THE CHALLENGES OF E-GOVERNANCE IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
137
interactions in e-governance: government to government; government to citizen; and government to business. McIntyre and Murphy (2012) regard governance as a set of aligning forces to facilitate individual goals and simultaneously respect the community’s shared values. Weber (2002) concludes that e-governance has not yet taken full advantage of Internet-based technologies. The use of e-governance has brought the following challenges in public administration.
Improvement in Efficiency The process of globalization has intensified competition between various actors, both domestic and international. In parallel, the privatization movement has placed greater demands on the public sector to improve efficiency. One of their major challenges is how to improve the efficiency of public services through the use of ICT. There is an increasing trend toward the machine automation of routine tasks. The main features of “ICT that, in our view, are candidates for affecting governance in society are a significantly increased ability to send, receive, store and analyze data, and the ability to do so at much less cost than only a few years ago” (McIntyre and Murphy 2012, p. 616). Electronic government is one of the main banners to be used in modernizing government. E-governance refers to the use of ICT to improve the delivery of public services to a country’s citizens. Bekkers (2003) mentioned the added values in terms of the following goals: increasing access to government; facilitating the quality of service delivery; promoting efficiency; supporting accountability; participation; and improving inter-organizational cooperation and relations. Electronic service delivery has caused the modernization of traditional bureaucracies in many countries around the world. E-governance has improved government efficiency by reducing the time to deliver and process the services. This has benefited both the clients and the principals in terms of receiving and delivering services. For example, an applicant for a government service can access the form online in a minute or so; and can fill out the forms in minutes. While in an earlier period an applicant had to rely on traditional mail or physically visit the office to get an application form. Under a system of e-governance, for example, any person can access the form in seconds from any location in the world with a click of the mouse, resulting in huge time savings. So, the public administrators are
