Next Wave of E-Government: The Challenges of Data Architecture, The

E-Government

There can be no doubt about it: local e-government efforts are starting to mature. Given the dramatic increase in the flexibility and affordability of Web-based technologies, more and more municipal and county governments across the nation are realizing the benefits of Web-enabled applications. Data outlined below suggest that, in large part, the newest trends in e-government evolution will squarely target the ability of local governments to think flexibly and creatively about data integration. Taking advantage of these opportunities will also require increased organizational and management capacity. This paper describes the evolution of e-government across the nation's largest cities, assesses trends in service delivery and considers some of the implications of these changes for all local governments.

In recent years, advances in technology, particularly the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web, have led to a dramatic change in how local governments construe their service delivery obligations. As the data described below demonstrate, a sea change is occurring as these applications evolve. What separates the leading edge from the rest is increasingly defined by sophisticated back-end integration of data - geographic information systems (GIS), constituency relationship management (CRM), document management and content management. New and proliferating information and communications technologies seem to promise broader information dissemination and new modes of service delivery. All local governments face significant challenges in the next stages of e-government, but smaller governments, in particular, are increasingly left behind by these developments. A substantial challenge remains in finding feasible and sustainable approaches to providing information and services to the public in an era of data integration.

Benchmarking Change: The Municipality E-Government Assessment Project (MeGAP)

When local governments first began to use the Web for information and service delivery, they tended to make ad hoc decisions. Individual bureaus would often develop their websites without coordinating across the organization. The result was that early municipal website development tended to be a cobble of ponderously organized, difficult to find information with very little interactivity or consideration for their audience.

The Municipality e-Government Assessment Project (MeGAP) had its origin in 2000 as an effort to provide a comprehensive compendium and benchmark of municipal experiments in the provision of Web-based services. The MeGAP assessment of local governments and the data it generates are designed, collected and maintained by the Public Sphere Information Group, Newtonville, MA (www.psigroup.biz/megap). The strategy for the development of this methodology was to focus on information that would be of use to e-government implementers, creating an overview of what other local governments had done to inform their own decision-making. This approach is deliberately in tension with a number of rubrics for evaluating services that were available at the time of its development.

When this study was initially devised, there were already several efforts at evaluating (and developing metrics for evaluating) the success of websites provided by local (Kanfer & Kolar, Johnson & Misic, Stowers), state and federal (West, Eschenfelder) governments. These studies had a common approach - create an evaluative rubric for already existing efforts with an eye toward improving implemented services and offering best practices advice for prospective services. What none of them provides, however, is concrete advice on specific strategies and applications (that is, which cities had provided which types of Web-based services and which services were most common). As a result there were no reliable assessments of the state of municipal e-government.

Contemporaneously with the evolution of the MeGAP as a benchmark of e-government, several organizations and researchers began publishing rankings of websites. Most notably, Darrell West's "Urban E-Government, 2004" provides one of the more comprehensive assessments of the state of municipal government efforts, providing "a detailed analysis of 1,873 city government sites in the 70 largest metropolitan areas" in the United States. Also private organizations such as the Center for Digital Government announces its "Best of the Web" rankings for municipal, county and state governments, based on its annual survey. Unlike all of these studies, however, in addition to devising a rating system based on the composite eScore, the MeGAP also provides a fine-grained analysis of particular functions and services that cities have characteristically provided for generations combined with those functions that are the hallmark of the information age. The relatively straightforward method for gathering these data begins with an observational study of official municipal websites. Each website is assessed across a wide range of performance dimensions that fall into four categories: