Question:

Discuss about the Identification of the issues in the e-governance in Jordan and USA.

Answer:

Introduction

In the field of Information technology, the development of the e-government is considered as a new area concerned with the utilization if the ICT for delivering the governmental services to the citizens. The e-government system comprises various technologies including mobile computing, the internet and wide area network for providing real-time services and solution to the citizens. Bakunzibake, Grönlund, and Klein, (2016) showed that the United Nations described e-government as the application and utilization of the “Information and Communication Technology” for provisioning the public services and information to the public. The implementation of the e-government helps in including various advanced concepts like citizen participation, accountability, and transparency in evaluating the performance of the e-government.

According to Solinthone, and Rumyantseva, (2016), in the recent days, Jordon is recognized as one of the developing countries that took the initiatives of including the Governmental payment and transactions through an electronic medium. The e-government developed in Jordan was dedicated to providing services to the citizen irrespective of the ICT ability, education, economic status and economy of the citizen. Weerakkody et al., (2015) illustrated that the development of the e-government has failed to live up to the expectation and potential. This paper evaluates the issues with the implementation of the Jordan e-government system and provides relevant solutions to them.

2. Identification of the issues in the e-governance in Jordan and USA

2.1. E-government strategies used by Jordan

The development of the e-government strategy aims at linking the governmental procedure of Jordan with national priorities. The development and implementation of the e-government in Jordan have been developed for dedicating the governmental services to the citizen across the location and society. The e-government strategy helps in crystallizing the projects, governmental services to the citizens while raising and controlling the performance and operations through the e-government services. The developed e-government system at Jordon aimed at increasing the effort of government initiative within the time span of three years between 2014 to 2016.  The implementation of e-government system has aimed at becoming efficient, results oriented, process driven, and customer centric services. The strategic planning of the government was included within the developed system along with the online transaction process.

2.2. Issues

The implementation and development of the e-government platforms require large capital, technical infrastructure for training, hardware implementation and software. Choi et al., (2016) showed that in the developing countries the implementation of the e-government needs to be ensured with a financial option in the long term. The Jordanian e-government system was based on cloud technology for providing complete associability and security to the information shared through the system. Irani, (2014) showed that the application of the cloud technology in the e-government system comprised of various technical issues. Several technical factors and issues are faced by the implementation team for ensuring efficient e-government solution to the citizen.

Privacy and Security: Abdulkareem, (2015) cited that ensuring privacy and security in the cloud platform is one of the crucial challenged during the development of the e-government system. Data integrity, data availability and data confidentiality are the major criteria for privacy and security. Joseph, (2015) illustrated enabling and ensuring the security in the cloud government helps in establishing trust and reliability of the citizen for using the system. Therefore, the implementation of the e-government system is often considered as a development of cloud application for ensuring the security requirements of the transaction and processes involved in the e-government. The e-government network often suffered from the various threats and virus attacks that volatile the requirements of security within the e-government system.  One of the significant and most common attacks on the e-governments system is DoS (Denial of Service). Bwalya, Du Plessis, and Rensleigh, (2014) showed other significant attacks in the e-government system are U2L, U2R, and probe. In addition to that, the data and information relevant to the citizen of Jordan are controlled and stored by the third party rather than the government itself. This has resulted in the creation of significant concern about data authorization and privacy among the citizens.

Integrity: According to Wirtz et al., (2015), maintaining the consistency and accuracy of the data and information stored and communicated within the system forms significant issues in maintaining the integrity of data. Chatfield, and AlAnazi, (2015) illustrated that integrity is a vital criterion for data storage and databases. The data integrity requires implementation of significant processes for ensuring the data reliability and accuracy throughout the lifetime of the data. In the e-government system, the data accuracy should be controlled in warehouses and databases through the application of enhanced technologies like business intelligence and data warehousing techniques. In the developed model of e-government.

Reliability: Rahman et al., (2014) cited that maintaining the reliability of the data in the cloud based E-government system is forms a major issue during development. Ensuring the operational infrastructure is essential for ensuring the data accessibility in unexpected and catastrophic situations.

Interoperability issues: Various services providers collaborate together for ensuring the proper services being provided to the customer. In the e-government system, the governed needs to include the banking services, and various public services procedure for ensuring proper functionality and operations to the citizen. For the collaboration of the various service providers, the e-government needs to ensure and guarantee the application and use of data through the system in safe and secure manner. In the e-government system, the government fails to provide a guarantee to the citizen about the data security between the service providers and the e-government system. For ensuring the data safety and security, a cross-functional platform and uniform interface needs to be maintained throughout the system.

Managing Cloud: The developed e-government system needs to provide seamless availability and accessibility of the services and information to the citizen. The functions and operations used in the e-government need to be regularly changed or updated for the change in the requirement of the citizen and the government itself. The updating of the entire process and functions within the system without the involvement of the government by the third party is a risky task while ensuring no data loss from the system. Apart from that, the lack of in-house IT and technical staffs has created significant issues for monitoring the services of e-government.

Content Management System: The e-government system includes various operations and functional modules for providing all the required governmental procedure and functionalities to the citizen. The inappropriate deployment of the “content management system” for maintaining the different modules within the e-government system. Snead, and Wright, (2014) have shown that not all the citizens are experts in e-payments. Therefore, the designer needs to ensure the applicator of appropriate style and design for enhancing the visually and constant structure throughout all the pages in the system.

