Advantages/Disadvantages of Electronic Government

Advantages:

There are advantages while implementing an electronic government. The main advantage of an electronic government this will be to improve the efficiency of the current system. That would in return save money and time. The introduction would also facilitate better communications between governments and businesses. An example would be, E-Procurement facilitates G2G and B2B communication; this will permit smaller business to compete for government contracts as well as larger business. This will have the advantage of creating an open market and stronger economy. Business and citizens can obtain information at a faster speed and it is possible at any time of the day.

In addition, moving away from a heavily paper based system to an electronic system would reduces the need for man power. Thus, this would allow the process to be handled by lesser employees and therefore to reduce operations cost.

The society is moving toward the mobile connections. The ability of an e-government service to be accessible to citizens irrespective of location throughout the country brings the next and potentially biggest benefit of an e-government service. The society is moving toward the mobile connections.

Due to the fact that information and statistics are posted online, the idea of an “opened up” government and made government policy, information (including some socially valuable archival and historical information) and services more available. This would reflect a greater transparency of the service provided by the government .

Disadvantages:

Electronic governments also consist on certain disadvantage. The main disadvantage of an electronic government is to move the government services into an electronic based system. This system loses the person to person interaction which is valued by a lot of people.

In addition, the implementation of an e-government service is that, with many technology based services, it is often easy to make the excuse (e.g. the server has gone down) that problems with the service provided are because of the technology.

The implementation of an e government does have certain constraints. Literacy of the users and the ability to use the computer, users who do not know how to read and write would need assistance. An example would be the senior citizens. In general, senior citizens do not have much education and they would have to approach a customer service officer for assistance.

Studies have shown that there is potential for a reduction in the usability of government online due to factors such as the access to Internet technology and usability of services and the ability to access to computers;

Even though the level of confidence in the security offered by government web sites are high, the public are still concerned over security, fear of spam from providing email addresses, and government retention of transaction or interaction history.