European Journal of ePractice

The papers for this issue of the European Journal of ePractice were submitted at a time when there was some certainty left in the structures of governments and the services they delivered. They are being published at a time of unprecedented turmoil in business and governance. The global financial crisis of late 2008 has redefined the business/government landscape. Some banks have become bankrupt, and there is concern that even Iceland may as a country be insolvent. Many banks are now partly or fully in public ownership; many citizens who saved money to provide them with a pension on retirement may not now receive that allowance. It is not just individuals who have lost significant amounts of savings in collapsed banks; it is also some government institutions. The pressure on public finances in many countries will become extreme. It would be too simplistic to say that this is the time for eGovernment to deliver the efficiencies and societal benefits that have long been promised, but it certainly is the time to focus on delivering impact in the right areas.

The extent to which services are, or are not, 'high impact' is not something that can be defined purely through quantitative measures. It is relatively easy to apply cost-benefit approaches to transactional services and to calculate the levels of financial impact. It is more challenging to take a health service and to calculate the overall impact on society, because there are not only issues of the structure and effectiveness of the service, but there also are exogenous factors such as extent to which citizens knowingly damage their health through diet, smoking, or alcohol.

A search on the term 'High Impact government' shows a considerable diversity of approaches. The term has been connected to themes such as leadership, citizen centricity and customer satisfaction, commercial partnerships, reducing administrative burden and technological efficiency. It has been linked to specific priority areas that will have an impact on society and the economy. Consequently the decision as to whether these contributions relate explicitly to high-impact has been left largely to those who submitted papers and the panel of reviewers, whose task was to accept that they met the criteria for this issue.

Trond Arne Undheim and Jochen Friedrich focus on the behaviour changes that are still needed so that the IT infrastructures can be used to the maximum effect, advising that the eGovernment impacts in the Netherlands and Denmark have been enabled by clear policies to use open standards. They call for more openness in standards, warning also that “some incumbents, notably national standards development organizations and a few monopoly vendors, resist change'.

Bram Klievink and Marijn Janssen show that high impact can be delivered through a sensitive re-assessment of the delivery chain. While much debate in government service delivery surrounds the often emotive areas of public funding, contracting services out to the private sector, or even privatisation, Bram and Marijn focus on the roles of the actors and the range of channels which are best suited to deliver services. Their conclusions that 'the disintermediation of low-performing channels, while re-intermediation in others, can contribute to both increased efficiency and better customer-oriented service delivery' shows that the objective should be less one of ideology (public or private for example) and more one of the ways in which services can be delivered best by the right configuration of actors - a process which is called 'Channels in Balance'.

Sirajul Islam addresses the problematical area of e-Participation, developing a framework which goes beyond many of the previous basic technological interventions that have tended to assume that participatory democracy will flow from communication across electronic channels. Active communication, coupled with trust, is more likely to empower participation, rather than to simply reflect existing communication discourses.

Mauro Cislaghi, Domenico Pellegrini and Elisa Negroni focus on the societal impacts of more effective judicial cooperation across EU member states. By promoting mobility and blurring borders with Schengen, the EU has created a large space of economic and social mobility. There are, however, significant threats from mobile criminality (organised crime and terrorism for example), and the effective development of processes such as 'mutual recognition of digital signature and the adoption of a EU-wide recognised standard format for legal document exchange' are important in maintaining and enhancing European mobility, while at the same time protecting citizens through a more effective security system. Failure to achieve this puts at risk the political agenda, moving back towards more aggressive border control that diminishes the opportunities and the value of the common European market.