The adoption of ICTs for e-Government will require training of government officials at all levels, from the most senior policymakers, whose support will be needed especially in the design and budgeting phases of e-Government projects, to the civil servants who will have to adapt to new ways of dealing with citizens and businesses.  Indeed, one of the biggest threats to successful e-Government may be the resistance of the bureaucracy. Chapter 8 explores training and motivation issues, as well as user awareness and education.

Especially at a time of rapid technological change, it requires considerable planning and foresight to ensure that computerized records systems can, when needed, communicate across ministries.  And government agencies (like private businesses) must appreciate that, in some ways, it is actually harder to preserve records in electronic form than on paper.   Chapter 9 examines the area of “records management,” pointing e-Government planners and managers to a considerable body of resources. 

E-Government managers should identify policy goals, key milestones, and desired outcomes in their e-Government strategy and then should, over the course of a program or project, measure progress against those goals, milestones and outcomes. Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) should be built into e-Government from the design phase onward. Chapter 10 discusses this key issue in greater detail.

Implementation of e-Government can be frustrated by the lack of an enabling legal environment. While legal issues permeate the e-Government process, Chapter 11 examines basic elements of the legal framework for successful e-Government, including reform of the telecommunications sector to promote infrastructure development and measures that can ensure the legal standing of electronic transactions. Chapter 12 discusses special policy issues associated with overcoming the digital divide. The legal framework is also relevant to protecting the privacy and security of communications networks and stored data, issues discussed in Chapter 15.

E-Government managers have available to them an increasingly large array of technologies and tools that make it easier to build websites and manage content.  Especially promising are the n-Government tools that take advantage of wireless technologies to leapfrog over infrastructure limitations. Chapter 13 explores these tools and the pros and cons of open source software.

In sum, Theme III of this Toolkit examines issues associated with the management and implementation of e-Government:

• training and workforce issues (Chapter 8)
• records management (Chapter 9)
• monitoring and evaluation (Chapter 10)
• legal framework (Chapter 11)
• Infrastructure and the Digital Divide (Chapter 12)
• e-Government tools and technologies (Chapter 13).

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