E-government architecture model for government-to-government deployment of interoperable systems,

Abstract

Rapid advancement and innovation of new technologies have led to global revolution on how governments carry out their businesses. Information Communication Technology(ICT) tools used to re-invent the public sector, have led to unprecedented benefits to government, compelling most countries both developed and undeveloped to embrace e-government. Government agencies are deploying new ICT systems with specifications and solutions relevant to their particular requirements. However, they are not paying attention to the need to connect exchange and re-use data within systems leading to weak interoperability in government. To address the issue of weak interoperability, we developed e-government architecture to enable smooth deployment of interoperable systems between national and county governments. E-government architecture acts as an information management and planning tool to enable government optimize their ICT assets by rigorously analyzing and identifying strategic opportunities from its various lines of business and business information. This enables the development of appropriate software applications in-line with technology investments. The exploratory research design and case analyses were used. Once the new e-government architecture for a devolved government; county and national government was developed, a new e-govern project management system was developed based on the architecture to demonstrate how interoperability can be achieved between the county and national government. The system was validated to determine whether it is interoperable and if both governments can access necessary data seamlessly for decision making. Interoperability was achieved by calculating user satisfaction using Cronbach’s Alpha of system users from county and national government by analyzing the data collected. The commonly accepted rule of thumb is that an alpha of 0.7 or 0.6 indicates user satisfaction or system reliability while very high degree like 0.95 indicates redundancy. Calculated Cronbach’s Alpha for the new e-govern project management system is α=0.77869 which falls under the acceptable and good system reliability when rounded off to 0.8. This shows that the system users were satisfied with the system and it can be applied between county and national government in order to achieve interoperability since both governments’ needs were met and each government can access important data seamlessly for decision making.