Goals and scope of study
Assess the differences between today and possible future outlooks for eGovernment research
- investigate the future scenarios developed in WP 2 in respect to the current research taking place (cf. WP 1)
- elicit research gaps to be addressed and measures to be taken to implement the future scenarios
To get a clear understanding of gaps, a common understanding has been developed. In eGovRTD2020, a gap expresses:
- a mismatch between issues of consideration (dimensions or topics of interest) in the state of play and the issues extracted from the future scenarios
- or a lack of current research of issues identified in the scenarios
Gap analysis methodology
To investigate the gaps in current research, the state of play of current eGovernment research and the possible future scenarios of governments and society in 2020 were the main inputs. The following figure depicts the single steps of the gap analysis methodology used in the project:
The gaps have been assessed in terms of relevance and importance towards the eGovernance cycle as depicted in the following figure:
For the assessment of gaps in the roadmapping workshops, a questionaire has been developed and handed out to the regional workshop participants.
Results of gap analysis
Brief description of gaps ranked as highly relevant and important to the eGovernance cycle
| Gap title | Short description of gap |
| Lean Government | The conditions for efficient sub-contracting / outsourcing to private sector with respect to general interest service requirements is a major issue. Comparative legal and policy analysis and understanding of the means and impact of cooperation between private organisations and government are needed.
Lack of studies about the efficiency of the cooperation through these Public-Private Relationships structures. Studies needed for the comparative analysis in various member states of such partnerships Research is needed to identify and set up a portfolio of services which assess their potential for outsourcing and those which must be provided by governments. |
| Maturity and dissemination of automated services | Missing technologies for full automation of public-services
Solutions for legal, social and ethical aspects (e.g. privacy, security, etc.) are lacking Impact of full automation to decrease the problem of increasing bureaucracy, to re-qualify and re-use the free human resources needs to be understood How to deal with the huge bureaucratic resistance to front- and back-office reengineering? Software tools for the transparent political decision-making not available |
| Incident Politics | The missing technologies for full automation of public-services have to be created as well as the solutions for some legal, social and ethical problems (e.g. privacy, security, etc.) have to be found. Full automation could help to solve the problem of increasing bureaucracy, but the ways how to re-qualify and re-use the free human resources must be found, contrarily there will be a huge bureaucratic resistance to front- and back-office reengineering. The software tools for the transparent political decision-making must be implemented |
| Competition among nations and among regions | Lack of knowledge concerning the role of eGovernment policy and eGovernment services quality in the decision of citizens and companies to select a national government. The gap is related to the problem of identifying how ICT can help a government improve its attractiveness to citizens and organisations.
Lack of knowledge concerning the role of eGovernment policy and eGovernment services quality in the decision of citizens and companies to select a regional government. The gap is related to the problem of identifying how ICT can help a government improve its attractiveness to citizens and organisation. |
| Transparency | The need to understand better what are the conditions of access and use of these data so that the rights of citizens and organisations guarantee by law can be protected and enforced . Also how government can in a legitimate way use ICT to provide services which add value the public data. |
| New types of IT governance | Improving the supply of general interest services in a transparent way to citizens and companies including when activities are crossing national state borders. Research on how to imbed knowledge based application and models in eGovernment application to provide better services to the citizens and companies is highly useful.
A better understanding of new types of governance mechanisms enabled by ICT is necessary to deploy shared services in public service networks. |
| Government Network | Impacts and effects of government systems integration and virtualization not well understood
Barriers of making government networks effective and efficient not known Impact of a single access point to the society and the market not understood in terms of economics, public value, etc. What is the demand for enabling cooperation among private and public agencies? |
| Information and Knowledge Management | Lack of efficient and effective information and knowledge management tools promoting and supporting citizens and companies to operate eGovernment services |
| ICT as driver | There is a lack of integrated research before, during, and after the implementation process of new and innovative ICT to prevent and avoid misplaced investments and ensure quality standards of the implemented system. |
| Ubiquitous systems | Need to identify opportunities to merge the deployment of different ICT for government modernization purposes, particularly in the back-office to increase efficiency and in the front-office regarding multi-channel access and eInclusion issues. |
| eParticipation | Lack of research concerning media competencies citizens will need to participate in policy formulation and decision-making process, and the deployment of ICT to support decision-making.
Lack of technical research concerning ICT dependency |
| One European identity & Worldwide Identification/authentication & use of Biometrics | further development and research programs needed on establishing one European identity system
Can unique identification and authentication for all services be offered by chip technology in all areas of life? Usage of chips and biometrics data in worldwide identification not well understood yet How is privacy, which is becoming very important in the future, being treated here? |
| Automatic monitoring and enforcement | Link to privacy issues and remote monitoring needs to be understood well
How can automatic judgment, intelligent judgment, control over information gathering and use, monitoring for data collection and decision making be exploited with the help of technology? What technology is required? |
| Ontology and Semantic Web | Common European eGovernment ontology and agreed European eGovernment glossary are not established. Common specifications for semantic interoperability are claimed in as being needed for instance through a regular eGovernment service terminology and service information model.
