From Electronic to Mobile Government

The open access book combines insights from policy sciences (backgrounds of cross-border coordination challenges), design science (development of architectures for mobile services), information ethics (privacy and security of e-government services in international arenas) and business studies (changes in existing business models). The notably interdisciplinary character provides scholars and policy professionals working in specific (legal, political, engineering) disciplines a unique outlook on how policy making, implementation, and pilots are related in multi-level and cross-border governance.

The book presents the results of the EU-funded “Mobile Cross-Border Government Services for Europe” (mGov4EU) project in which various pilots implemented and validated enhanced infrastructure services for electronic voting, smart mobility, and mobile signing. Together, the single pilots demonstrated how enhanced electronic identities and trust services (eIDAS) and Single Digital Gateway Regulation (SDGR) layers can accommodate once-only, digital-by-default and mobile-first principles. By taking advantage of security features of modern smartphones like hardware-backed secure elements together with integrated convenience elements like biometric sensors, this research showed how both the security needs and data-protection expectations one has into public services and the usability challenges that arise when accessing complex services using constrained mobile devices meet.

This book is the first one in his kind to address this gap in the academic knowledge, as well as this gap in available compendiums for policy professionals at European levels of decision-making, as well as for policymakers and experts working on electronic identification, cross-border and cross-sector information exchange in the various member states of the European Union. This way, it serves various audiences: first, researchers in informatics-related areas like information systems, electronic government, and mobile applications, as it describes empirical examples of secure, easy-to-use and cross-border electronic services that have been developed and successfully tested in practice. Second, it also caters to researchers in international relations or political science as well as policymakers and politicians, both at national or European levels, who are involved in drafting policies and implementing European initiatives in relation to the building blocks of next-generation e-government services.

Vincent Homburg is Professor of E-Governance and holder of the ERA Chair of e-Governance and Digital Public Services at the University of Tartu. His research focuses on social dimensions of e-government and the political impact of the development, implementation and use of technology in public governance. He has published articles (among other journals) in International Review of Administrative Sciences, Local Government Studies, Journal of Behavior and Information Technology, Knowledge, Technology and Policy, and Artificial Intelligence and Law. Together with Victor Bekkers, he co-edited The Information Ecology of E-Government, and with the late Christopher Pollitt and Sandra van Thiel, he edited The New Public Management in Europe. His monograph Understanding E-Government was published in 2008.

Thomas J. Lampoltshammer is Associate Professor for Information and Communication Technology at the University for Continuing Education Krems, Austria. He also serves as the Co-Head of the Center for E-Governance and the Co-Coordinator of the PhD program “Technology, Innovation, and Cohesive Society”. His research is situated at the intersection of ICT and digital governance in heterogeneous application domains for fostering sustainable development from a multi-sector perspective. He is an active member of the IFIP WGs 8.5 and 5.15. He also regularly reviews established conferences in digital governance, IS, and ICT, such as HICSS, EGOV, or dg.o. He is the co-founding and lead chair of the International Data Science Conference (iDSC) series and the founding track chair of the Digital Society Track at the EGOV conference. Furthermore, he frequently serves as a reviewer and external monitoring expert for the European Commission.

Mihkel Solvak is Associate Professor of Technology Research at Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies and Vice Dean for Research and Development at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Tartu in Estonia. He is currently active as manager and researcher at the Center of IT Impact Studies (CITIS). His research focuses on the usability of machine learning in designing and building pro-active digital services that act as either decision support tools for civil servants or behaviour predicting services to be used in prevention work. He also does research on the diffusion and usage patterns of e-services and electronic elections using process generated log data analysis, sensor and registry data.