Digital government is typically defined as the production and delivery of information and services inside government and between government and the public using a range of information and communication technologies. Two types of government relationships with other entities are government-to-citizen and government-to-government relationships. Both offer opportunities and challenges. Assessment of a public health agency's readiness for digital government includes examination of technical, managerial, and political capabilities. Public health agencies are especially challenged by a lack of funding for technical infrastructure and expertise, by privacy and security issues, and by lack of Internet access for low-income and marginalized populations. Public health agencies understand the difficulties of working across agencies and levels of government, but the development of new, integrated e-programs will require more than technical change — it will require a profound change in paradigm.

Digital government is typically defined as the production and delivery of information and services inside government and between government and the public using a range of information and communication technologies. Two types of government relationships with other entities are government-to-citizen and government-to-government relationships. Both offer opportunities and challenges. Assessment of a public health agency's readiness for digital government includes examination of technical, managerial, and political capabilities. Public health agencies are especially challenged by a lack of funding for technical infrastructure and expertise, by privacy and security issues, and by lack of Internet access for low-income and marginalized populations. Public health agencies understand the difficulties of working across agencies and levels of government, but the development of new, integrated e-programs will require more than technical change — it will require a profound change in paradigm.

The NSF’s proposed Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Program addresses the creation of electronic infrastructure to enable more ubiquitous, comprehensive knowledge environments that provide complete functionality for the science and engineering research communities in terms of people, data, information, tools, and instruments, while providing unprecedented capability and capacity for computation, storage, and communication.

U.S. citizens participate directly in rulemaking—a deliberate agenda-setting process designed to elicit, sort, and clarify fact and opinion from a wide variety of interested parties.

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Throughout the globe, the sweep of information and communication technologies offers unprecedented opportunities for the advancement of governance and society. But information and communication technologies alone are inadequate to foster such benefits. An important, time-sensitive opportunity exists to make a major difference in the development of digital governance and society globally.

Access to broadband is widely recognized as a prerequisite for a community's economic welfare and the delivery of local government services. In communities where the private sector is perceived as having failed to deliver adequate and affordable broadband services, municipal and county governments face pressures to stimulate broadband deployment.

Electronic government is being built rapidly and without an adequate foundation in democratic theory, public administration and management, and, in general, political and policy sciences. This is not surprising, given the rapid rate of technological change in the United States and our culture’s faith in progress through technology. But the lack of a knowledge base presents a challenge to social and policy scientists. For scholars, particularly those engaged with public affairs, have an obligation to understand and influence the fundamental, far-reaching set of changes in governance brought about by information technology.

Over the course of the twentieth century, American government took on its present bureaucratic form through a series of negotiations and political processes. It seems logical to assume--and recent evidence suggests--that this structure of government will change as policy makers and public managers use the Internet and other new information technologies to reshape programs, services, agencies, and policy networks.

The book finds that many issues involved in integrating technology and government have not been adequately debated or even recognized. Drawing from a rich collection of case studies, the book argues that the real challenges lie not in achieving the technical capability of creating a government on the web, but rather in overcoming the entrenched organizational and political divisions within the state.

The use of customer service ideas in government continues to be widespread, although the concept and its implications for public sector service production and delivery remain poorly developed. This paper presents a series of paradoxes related to customer service and its use in government. The central and most troubling paradox is that customer service techniques and tools applied to government may lead to increased political inequality even as some aspects of service are improved. The argument is structured by examination of the following: the predominant structural features of service management in the private sector, the assumption that customer satisfaction is a central objective of service firms, the understanding of customer service that informs current federal reform efforts, and the operational and political challenges of customer service as a public management objective.