Developing ICT systems for public e-service provision – the Escher experience

January 2012 - Escher Group was in Shanghai, China, on 4 December 2011 to deliver a paper entitled Towards e-Inclusion: a Design Theory for Public e-Services Provision at the Pre-ICIS Workshop on eGovernment. It focused on the design challenge of providing ICT systems for public e-service provision.

The ICIS is the major meeting space of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), an organization with 4,000 members representing universities from 100 countries worldwide. It promotes quality and relevance in e-Government research and is dedicated to ‘open discussions’ and future scenarios to accommodate this philosophy.

The paper addressed the design challenge of providing ICT systems for public e-service provision, something Escher Group encountered when developing RiposteTrEx™. Public sector services differ qualitatively from private sector services in that they aim to provide not just value for money but also public value. Public sector ICTs have unique requirements that are not all thoroughly supported by traditional ICTs and their respective design theories.

Escher’s paper, which was delivered by its Senior Researcher, Maria Moloney, guides designers on how to produce systems which provide public e-services securely and inclusively. The end product creates public value by tackling digital inequality and easing citizens’ online privacy concerns.