Digital Government

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Electronic Enterprise Institute

Digital Government

Much of the work that governments are entrusted with performing can be viewed as the efficient, faithful execution of carefully prescribed processes. Some examples of such governmental processes are the collection of taxes, the granting of licenses, the gathering of statistics, the supervision of elections, and the actual drafting of legislation itself. The goals and overall description of these processes are generally prescribed by legislation. Once this has been done, it is the public expectation that government will execute the processes faithfully, completely, and efficiently. To perform these processes, governments generally assign key tasks to new and/or existing agencies and officials.

Unfortunately, the creation of even straightforward digital government applications has lagged parallel developments in e-commerce, due in part to the stringent requirements we place on digital government and to the requirements for collaboration among all stakeholders our system of government imposes. Our premise is that to meet these requirements and overcome resistance to change we must focus on establishing and maintaining trust in all stakeholders. We propose that the development of digital government systems should be viewed as the design, analysis, implementation, execution, and modification of efficient, effective processes with stringent fairness requirements. A process-centric view of the world has proven to be promising in development of efficient and effective systems in such diverse areas as ecommerce, medical practice, and engineering design.

Online Dispute Resolution

We are demonstrating our approach through the domain of dispute resolution in cooperation with the National Mediation Board. Dispute resolution is a government process domain where fairness is particularly crucial. Efficient, effective and fair dispute resolution can do much to restore trust in government, even after other transactions may have been problematic. Poorly done dispute resolution can, on the other hand, destroy trust in government. Since processes for carrying out dispute resolution are often the only way many citizens ever interact with government, it is vital that these processes be efficient, effective and fair.

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