective of efficient public service delivery
• anticipating the emergence of new technologies and having government respond to them quickly
• the contribution of global and national league tables to e-government policy formulation and implementation
• setting up dependable management information systems (MISs)
• anticipating and meeting information and/or transaction needs of the citizens quickly and in user-friendly manner
• setting up appropriate search capabilities on e-government websites
• making use of semantic web in e-government websites to improve the quality of the required government information making use of wiki technology in e-government if public sector is constrained by resources
• monitoring investments in e-government
• putting in place proper customer relationship management (CRM) and/or electronic customer relationship management (eCRM) programmes.

The paper concludes that there is enormous potential for the future of e-government in improving both internal processes of government as well as providing seamless public service delivery. However the author concludes that this potential remains largely unrealised and e-government may land up as yet another channel of public service delivery and not as an instrument of transformation within government.