Origin and Emergence of Egovernment

Origin and Emergence of eGovernment

The origins of eGovernment could officially be placed within the decade of the ‘80s, when the World Wide Web emerged as a governmental source which soon became more and more commercial. During the next ten years it was obvious that the Internet could result in an essential cost reduce and efficiency increase in any aspect of information management, like for example communications and data processing and analysing.

As a result, there were very high ambitions about how the electronic means could facilitate and reduce the cost of any kind of transactions and decision making, but it was step by step realized that the effort and the initial investment required in order to develop and particularly maintain the appropriate Information Systems were much more elevated than predicted in advance. For example, the issue of interoperability, which is considered nowadays as one of the most important topics in IS research and especially in eGovernment, was a series of problems that few people could predict in that time. Nevertheless, the first reports about reducing costs were obvious and technical means continued to advance rapidly, so relevant research was supported in a more systematic way, taking also into account the problems that were faced.

In fact, the origins of eGovernment could be identified before the ‘80s, as during the ‘70s the first mainframe systems were used in central government for the purposes of financial management, project planning and transaction data queries. These tasks could be characterized as purely database and mathematical applications that could support administrative agents. Nevertheless, apart from facilitating administrative tasks, the concept of involving mainframes into the policy making procedures was present, but could not be exploited further in that time due to the limited computational effectiveness of the means.

At the second half of the ‘80s though, besides the first steps of the World Wide Web, modelling and simulation were introduced as policy making tools, originating from the field of environmental policy. Additionally, expert systems were also introduced in the field of social security issues in the USA and in a larger scale in the UK in order to test regulations and create proposals for law changes. By the end of the ‘80s document management and exchange systems were being used in the public sector, having for the first time a significant impact on complex bureaucratic systems.