Infrastructure in e-government was also found to be a subject of interest which is introduced to understand infrastructure in an e-government context (Klischewski, 2001; Khoumbati and Themistocleous, 2006; Humes and Reinhard, 2008; Janssen et al., 2009; Khrishnan and Teo, 2012). Some studies in the field of e-government described infrastructure in e-government from a general perspectives such as in the descriptions provided by Klischewski (2001) and Janssen et al. (2009) where Infrastructure in e-government was described as product, relation, networked components, characteristics of society and its foundation. All these aspects should be considered in order to enhance and increase understanding when exploring infrastructure for e-government (Klischewski, 2001). Furthermore, infrastructure in e-government is the system’s development where improvements of government’s products, services, and applications inherited, initiated and expanded with the rapid development of IT, human, and organisational aspects. It is the collaboration of systems among each other, the corporation of information which is facilitated by the existence of IT capabilities, Human IT infrastructure, services, and applications (Klischewski, 2001). Janssen et al. (2009) described infrastructure as the use of multiple type of parties. It is the technological services that contain systems, networks, cooperation, connectivity, security, sharing information and knowledge in different fields of different networks, systems, standards, users, and translation of legislations and administration of collaborations between government, public and private sectors. Infrastructure was also described as integrations of
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different services and stakeholders. It is embedded in the daily activities and is taken for granted. Furthermore, infrastructure evolves and changes over time.
Also, infrastructure implies the fact that every party that is involved in the infrastructure is dependent on other parties in terms of development of functionalities or projects (Janssen et al., 2009).
3.3.2 Infrastructure frameworks in e-government
In addition, some studies focused on the infrastructure in e-government in particular aspects. For example, the Janssen study was found to focus only on the socio-technical systems, studies conducted by Humes and Reinhard (2008);
Khrishnan and Teo (2012) were found to focus on information infrastructure. A study conducted by Khoumbati and Themistocleous (2006) was found to investigate infrastructure from the integration of service and organisations perspective, while collaboration arrangements and the impact of power politics was the focusing study of Bekkers (2009). Therefore, the previous studies were examples which utilised infrastructure to investigate particular subjects in e-government. However, a lack of defining the concept of e-government infrastructure in the field of e-government was found in these studies particularly and in e-government literature generally. This is because the studies which adopted the concept of e-government infrastructure either had a brief description of the impact of infrastructure in improving e-government or directly investigated the term infrastructure such as service infrastructure, human infrastructure, technical infrastructure, interoperable infrastructure, etc without reflecting an understanding of the characteristics of infrastructure.
It was found in the e-government literature that some models/frameworks of e-government infrastructure were addressed and investigated (Kaufmann et al., 1999; Julta et al., 2002; Douwe et al., 2009; Krishnan and Teo, 2012). However, these models were just investigating a particular subject rather than drawing a wider understanding of the relation of this subject to other aspects of infrastructure. For example, a study emphasised the relationship between information infrastructure and e-government development (Krishnan and Teo, 2012). The study indicated that information infrastructure has an effect on e-government development and it was suggested that understanding this relationship can be strengthened when the government focuses on improving
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the issues regarding to this relationship. The study (Kaufmann et al., 1999) adopted six dimensions for managerial use to help understand the relation between information infrastructure and e-government development. These dimensions were as follows, (1) voice and accountability, (2) political stability, (3) government effectiveness, (4) regulatory quality, (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. However, these dimensions were proposed for measuring information infrastructure rather than focusing on the concept of infrastructure and the internal and external impact of other involved boundaries such as social and/or organisational, etc (Krishnan and Teo, 2012). In addition, these six proposed dimensions were found to enable the investigation of understanding e-government infrastructure from organisational/managerial perspective which presented in dimensions (1) and (6) in addition to political perspective which demonstrated in dimensions (2), (3), (4), and (5) hence making this framework to be more focused on the political followed by organisational/managerial issues without giving a wider an in-depth perspective through adding the social and technical perspectives since these organisational and political perspectives have an impact on the social activities and the existent technology that is in use.
A framework that identified critical aspects of organisational infrastructure was presented by Julta et al. (2002). In their study, they found that most of the studies identified two major components that focused on understanding infrastructure in e-government. These two components consist of: (1) technical IT infrastructure, and (2) human IT infrastructure. However, Julta et al. (2002) suggested three constructs to be included in e-government studies for the purpose of enhancing the understanding, exploration, and managing of infrastructure issues in e-government initiatives. These components consisted of (1) organisational infrastructure, (2) business process infrastructure, and (3) technical infrastructure. In addition, the components were also used empirically, through surveying, to explore the municipal e-government websites in Canada.
The findings revealed that absence of organisational infrastructure issues hindered the diffusion of e-government across the country. These issues include legal, business, and technical interoperability which existed in the government’s designated information systems. Therefore, the five proposed dimensions were found to give a wider image of understanding e-government infrastructure in term of technological, organisational, business, and
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human/social as these dimensions were found abdandoned in Khrisnan and Teo (2012)’s study. However, the study did not include a fundamental viewpoint which is political perspective which considered an influential part of the e-government infrastructure since it focused more on providing a wider understanding on the influence of technological, organisational, business, and human/social aspects on e-government infrastructure.
Another study investigated a software infrastructure in e-government (Douwe et al., 2009). Their study was based on exploring a one stop e-appointment service as part of a software infrastructure for e-government. The study identified four components for identifying challenges for software infrastructure.
These components included (1) the need to understand the business process, (2) the need to provide a technical infrastructure supporting secure communications between the one stop government portal and service providers, (3) addressing organisational issues, and (4) addressing regulatory issues. The findings of their study revealed that there should be considerations from the government and negotiations with service providers for alternative solutions for the appointments in addition to providing support for business processes. Further challenges concerning technical infrastructure were found.
This was that government should enhance communications between different service providers and one stop government portal. In addition, the organisational infrastructure challenges addressed controlling misuse as a main barrier since multiple appointment arrangement was found to affect practice in the one stop government portal. Lastly, multi channel delivery applicants’
interactions, data exchange, privacy issues, and access to information were other challenges identified in the regulatory issues. Consequentially, the proposed dimensions for e-government infrastructure were designated to tackle the issues of e-government infrastructure from organisational, technological and business point of views. However, the study did not consider the important role of understanding the social/human aspect in shaping infrastructure’s practices.
Consequentially, the previous models were found to tackle information infrastructure, software infrastructure, and organisational infrastructure.
However, the previous examples lacked the holistic understanding of infrastructure in e-government. For example organisational infrastructure has an
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impact on infrastructure. However, organisational infrastructure is also affected by other factors such as technological, political, or social/human infrastructure.
In addition, the lack of including all these aspects under the umbrella of e-government infrastructure is one vital topic which requires e-e-government to understand infrastructure from a wider perspective to understand in depth e-government infrastructure and the causes and consequences of these dimensional aspects on infrastructure in addition to each other. As a result, this lack of a holistic aspect requires a need for a comprehensive view which combines all these aspects to be investigated for the sake of delivering a wider and in depth exploration and understanding of e-government infrastructure.