Information Polity

Efforts to improve the delivery of public services with ICT are older than the recent explosion of the Internet and the emergence of the concept of e-Government. Innovative Electronic Service Delivery could well become a driver of the modernisation process in government. The opportunities are still clouded by a lack of clear visions and of generic reference models of Electronic Service Delivery. Also, instead of taking a joined-up approach to citizen services, parochial approaches still prevail in many countries. This contribution deals first with some of the early efforts to create one-stop government services. From there a reference model for electronic services is sketched. It identifies several phases of a typical citizen-government transaction, and it provides a checklist of the various requirements for Electronic Services Delivery. It furthermore comprises an organisational architecture for citizens' services which enables single-window access to all administrative services via targeted "front offices".

e-Government has already arrived in Africa, though it is essentially an imported concept based on imported designs. There are growing numbers of e-government projects, some of which are contributing to public sector reform and delivering gains of efficiency and/or effectiveness across a broad agenda. However, this positive picture must be set alongside significant challenges. e-Government is only slowly diffusing within Africa because of a lack of'e-readiness for e-government' that can be charted along six dimensions. There is widespread recognition that this challenge must be met by strategic building of national infrastructure. Where e-government projects are introduced, they mainly end in failure; either partial or total. To address this tactical challenge, stakeholders must be sensitised to the large gaps that often exist between project design and African public sector reality. These large `design– reality gaps' can be seen to underlie failure. They arise particularly because e-government concepts and designs have their origins in the West; origins that are significantly different from African realities. Some best practices are outlined that may help to close design – reality gaps and, hence, may help to improve project success rates. This will only happen, though, if they too are appropriate to African realities.

In recent years, the Irish Government has launched a number of e-Government initiatives. The most ambitious of these is Reach, a project to develop a Public Services Broker (PSB) which will at once be a public sector portal, a public data vault, an inter-agency broker and an authentication system. If successful, this development could result in certain public services becoming virtual, i.e. being provided entirely from or by machines. The origins of the PSB and both the assumptions and the philosophy behind it are explored. A number of issues raised by the PSB are examined and its likely impact on certain aspects of Ireland's public services is assessed.

In many countries, administrative supervision has grown dramatically in recent years. Administrative supervision is a form of interaction between policy makers and policy executors, aimed at improving political accountability. In this paper, the role of information and information relationships between policy-making bodies, executive institutions and administrative supervisors is explored. We identify three roles of administrative supervisors: a classical (cop) role, a modern (coach) role, and a networking (director) role. Each role has requirements with respect to the information relationship, particularly in the relationship between the supervisory authority and the executive institution. In this paper, we analyze the sometimes contradictory roles of administrative supervisors and the implications for information relationships, and we indicate the consequences for practice.

In the nineteen-eighties, the Tessec expert system was developed and several studies showed that this system could improve administrative decision making under the Netherlands' General Assistance Act. Despite this favourable evaluation, Dutch municipalities did not adopt Tessec and the development of the system was halted. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, there is a series of new expert systems on the Dutch market, the MR-systems. These MR-systems perform the same tasks as Tessec and are in fact very similar. There is however one important difference: the MR-systems are widely used.

In this article, the author tries to find a sound explanation for both the failure of Tessec, and the success of the MR systems. As he argues, this explanation can be found in a shift in attitude towards the role of legislation during the past decade. This shift has facilitated the adoption of legal expert systems.