Opportunities and Challenges in e-Cities with Special Focus on Businesses

In cities, citizens and businesses alike face significant obstacles during their interaction with public administrations and governments, having to cope with bureaucracy, ambiguous procedures, functional disintegration, vague, and/or overlapping authority structures and information fragmentation. Such problems are very difficult to overcome, especially when time and human resources are limited (e.g., for individual citizens and small-medium enterprises) and thus represent a major obstacle to administrative compliance as well as entrepreneurship (IDABC, 2002). Modernization and improvement of administrative services through Web-based service delivery has different priorities in different settings and, depending on the broader political agenda and the importance attributed to Information and Communication Technologies as a tool for socioeconomic development and opportunity, it is (862 D. Gouscos et al. / Government Information Quarterly 24 (2007) 860-885) often not only an objective per se but also - and even more importantly - a facilitator for broader and longer term objectives. In the European Union, for example, although Internet penetration has increased rapidly since the Lisbon European Council in March 2000, the access thresholds set have still not been reached. The European Union (European Commission, 2003) aims to reach a sustainable level of e-readiness first of all by providing full opportunities for access to all citizens via broadband always-on Internet connectivity. In addition to that, as defined in Europe 2005 (European Commission, 2002): "member states should ensure that basic public services where relevant, exploit the potential of multi-platform access"; and to support these objectives, education, and training actions are considered essential to ensure that citizens will have the digital literacy and skills necessary to take full advantage of the services offered bye-Government. In this spirit, e-Government undertakes a twofold role: make public administration more user-friendly and cost-efficient, and also provide some content and value that contributes to justification of the e-readiness (digital literacy, broadband connectivity) investments. In the United States, on the other hand, one-stop service delivery through electronic government is among the key issues on the Presidents' Management Agenda and Performance Plan (OMB, 2003). According to this plan, e-Government is critical for meeting today's citizen and business expectations for interaction with the Administration whereas, at the same time, it enables agencies to align efforts as needed to significantly improve service and reduce operating costs.