A Review of a Paper Written by Hassan and Shehab

A review of a paper written by Hassan and Shehab (2011) on recent advances in e-service in the public sector: state-of-the-art and future trends.

The paper written by Hassan and Shehab is on the development of e-service in the public sector and the main purpose of the study is to gives a clear view of the current literature and challenges faced by countries while providing an enabling e-service to all concerns. Mostly these challenges talks in this paper are mainly from the perspective of technology development and possession of qualified human capital to mount the required e-service in the public sector.

E-service is defined as the use of electronic networks to provide a service to the stakeholder and there are many flat forms used in delivering this service such as the internet. It is also defined as the process of service delivery since from the fist time a stakeholder log on to the sites till when the service is finally received and fit the requirement of that stakeholder. This evolution in the e-service does not limit to only services sectors but also to the manufactures of goods where the services provided while selling the goods on line by these manufacturing firms play a vital role in their success.

Definition of e-service in the public sector is not all that clear and that result in numerous interpretations by different authors, some refer to e-service as e-public while others refer it to be e-government. In the public sector there existed various interactions that previous studies categorised them into government-to-citizens interaction, government-government interaction, government-to employee interaction and government-to- business interaction. Government-to-citizens and government-to-employee interactions are grouped under downstream interaction while government-to-government and government-to-business interactions are categorized as upstream interactions.

There is a basic difference between e-service and self-service in which self-service refers to the use of all technological apparatus or interfaces where the customer has to mingle with a designed instrument like ATM to have and instant interaction with the organisation while e-service interaction involves or can be done with the use of only the internet may be from the home. Thus self service is where a customer can use a designed physical tools or instruments connected on line to serve himself while e-service is the used of an online website of an organisation may be at home or workplace.

E-government has for long evolved from one stage to another and in each of these stages there exist different levels of citizen orientation, technological sophistication and administrative changes. The developmental stages includes cataloguing stage, transaction stage, vertical integration stage and horizontal integration stage in which each stage comes with an increasing level of complexity.

Cataloguing stage is