2.3. Solutions

An enhanced model has been proposed in this assignment for reducing and eliminating the potential issues identified in the previous section. The proposed model has been developed with “system feedback process” that ensured the proper functionality and operations conducted through the developed e-government system. All the processes mentioned in the proposed diagram has been automated for monitoring the requested process within the system. The proposed model of e-government while eliminating the technical difficulties observed in the Jordan E-government project has been proposed in the section below:

Figure 1: Proposed e-government model

(Source: Created by Author)

The information shared and stored in the system is the most crucial element of the e-government system. The database of the proposed system needs to be robust for storing the argument details, profile data, and banking details. The database will be developed over the cloud system for ensuring the accurate and faster queries of the system. The registration process implemented in the e-government system is directly linked to the database for storing the user information. The proposed system will run on SQL Server 2008 for retrieving and storing the sensitive information. The developed e-government includes particular comparison algorithm for efficient searching of the elements and services through the entire e-government system.

The time complexity of the proposed model will be the following:

T (n) = n + n + n (n + 1) + n (n + 1) + n (n + 1)

= 2n + n² + n + n² + n+ n² + n

= 5n + 3n²

Therefore the complexity of the proposed model is O (n²).

According to Zhang, Xu, and Xiao, (2014), the application of the appropriate search algorithm in the e-governmental system helps in enhancing the performance of the developed system. In the proposed system, Lexical Method will be used as the required search algorithm. The application of the lexical methods helps in matching the query concepts of the citizen with the concepts of the services provided through the e-government system. The matching system of the lexical similarity has been defined in WordNet and performed in synset (Ziemba, & Papaj, 2013). The e-government system will include a lexical dictionary for all the available governmental services provided to the citizen. The searching of a particular word in the system will begin with comparison with all the word available in the system. The pseudo code for the lexical similarity has been described as follows:

Variable: “A” word

Input: search text

Output: list array of words

Read input text

A ß gets word from text

Intarray[ ] as array

For each A to end of text

If “read character” = “NULL”, “which is space” and special character “etc > ? / *”

Then

Consider as end of word

Else continue

End

In addition to that, the SO values of the words compared to the system are derived and calculated using the PMI (Point wise Mutual Information) methods (Elbahnasawy, 2014). The PMI calculated for the proposed model can be described as:

PMI (word1, word2) = Log₂ (p (word1 and word 2) / p ((words1) p (word2))

The application of the above stated methods will be utilized for comparing the two words. According to proposed formula, the probability of the getting the positive results of comparing the two words is true if the value provides value if base-2 log (Wilson, 2014). The application of the appropriate comparison algorithm helps in ensuring the reliability of searches and data applicability in the e-government system.

In addition to that, in the proposed system, Three-tier techniques will be sued for developing the page building system in the e-government system. The application of the Three-tier techniques helps in strengthen and enhancing the security of the services and database used in the developed e-government model (Chairunisa, Malik, & Rahman, 2016). The three tire techniques sub-divided the entire system into three major level or tire namely, intermediate tier, application tier and database tier. The database tier in the system has been used for storing and extracting the raw data from the database to the developed system. Further, the application tier enhanced the interface between the user and the client. The governmental executive and citizen communication and execution in critical for ensuring the proper operations of all the provided services. The citizen will interact with the system utilizing the application tire through the use of various electronic devices. The application tier and the database have been connected through the intermediate layer in between them. The application tier allows communication and data exchange between the database and developed application for e-government (Khamallag, Kamala, & Tassabehji, 2016). On the other hand, the implementation of the three-tier architecture helps in reducing the security and reliability issues and independent development as well as modification between the three layers. Therefore, during modifications or updating of the systems or application, the other module that is application and the database will not be affected by the other. In addition to that, the application of the three-tier method while developing the e-government system saves a significant amount of data space and prevents the developed system from data loss, hacking and security threats.

For ensuring interaction between the citizen and e-government system, the service providers needs to implement the “Hypertext Transfer Protocol” (HTTP) for ensuring secure communication and data exchange through the “Secure Socket Layer protocol” (SSL) over the internet (Dwivedi et al., 2015). The network of the e-government system has been coded with “Extensible Markup Language” (XML) for executing the SQL statement and query.

For strengthening the security of the data, SQL injection has been included in the system database. The application of the SQL injection helps in increasing the application confidence and prevents the e-government from security attack (Venkatesh, Sykes, & Venkatraman, 2014). In addition to that, the system will include the data encryption procedure for preventing the unauthorized users for reading sensitive information over the e-government system. The e-government system has its inbuilt key generation algorithm for generating the public key and symmetric key for securing the access control over the e-government.

In the section below, the posed ULM class diagram for the posed enhances e-government system has been provided:

Figure 2: Proposed ULM Class Diagram for enhanced e-Government System

(Source: Created by Author)

3. Conclusion

The application and integration of the e-government services help in mobilizing the service and official procedure. The effective application of the e-government service allows the country to increase the efficiency of the governmental procedure. Based on the technical issues identified, the proposed system has been developed for enhancing the security concern and reliability of data. The proposed model of the e-government system has allowed in maintaining the security and reliability of data through the connected database and application developed. The application of security measures like SQL injection, three-tier models, and encryption models helped in ensuring the security and protecting the system from security threats. Furthermore, the developed model also helped in ensuring the data wastage and reducing the cost and time for implementation.

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