On Architecture of e-Government Ecosystems

The "digital transformation" is perceived as the key enabler for increasing wealth and well-being by many in politics, media and among the citizens alike. In the same vein, e-Government steadily received and receives more and more attention. e-Government gives rise to complex, large-scale system landscapes consisting of many players and technological systems - and we call such system landscapes e-Government ecosystems. In this talk, we are interested in the architecture of e-Government ecosystems. "Form ever follows function." Now, what is the function that determines e-Government? And what is the form in which it manifests? After briefly reviewing the purpose of e-Government from a democratic as well as a technocratic viewpoint, we will discover the primacy of the state's institutional design in the architecture of e-Government ecosystems. From there, we will arrive at the notion of data governance architecture, which provides the core of all system design efforts in e-Government. A data governance architecture maps data assets to accountable legal entities and represents the essence of co-designing institutions and technological systems. Against the background of what has been achieved, we review a series of established and emerging technologies that have been explicitly designed for or are otherwise relevant for building e-Government systems.