International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

E-government may be defined as the use by government of information and communication technologies, internally and to interact with citizens, firms, nongovernmental organizations, and other governments (→  Information and Communication Technology, Development of ). E-government in practice, therefore, consists of both complex networks of information systems within government organizations and a huge range of websites with which citizens can communicate, interact, and transact. In some sense e-government has been around for over half a century in larger developed states; for example, governmental organizations in the US and the UK used computers for internal operations from the 1950s onwards. But the term e-government only came into common usage in the 1990s as societal use of the →  Internet became widespread. While earlier technologies were largely internally facing, the Internet for the first time provided government with the possibility to interact electronically with individuals and organizations outside government. Thus the Internet brought far greater possibility for the “transformation” of government through the use of electronic tools than earlier technologies, and the topic became interesting to a far wider range of researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers than hitherto. By the 2000s, almost all governments had some kind of electronic element, even if only a website ... log in or subscribe to read full text