In this book E‐Government is broadly defined as “the use of ICT to promote more efficient and effective government, facilitate more accessible government services, allow greater public access to information, and make government more accountable to citizens” (p. 2). E‐Government goes beyond electronic service delivery nowadays and is part of the ongoing reform and transformation of government enabling participatory governance and partnerships to improve efficiency and effectiveness. E‐Government is about transforming government to be more citizen‐centered. The book Transformational Government through E‐Government Practice: Socioeconomic, Culture, and Technological Issues aims to provide an understanding of and highlights key challenges, issues and complexities in transformational government. It is the first comprehensive book dedicated to the discussion of transformational government targeting both academia, social and practitioners. This book provides a timely contribution to the field of transformational government through E‐Government by including many aspects and views on transformation, including showcasing successful practices from all over the world.
In the preface of the book, the editors discuss the role of ICT in the public sector by identifying the degree of transformation and the underlying societal factors. Having evolved from E‐Government but encapsulating a wider perspective of the transformational aspects “ICT in government is broadly conceptualized as Transformational Government or Electronic Government (eGov). In a broader sense, the mission of eGov is to provide top‐quality” (preface, p. Xiv). This definition builds the foundation for the scope of this book containing seven sections. In the first section there are four chapters, respectively, focusing on the different branch of transformational government, policy‐making strategic, and the result of the transformation of traditional government service system. They all relate to one or more aspects mentioned in the definition. Therefore, this definition strongly steers the content of the book.
Overall, the seven sections and 24 chapters provide an overview of the various aspects of transformational government. Briefly, and in spite of some incoherence between chapters, the line of discussion through those sections turns out to be quite clear after being familiar with the discussion of foundations in the first section. This first section is focus on multi‐methodological research agenda in information systems (IS) research and E‐Government. This section is interested for those who are looking for methods that can be effective in researching in shaping E‐Government. This section is followed by a section containing a literature review on the information systems perspective of E‐Government, this literature review have a significant portion on E‐Government research agenda. This section is quite interesting for scholars originating from different academic disciplines, including the social sciences, business process management and public administration and interested in conducting multi‐disciplinary research.
In the second section, which is also divided into four chapters, the implications and evaluation frameworks of E‐Government development are dealt with. This section is especially, focusing on service design and delivery for higher efficiency and effectiveness. This section also highlights success factors of e‐procurement. Public policy is necessary for E‐Government and is aimed at building relationships between different domains that formerly fragmented and distributed to let organizations or departments operate in a coherent and consistent manner.
The first, second and third section can be regarded as the discussion of policy and technology support for transformational government, whilst the fourth section is about the knowledge and technical support. In this section, developed a framework for M‐Government may serve as an orientation for practitioner and researchers who interested to better understand of M‐Government. The fifth and sixth section discusses social, organizational, technical and economical impact of E‐Government and transformational government. The last section is about the adoption and acceptance of transformation. Both social scientists and policy makers are the intended readers of this section.
All 24 chapters in this book include contributions from researchers, government agencies, policy makers and international organizations to provide a balanced perspective of the strategic, organizational, technical as well as theoretical and practical issues that have shaped the progress of electronic government and transformational government.
Consisting of a mix of theory and practice, this book can be useful for academia (research and teaching) as well as practice (policy makers and implementers). The other side of the coin of this mix is that the broad scope diminishes the focus and depth of the book. This is not surprisingly as for such an immense complex and interdisciplinary field, a single book cannot meet simultaneously both extensive scope and depth. It does a good job in collecting the state‐of‐art research from leading scholars coming from different disciplines and backgrounds. Besides academic researchers and practitioners, this book is suitable for students who would like to get a comprehensive overview of the most important concepts, trends and technologies involved in transformational government implementations. Within all seven sections that takes quite a comprehensive standpoint towards the transformation of E‐Government is covered. This book fills in the knowledge gap by offering a diverse collection of chapters and covering theories, concepts, methods, frameworks, guidelines, evaluations and challenges in transformational government research. The quality of most of the individual chapters is very good and the editors are successful in incorporating a wide variety of ICT‐related subjects in one volume. The broad coverage of issues and the high quality of articles make the book a good reference source and a valuable collection for transformational government research and facilitating discussion between researchers and practitioners.