In regard to globalization, automatic translation machines will be needed |
| Crisis Management | Lack of knowledge concerning the identification of critical situations with high impact on people?s lives, organizations, market, health and property with huge economic and ethical consequences. How can ICT contribute to detect, prevent and help government manage crisis situations?
Lack of knowledge on how different national and/or regional governmental agencies can better be coordinated in a efficient way using ICT system when natural disasters occur (especially cross-national) |
| Problems with social security and pensions | Lack of knowledge concerning the evaluation of the efficiency of these services and lack of development of pan-European eGov services concerning the basic three public services: health care financing, state pension, state support for unemployed.
Lack of research about the psychological, societal, legal, institutional and economic aspects of using ICT to balance between security control and privacy protection |
| Intellectual property | Lack of regulation according to the deployment of ICT regarding the access to and use of data, in particular intellectual property |
| Globalisation | Research is needed to identify and develop business models which cover the challenges eGovernment will face if Europe citizens continuing to become more mobile and the Europeanization will raise, and Globalisation will continue. |
| Cyber wars and crimes | Distrust in eMoney and raising occurrence of cyber crime result in needs for additional information and data security for eGovernment infrastructures
Need for concepts, methods and tools to detect and counteract corruption, crime and terrorism activities taking e.g. place via the Internet or being prepared via the Internet Need for cooperation and networking information security policies on at least EU level Focus on related domains like psychological, societal, institutional, legal or economic aspects which can prevent eCrime |
| Virtual borders and citizenship | No research deal with issues like: What is virtual citizenship? What kind of virtual borders exist already and will come into existence? How will those virtual borders affect citizenship. |
| Changing public values | The scope of public values research need to be expanded. Combining sources by different types of agencies situated in different (EU) countries and the relationship with public values is not explored yet.
Public values vary from country to country which makes comparison difficult. Public values change over time which make new type of services possible, for example related to monitoring. Privacy protection is sometimes subordinated to the public welfare and fight against terrorism and might be considerably different from how they are now. |
An overview of the number of gaps identified per category, and the number of highly ranked gaps, for which a gap storyline has been developed is shown in the following figure:
Gap storylines
What are gap storylines:
- Storylines are a coherent collection of issues (dimensions and topics of interest) within one category including a problem, a goal and potential solutions in the future
- Gap storylines may enlarge issues of scenarios with new aspects to make them internally complete and consistent. In developing gap storylines, some dimensions identified in the state of play or in the scenario building exercise may also appear as solutions
- Gap storylines were developed for gaps which were assessed as having a very high impact or very high relevance to the governance model
- The storylines are intended to give a deeper understanding of future scenarios and the risks and weaknesses in current research
- The gap storylines shall communicate the gaps and their risks to the experts in the roadmapping workshops in terms of »Where are we (gaps) and where do we want to go to (scenarios) with investigations of this gap? in an effective way
Example of a gap storyline: New types of IT-governance
General:
- In the future of 2020 it is expected that more and more will be outsourced and (semi-) autonomous agencies will be used for executing public administration functions and tasks.
- Functions and roles might be reallocated to different government agencies at central and decentralized levels. Traditionally these organizations (agents) report to their principals by writing extensive reports and engaging in formal agreements.
- In this future politicians might try to influence (manage!) the operation of public administration and healthcare more directly to improve efficiency and service levels.
- Within government, some functions and services will remain at local, regional, or national levels, while others will operate at the European level. Many of these functions and services will interact or share data.
- For this purpose new types of governance mechanisms become necessary that might have a different degree of centralism and decentralism, need for coordination or integration, and balance between tight control and autonomy.
- A better understanding of new types of IT governance mechanisms is necessary to deploy shared and distributed services in public service networks.
- IT governance mechanisms comprise the system and structure for defining policies, monitoring and controlling policy implementations, and managing and coordinating the procedures and resources aimed at ensuring the efficient and effective execution of services that rely on ICT.
- Failure to fully recognize the need for IT governance or to understand which type of IT governance mechanisms are needed might easily result in failure of government operations.
Gaps clustered in this storyline:
- Local governments arranges healthcare (in government and society category)
Gaps from other categories:
- Lean Government: (government category)
- Hierarchical will flatten (government category)
- Integrated vs. fragmented public administration (government category)
- Reform PA (government & Economics)
- Simplify PA (government & Economics)
- New type of governance (government & Economics)
- Funding and control of education (Government & society & economics)
- Services provided by private parties (Government & society & economics)
- Outsourcing (Government & society & economics)
- PPP (Government & society & economics)
Deliverable
The deliverable is available here: Gap analysis report
