Towards a flexible ICT-architecture for multi-channel e-government service provisioning

The planning and subsequent nationwide implementation of e-government service provisioning faces a number of challenges at the level of municipalities in the Netherlands. Initiatives are confronted with a highly fragmented ICT-architecture that has been vertically organized around departments and with hardly any common horizontal functionality. This situation is even further enforced by a defacto duopoly on the software market of information systems used by municipalities. The provision of services over Web-based channels leads to a need for a more flexible, open ICT-architecture based on standardized elements. The goal of the research presented in this paper is to determine the feasibility of a component-based approach to meet the aforementioned challenge for a more flexible, open ICT architecture. The research consisted of two parts (1) the identification of opportunities for generic components in the ICT-architecture of municipalities and (2) supporting the evaluation of these opportunities using simulation.