Towards Bits and Bytes: Digital Citizenship in e-Government Ecosystem

In Australia, the development of a national federated digital identity system (the ‘identity federation’), is receiving much attention globally. Governments and businesses alike come to understand in the advent of the technology-driven economy that national and global economies should use the Internet as a platform for innovation and economic growth.

Australia has acknowledged the value of digital identity. The Australian Government envisioned that a national digital identity strategy would streamline people’s interactions with the Government and provide efficiency improvements. The Government also agreed to work with State and Territory jurisdictions and with the private sector to develop a Trusted Digital Identity Framework (TDIF) to support the Government’s Digital Transformation Agenda. Through it is Digital Transformation Agency (DTA), Australia is the first country to express digital citizenship in this form in partnership with other government agencies and critical private sector bodies underpinned by its Trusted Digital Identity Framework (TDIF).

The provisioning of such a sophisticated environment poses several challenges to public authorities in terms of the identification and authentication of citizens. Shortly, we will examine the characteristics of the framework, the implications for identity management (IDM) in the e-Government ecosystem, the accreditation and implementation processes, data sharing and privacy concerns and the impact of digital citizenship.

What is Digital Citizenship

Digital citizenship comprised of a collection of Information Technology and administrative business processes (Zhiguang & Ting, 2010). Digital identity is an integral part of digital citizenship and the e-government system. The definition of Digital Identity, according to NIST (Grassi, Garcia, & Fenton, 2017), is, “the online persona of a subject”. Although the definition of Digital Identity is broadly argued, the NIST proposed term “persona” of a subject may be viewed online in many ways. To further add complexity, the term identity within a networked environment refers to an increasing variety of potential nouns; from a set of personality-defining characteristics to a hashed computer password (Camp, 2004). For clarification, digital identity is the distinctive representation of a subject engaged in an online transaction (Grassi et al., 2017). A digital identity is always unique in the context of a digital service but does not necessarily have to determine the subject in all settings distinctly. In other words, accessing a digital service may well not imply that the subject‘s real-life identity is widely known (Grassi et al., 2017).

Furthermore, Digital Identity may also be defined as the representation of the overall known information about a person across online applications (Pimenta, Teixeira & Pinto, 2010). The ability to use digital identities across a range of social and economic use situations, NIST conceded, is hard (Grassi et al., 2017). Further, to prove someone is who they claim they are — particularly remotely, via a digital service — is fraught with possibilities for an adversary to successfully impersonate another person. Thus, the concept of Digital Identity Management solutions for conveniently managing and securely using identities such as identifiers, passwords, personal profiles online have been proposed and widely implemented.

E-government is a comprehensive concept, and digital identity is a key enabler for e-government services (Corradini, Paganelli, & Polzonetti, 2007). The Digital Identity system can help governments to empower citizens and build a more connected digital society. The proposed E-government infrastructure often handles sensitive data about individuals and other organisations. This collection and sharing raise privacy and security concerns. These concerns and implications are later discussed.

Australian E-Government framework

The Australian development of an integrated method of e-government seeks to join up all three tiers of governments to enable citizens to interact seamlessly with federal, state, and local governments and prioritise citizens’ control and ownership of their data. The proposed decentralised architecture is intended to be implemented to ascertain there is no single point of failure and allow easy and secure integration with pre-existing electronic government platforms. Historically, a prior attempt to a join-up approach to e-government could not be accomplished and was unsuccessful (Management Advisory Committee, 2004). The success of some large departments, such as the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) as well as the Centrelink, has depended more on a joined-up frontend’ as opposed to an integrated back end which allows citizens to interact with the government seamlessly (Dunleavy, Margetts, Bastow, & Tinkler, 2008).

The decentralised approach of e-government allows different databases and IT solutions in the three tiers of government to communicate with one another securely. It resolves the dilemma of how to integrate the array of government databases and systems that currently exist. The present proposal of integrated e-government in Australia rejects the notion of a single database (a so-called superdatabase) that consolidates all data from various other databases (Ott, Henson, & Krenjova, 2018). The four key elements underpin this secure exchange are (Ott et al., 2018):

· the identification of both the sender and the receiver of the data

· the encryption of data exchanged to ensure the information is unreadable in case someone intercepts it

· the time-stamping of data transactions

· a legal audit trail via archiving and logging of electronic records.

In addition to the above, the policy brief also made further recommendations for the development of e-government in Australia:

• Avoid large e-government projects. Agile development can minimise risks, enable faster results and avoid implementation challenges.
• Establish an effectively functioning, secure eID and digital signature for every citizen. The eID should be user-friendly and straightforward, issued by the government (similarly to passports) and guaranteed by law. It should be used for both e-government services and business e-services.
• Back-office integration should be synchronised centrally but performed in a decentralised fashion, enabling secure data exchange between systems connected via the internet. The integration platform should allow the combination of different technology platforms in different locations, in various legal environments and with different organisational set-ups. The integration platform should be as simple as possible and not necessitate modifications to existing back-office procedures and systems. Process redesign can be accomplished step by step.
• A citizen-centric model is vital to win public support for integrated e-government. It should allow people to control their private data and provide legal guarantees, supported by organisational and technical frameworks. Building trust takes time, so carefully planned communication between the government and citizens is critical, including building up and publicising a track record of competent and secure service delivery. This can be assisted by following basic design concepts and data protection principles when designing the eID and the back-office integration of IT systems.

