Innovation and e-government: An in depth overview on e-services

There is no doubt that e-government is a phenomenon of our era. E-business is becoming vital on the private sector as well as in the governmental institutions. The use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in order to change the structures and processes of government organizations in an attempt to allow the exchange of information with citizens, businesses and other arms of government, results to improved efficiency, convenience as well as better accessibility of public services. The three segments of e-government services are Governmentto-Citizen (G2C), Government-to-Business (G2B) and Government-to-Government (G2G) in a correspondence to the business model segments. As many others aspects of science in their very beginning, e-government suffers from a definitional vagueness of its concept due to the fact that there is not a widely accepted definition among researchers. So, what exactly is e-government? Has anyone tried or managed to define its exact concept and meaning? Is it just an Internet-based government or are there any other non-internet technologies used in this context? How can next-generation heterogeneous networks, enhance its abilities on interconnectivity? These are all questions seeking for an answer in this paper. This study does not try to stand out either as a review or as a synthetic summary of the literature concerning e-government, rather, its main objective will be an in depth overview of the current status of e-government phenomenon. Future works need to give an answer to the dilemma whether e-government is really a tool for decentralization and democratization or the result of a sociotechnical process towards a new model of public administration. Finally, in an attempt to focus on the changes in business process that are needed inside governmental institutions in order e-government to be successfully implemented, a second recommendation for future work resides on the need for a holistic model which can embrace the back-office, the front-office as well as the real citizens' needs.