Federation of E-government: A Model and Framework

e-Government has become a global phenomenon. There have been some great innovations in egovernment over the last decade. Some governments compete for leadership in offering online services. Others do not want to be left behind. Most governments have developed detailed strategies for realizing their egovernment programmes. Although the goals behind these programmes vary across countries, there are still many commonalities among them. Such commonalities result from the application of best practices. Governments have the tendency to learn from each other. We could identify certain trends in e-government application. e-Government strategies per se are generally well developed. Yet the problems are mostly associated with implementation. This paper studies the strategies of (21) countries in addition to the European Union to put together a generic strategic framework of e-government. We found most of these strategies to be lacking a strategic framework - a framework that stems from the e-government strategy itself. The ultimate purpose of this paper is to introduce a best practice framework that is generic enough to be adopted by any given strategy. The paper argues the missing benefits of such a strategic framework. The proposed framework incorporates very important elements and principles. It has desirable characteristics and features that can add value to the e-government strategy. Unlike previous studies, the proposed framework defines strategic building blocks of e-government based on real-life e-government implementations of the countries reviewed. Our strategic framework possesses modular design. It is flexible, customisable and extensible. In putting this framework together, we took into consideration commonalities, trends, and best practices in addition to relevant work of other scholars.