Case Studies

E-government in the literature (Fang, 2002) is defined as “a way for governments to use the most innovative information and communication technologies, particularly web-based Internet applications, to provide citizens and businesses with more convenient access to government information and services, to improve the quality of the services and to provide greater opportunities to participate in democratic institutions and processes”. In a study conducted by a Dutch Centre of Expertise (Mulder, 2004), the Dutch’ concept of e-government system aims at a smart use of the internet-based technologies in various domains such as quality of service, democratic participation, access to public data, and efficiency in work processes. The municipal citizens’ registration is the fundamental element for a national electronic identity infrastructure. The article summarises three studies conducted by the Centre of Expertise which has resulted in the strategic decision by the central government to implement the necessary organisational and technical architecture.

In a similar study (Brostoff, Jennett, Malheiros, & Sasse, 2013), the US and UK governments introduced Federated Identity Solutions (FedID) to provide citizens with an authentication method to use while accessing e-government services. Governments do not want to be Identity providers (IdPs), but leverage accounts that citizens have with other service providers instead. This methodology is not new; it has been proposed by the Australian government, as discussed earlier. The authors recorded how citizens reacted to the new FedID authentication services by using third party providers they already had accounts with. The authors performed two studies using low fidelity prototypes; citizens participants and small business owners, employees and agents. The research identified some positive perceptions. More than half (56%) of participants understood and accepted the concept of FedID in term of efficiency and simplicity. Finally, the authors concluded by discussing trust in ID Providers and the significance of the age group in FedID when it comes to its adoption.

In several countries worldwide, governments are introducing digitised personal identification and authentication models into their service relationships with citizens. In Pakistan, digital identity has gained importance as a result of the growing number of e-Commerce and e-Government services (Hayat, Khan, & Alam, 2008). In Nigeria and other developing nations, (Adedayo, Butakov, Ruhl, & Lindskog, 2013) introduced a secure framework for the protection of Personal Identifiable Information (PII) based on OWASP security specifications.

As discussed earlier, e-government is a comprehensive system; it is an operation of which often cross-functional, departmental, organisational, or even geographical boundaries. As such, IT governance is a very effective way to keep the goal of e-government development consistent with that of public services. (Yang, Cao, & You, 2009) studied governance theory, and analysed the critical problems in China’s e-government development, and proposed a governance framework for e-government system. The authors identified the following critical issues in the field of e-government services:

• Lack of systematic overall planning

Given the challenging nature of the environment, should a service-oriented government have been established as the ultimate goal, all the local e-government sub-systems should follow the same broad framework to maintain coherence for the same objective. Contrariwise, if the overall structure is not taken into full account, it will lead to difficulties in coordination between individual sub-systems, and it will result in the malfunction of realising a service-oriented government.

• Absence of Performance Evaluation System

An effective performance evaluation process is a critical component of the contemporary public management system and is vital in the process of establishing a service-oriented government. The development of a virtuous cycle and the transparency of evaluation results to the public can help enhance mutual trust and confidence between the people and the Government. Nevertheless, due to the technical complexity of the system as well as insufficient expertise, the performance evaluation process is still regretfully absent in the current e-government system in China.

The Implications

The world has been transforming over the last 20 years, as a result of the advent of cutting-edge technologies converting our societies from analogue to digital models (Al-Khouri, 2014). Nonetheless, the management of digital identity has numerous facets — cultural, social, economic, and technical — and is a complicated area of practice (Backhouse, 2006), (Camp, 2004) & (Fish, 2009). The switch from a paper-based to an electronic-based society has drastically decreased the cost of collection, storing and processing individuals’ personal information. Consequently, (Camenisch et al., 2005) claimed that it is becoming more prevalent for businesses to “profile” individuals to provide more personalised offers as part of their business strategy. Furthermore, while such profiles can be helpful and improve efficiency, they can also govern opaque decisions about an individual’s access to services such as credit or an employment position.

Privacy of data becomes an issue whenever data is processed that can or must be related to people. The potential of electronic information systems, however, and their opening to the Internet have invoked more and more concerns and questions regarding privacy during the last decades (Otjacques, Hitzelberger, & Feltz, 2007).

Trust is a highly complex, multi-dimensional (Lewis & Weigert, 1985) and context-specific phenomenon (Luhmann, 1979). It has traditionally been a concept that is difficult to define and measure (Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt, & Camerer, 1998). Trust in e-government is of vital importance for the effective adoption and use of electronic public services. Understanding the concept of trust and the different types it involves in the e-government context is a crucial challenge for both research and practice (Papadopoulou, Nikolaidou, & Martakos, 2010).

Conclusion

By definition, for a digital identity solution to be successful, it needs to be understood in all the contexts where an individual might want to use it to identify themselves. The management of digital identity enables trusted remote interactions between an organisation and an individual. As previously discussed, digital identity management is a cross-cutting subject within the government. For a national strategy to be fully efficient, identity management policies and practices should be coordinated across the government, regardless of the specificity of each e-government activity and service.

IT governance is an effective way to keep e-government development consistent with that of public services. The absence of a performance evaluation system raises concerns, and the importance of IT governance for the construction of e-government is paramount.

Trust in stored data refers to the extent that a citizen can trust that the data collected and stored are adequately protected from potential threats. Taking into account the value and significance of the type of data stored in an e-government system, trust in stored data can be an essential aspect of trust in e-government.

The proposed integrated approach to digitalise government services across all three tiers of government in Australia has the potential to succeed. One of the most critical aspects of e-government is how it brings citizens and businesses closer to their governments. This movement to e-government changes the way individuals and companies interact with the government. E-Government offers vast potential in seeking an innovative approach to reach the ideal of government of people, by people and for people.

This paper provided a necessary discussion of the Australian -government proposed framework and only a couple of case studies related to e-government system development in other countries. By analysing concepts and theoretical framework in these issues may give the broader context of structural initiatives for E-government development and the recommendations for further studies of E-government in public administration.