E-Government

“E-government refers to government’s use of information and communication technologies to exchange information and services with citizens, businesses and other arms of government” and it is an approach “to make public administrations more efficient and effective” [1]. Like private enterprises, governmental institutions need to deal economically with their budget and therefore try to achieve cost reductions. One of the main benefits of e-government services is that they enable more cost efficient administrative work flows and services. This is achieved by the dematerialization of documents and by optimized administrative systems. Beside economic goals governments try to realize improvements of their services by using information technology. The Internet is used as additional delivery channel and access point, allowing fast and wide distribution of information. Users benefit from easier access to services and faster service times, without the need to travel to agencies or the expense of sending paper forms. In summary the main reasons for the implementation of electronic services by governments are cost and time efficiency, as well as an improved quality of service:

• Cost reductions can be realized by the optimization of administrative structures and processes. Governments try to achieve a higher “value for money” [2]. 
• Service quality is improved by better accessibility and usability of public services [1], together with a wide range of functionality provided on several platforms. In this context e-governmental services tempt to “meet users needs” [2]. This includes a quick and easy access to governmental information and services, achieved by a consistent look and feel of electronic services. 

E-government is characterized by the supply of public services via a variety of channels. In the past the options of accessing services where restricted to the visitation of governmental departments and mail correspondence in some chases. The current development of electronic services is focused on online and voice based services [2]. The main delivery channel of e-governmental services is the Internet. This channel is supplemented by line telephone and mobile phone networks, which experiences a current trend due to the proliferation of mobile devices [3]. There are various applications and specifications of e-government at the moment:

• E-taxation refers to the process of citizens and businesses conducting their tax related activities electronically. The most common example of e-taxation is the functionality provided to individuals to enter their account information for tax return [2].
• E-voting is an electronic service of governments, substituting traditional elections [1]. The benefits of e-voting are reductions of paper ballots and time and location flexibility of voters. 
• M-government is a subset of e-government, using mobile devices, such as mobile phones or tablet computers to access public information and governmental services anywhere and anytime [3]. In m-government data transfer is realized by wireless and mobile phone networks. Governments want to exploit the current trend of mobile technology to advance the distribution of their electronic services. 
• An electronic identification card is a type of smart card [1], usually equipped with integrated circuits, providing the ability to store user related information. The primary purpose of these cards is identification and authentication for several e-governmental services. 

An important issue in the context of e-governmental services is to ensure privacy and security [2]. Services delivered via the Internet are endangered by data theft and fraud. Since e-governmental services are often related to finances (e.g. e-tax) and always involve detailed personal data, the need for highly secure systems is all the more important. If the requirements of information security and privacy of personal data are not fulfilled, the acceptance of electronic services will suffer. This has negative economical as well as environmental impact, because the benefit of electronic services is increasing together with the amount of users. Electronic services are characterized by low marginal costs, which means that the increase of total costs by a single additional user is quite low. The fixed costs of technical equipment like servers, network infrastructure and computer systems take up the largest share of costs of electronic services. Therefore the total costs per user of electronic service decrease with increasing numbers of users, because the fixed costs are divided by user numbers. The costs of electronic services can be directly linked to energy and resource use, which means that the environmental impact develops directly proportional to the development of costs. In summary this means, that the economical and envi- ronmental benefits of electronic services rise with the number of users.

The potential environmental benefits of e-government cover reductions in paper usage due to dematerialization [3], as well as energy and emissions savings by various applications. Significant carbon emissions reductions are expected from library management systems which support e-archives, to reduce emissions and paper demand of libraries [1]. The reductions in paper usage refer to the approach of the paperless office [3]. This is a term for the dematerialization of paper forms and electronic administration. In e-government this includes administrative activities of processing service cases, which can be operated electronically instead of using paper forms, reductions in paper ballots and electronic communication. Especially e-taxation is considered to have large potential in achieving paper use reductions. Data from Europe shows, that in 2005 between 5 and 20 percent of citizens declared their income tax online and between 10 and 20 percent of business declared their value-added tax electronically [1]. It is estimated that these numbers rise to about 80 percent for citizens and almost 100 percent for businesses until 2020 [1]. All environmental improvements by e-government are endangered by low numbers of users, which could even result in a negative environmental impact in total. An example in this context is paper consumption, which is generally reduced by electronic services. This reduction will only be significant, if the majority of users access governmental services electronically. Due to the coexistence of traditional governmental service supply (higher paper demand) and electronic services (higher energy demand), low usage rates of electronic services, paired with high usage rates of traditional delivery channels would lead to a combination of high energy demand and high paper usage [3].

References

[1] Bio Intelligence Service. Impacts of information and communication technologies on energy efficiency, final  report. ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/fp7/ict/docs/sustainable-growth/ict4ee-final-report_en.pdf, September 2008. Accessed: 2013-02-12.

[2] Australian Government Information Management  Office. Responsive government - a new service agenda. http://www.finance.gov.au/publications/2006-e-government-strategy/docs/e-gov_strategy.pdf, March 2006. Accessed: 2013-03-05.

[3] P. Fernando and A. Okuda. Escap technical paper: Green ICT - a “cool” factor in the wake of multiple meltdowns. http://www.unescap.org/idd/working%20papers/IDD_TP_09_10_of_WP_7_2_907.pdf, December 2009. Accessed: 2013-02-12.