Athens.
The next session at WebSci '09 focusses on the impact of the Web on government processes and policies. We begin with a paper by Albert Batlle, who notes that e-government studies so far have rarely been interdisciplinary, continue to lack a theoretical basis, still only speculate about the benefits of e-government, conduct studies which focus only on what online elements are available (they are focussing only on the supply side of e-goverment, not the demand side), and may even be guilty of technological determinism.
Albert's own study used instead an interdisciplinary approach, examined new interaction mechanisms and back office processes and their dynamics, studied uses of both explicit and implicit information, and operated on an empirical basis by studying citizen attention services in Quebec, Catalunya, and (the Brazilian federal state) Sao Paulo. The focus, then, is on information flows within public administrations, and examined their implications at Fountain's three levels of institutionalised government processes, public organisations and interorganisational networks, and ongoing social relations in social network interactions. If information flows change at one level, the hypothesis predicts, this will also occasion change at the other levels. What is of greatest interest here is organisational change in government structures.
The three case studies were chosen because of their different levels of e-government use and readiness (with Quebec ahead of Spain, and both ahead of Sao Paulo State). In the case of Sao Paulo, information is centralised in the state's Web portal, while direct interaction with citizens is completely decentralised; each department has its own ombudsperson who handles complaints and suggestions from citizens and informally creates pressure for service improvement; metadata generation is inconsistent, therefore. In Catalunya, all information is similarly provided in an integrated portal, but all channels of communication are similarly integrated - all phone calls come in through a central line, for example, and are diverted to the relevant departments from there, resulting in more consistent metadata about citizen responses. In Quebec, there is a services portal which acts as a point of contact only for six of the Quebec government's departments, and metadata is similarly generated centrally.
In Sao Paulo, then, there is no single frontline agency, and the ombudspeople system bypasses vertical accountability. There may be a need to increase horizontal and cross-agency integration; in Catalunya, citizen interaction is concentrated, and services can be improved on the basis of the metadata generated. In Quebec, there is a top-down strategy with front and back office integration, and data can be used to increase service quality integration. There are different bottom-up and top-down strategies in play here, then, and differences in information flows impact on accountability and political power.
