The second issue of the European Journal of ePractice, entitled “New e-ways of doing the Government's job”, presents a variety of case studies that show Governments are willing to experiment. From interoperability, to RFID via online portals to bridging the digital gap, public actors take home important insights every day.

Careful reading of these articles will increase awareness of the importance of sharing solutions, lessons, technology and experience with others; indeed, the learning process is equally important to furthering one's own excellence. Most challenging of all, as practitioners and policymakers alike, we must understand how best practice actually helps existing and emerging projects to succeed faster.

Governments are now naturally e-enabled. Now the challenge is to be sufficiently efficient and responsive. In future, public services may become ad-hoc and distributed, generalising the peer-to-peer logic of the Internet. Government must meet the demand – the users are not waiting around. They want a seamless integration of Internet and face-to-face. Clearly, we are only at the beginning of this path.

The articles in this issue are:

• Interoperability and the exchange of good practice cases

By Sylvia Archmann and Immanuel Kudlacek (European Institute of Public Administration - EIPA)

“The exchange of good practice is a valuable tool to boost eGovernment services across Europe’s public administrations. To achieve an open and competitive digital economy, public administrations have to be linked together and therefore need to be interoperable. Interoperability, the ability of ICT systems to communicate, interpret and interchange data in a meaningful way, is one of the main challenges for successful, efficient and citizen-centred eGovernment applications. This article provides a general overview of the importance of good practice cases and briefly describes the results of the study, especially focusing on the main recommendations for public administrations.”

• Can Government be a good eBayer? Using online auctions to sell surplus property

By Enrico Ferro (Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, Italy) and Lucy Dadayan (College of Computing and Information, State University of New)

“E-commerce in general, and online auctions in particular, represent important examples of how information and communication technologies have been employed by public organizations to gain benefits in both efficiency and effectiveness. While online auctions have widely been used by governments around the world to drive down procurement costs, they have been seldom used as means for revenue maximization. In this article, we discuss the three-year experience gained by New York State in the use of online auctions for the sale of surplus inventory and property. This case study, besides representing an example of a best practice for other US state and local governments as well as European Governments, also provides an interesting starting point to address a number of research questions such as the ability of governmental organizations to meet private sector standards; the measurement of returns on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) investments; and the new possible roles played by transparency in the migration toward online models.”

• Best practices in eGovernment - on a knife-edge between success and failure

By Trond Arne Undheim (DG Information Society and Media, European Commission)

“This article is an in-depth exploration of three best practice cases2 in eGovernment. Findings from the Norwegian portal Mypage, the Austrian portal Help and the Dutch Horeca1 project, all previous European Award winners, indicate that even successful projects face significant challenges. Generic success factors exist, and lessons learned for practitioners include: Achieve leadership buy-in, keep technology as simple as possible, get early stakeholder and user involvement, gain momentum and plan for sustainability. This article is tailored to an audience of eGovernment practitioners across sectors. Careful reading will increase awareness of the importance of sharing solutions, lessons, technology and experience with others; indeed, the learning process is equally important to furthering one's excellence.”

• Making the clinical process safe and efficient using RFID healthcare

By Elena Sini (Italian Nacional Cancer Institute), Paolo Locatelli and Nicola Restifo (Fondazione Politecnico di Milano)

“The Fondazione Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori (the Italian National Cancer Institute) had a need for greater efficiency in the management of the transfusion process, as it had no information system for the detailed monitoring and control of the process; the transfusion service did not have instant access to all the necessary information and for some procedures operators only have access to hard-copy aids. Using RFID the Istituto can now achieve a greater capacity for controlling and monitoring the transfusion system, with the aim of enhancing safety, transparency and quality. RFID tags are sticked on blood bags and patient wristbands. Staff is provided with RFID identification cards and PDAs (with an application developed by the project team) and thus enabled to register patients at their arrival, verify the patient-blood match and recognise at any time patients and transfusional units. Each event is automatically traced by the system and sent to the Transfusion Centre, providing an essential informative feedback which was not available before.”

• Surfing, creating and networking: Tampere City Library drives into the Information Society

By Elina Harju (Tampere City Library - Pirkanmaa Regional Library)

“In Tampere (Finland), “Information Society for all” has been a strategic goal since the beginning of 2000. New ways to approach the matter have been applied, and the Tampere City Library has been an active member in these tasks with the implementation of the Internet bus Netti-Nysse, which is described in detail in this paper as well as the challenges ahead to prevent the digital divide and the role that libraries can have in preventing them. In a modern information society like Finland we know that the access to Internet is not enough; the “everyday Information Society” is about learning, culture, community and meaning. It is about support and interpreters. It is about equal opportunity and constant public commitment. This paper is based on six years of experience working with the Tampere City Library Internet bus, a half year scholarship and work with Community Informatics at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the ideas that professor Jan van Dijk presented in his book “The Deepening Divide”.”

Further information:

• European Journal of ePractice 
• Call for papers 
• Submission guidelines