The opportunities and challenges of e-government.

• Author: Bailey, Robert
• Position: E-government or Out of Government - Book review

Mark J. Barrenechea and Tom Jenkins, the authors of e-government or Out of Government, embrace the idea that throughout various federal, state, and local government agencies, e-government can deliver, with an integrated approach, secure, accurate, and integrated information, both internally and to their citizens.

Technology's Transformative Power

The authors give more than 50 worldwide examples of government agencies having transformed traditional public sector communications and organizational roles. But, they contend that e-government can be successful only if the government reevaluates its mission activities and matches them with new automated and streamlined processes, transactions, and interactions. The goal, according to the authors, is to transform relationships based on new collaborations that empower citizens and help governments transparently improve efficiencies and gain citizen trust.

In the foreword, Ian E. Wilson, former librarian and archivist of Canada, makes special mention of the "records to data" aspect of e-governance and the importance of program managers to manage records as effectively as other government assets. However, the book's focus is on active information. The topic of "records" is mentioned 13 times, but mostly in the examples and seldom as essential to the e-government discussion.

Among the topics given their own chapters are each level of government, from local to international; the need to determine whether government or private enterprise can best deliver public services and the potential for forming public-private partnerships as the most cost-effective and best solution; big data; and cloud computing. Though the last two topics were given full coverage, these chapters cite a lot of information published about big data and cloud computing prior to 2014. Much more is known today, so these chapters already have an historical feel to them.

Two topics the book should have covered more deeply are information security and e-mail management. There is some reference in chapter 3 to secure e-government but not nearly enough discussion about the size of the problems, the threats, and the possible solutions. Despite being only a conveyer of information, e-mail has been at the heart of many recent government agency scandals, proving itself to be a troublesome aspect of e-government.

Because the authors are employed by Open Text, a major enterprise content management (ECM) company, it is surprising that little is...