E-Government Typologies, Stakeholder Relationships, and Information Systems Support: the case of Services to Employment

The e-Government label is used to frame several activities, such as e-Service, e-Administration, e-Voting, e-Participation, e-Democracy. Leveraging the e-Government “umbrella term” to refer to such set of e-activities (which may be viewed as sub-concepts of the general e-Government concept) highlights from one side the existence of several interrelated concepts and on the other side the lack of a well-defined and commonly-accepted conceptual framework to identify and classify e-Government implementations with respect to the several “e-Government sub-concepts”. e-Government can be portrayed as an empirical driven adoption, since all the e-Government sub-concepts share the exploitation of ICT to support (very) different government activities. In this paper, we classify e-Government projects according to sub-concepts. Since some public services may be classified both as e- Service and as e-Administration, while others can hardly be classified, the exploitation of a general term like e-Government allows for a classification according to stakeholder, relationship types, and Information System (IS) typologies. The investigated research question is whether such classification framework can improve the understanding of e-Government scenarios and can help e-Government project design, reengineering and evaluation activities by disambiguating the several involved e-Government sub-concepts. We use Services to Employment as a paradigmatic example of e-Government, due to their inherent nature and to our experience.