Establishing the capability for employees of a local or national government to blog about their work life and access their Facebook accounts during work hours constitute Electronic government?

This clearly does not constitute electronic government in US and most of the world’s government context. The focus of electronic government is to use technology to effect automation and coordinated function of specific rules, processes or procedures so that it leads to measurable outputs as expected by the inherent e-government policy or Acts.

If we take the case of US, Clinger Cohen Act forms the basis of measuring success of e-government initiatives. Also, E-Government Act defines e-government systems are those which enables easy access to government information and those which may lead to process improvements within the governmental setup. Blogging one’s personal work life or accessing their Facebook accounts does not lead to measurable success as defined in first paragraph (focus of e-government) or basing our analysis on the two reference points (Clinger Cohen Act, E-Government Act) of a particular localized government (US) setup as indicated above.

Thinking further ahead, as Homburg reiterates, e-government systems cannot be localized and benchmarked – as ecosystems evolve and local setups might be different. Considering this viewpoint, we cannot strictly say that the user act, specifically – blogging one’s work life on the approved government portal – might constitute electronic government if that act creates a situation that opens up better relation and increases approachability between government officials and the citizen (evolution of ecosystem perspective). However accessing Facebook account by the employee during work-hours cannot constitute electronic government unless it gets integrated to the core government portal and is monitored (potential of openness and approachability can be leveraged by political figures).

Bibliography:

1. Homburg V. (2008). Understanding E-Government -Information Systems in Public Administration. Routledge 2. Cio.gov (n.d.). Clinger / Cohen Act. Retrieved on September 18th 2010, from http://www.cio.gov/Documents
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