Assessment of the potential use of grid portal features in egovernment

• Published in: Transforming government 2008-05, Vol.2 (2), p.128-138
• Main Authors: Maad, Soha, Coghlan, Brian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Communication technologies; Government; Graphical user interfaces; Portals
• ISSN: 1750-6166
• DOI: 10.1108/17506160810876202

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to overview key features of grid portals and egovernment portals and assess the potential for using features of the former in the latter. In the context of this paper, grid portals are defined as graphical user interfaces that a user employs to interact with one or more grid infrastructural resources. Designmethodologyapproach The paper classifies grid portals in five categories and two development frameworks and based on this classification overviews ten existing grid portals. The overview covers, where possible, the developers, the objective, the implementation, and the features of the considered grid portals. For egovernment, the paper focuses on the overview of a typical egovernment portal and best design practices. Based on the overview of grid portals and the typical egovernment portal, the paper assesses the potential benefit of grid portals in meeting the critical success factors for egovernment identified as integration, knowledge management, personalization, and customer engagement. The results are tabulated, analysed, and discussed. Findings Many of the features of existing grid portals have the potential to be used within an egovernment portal, but the lack of any indepth study of the nature of the egovernment application domain from a technical and social perspective inline with grid development makes this potential far from reachable at this stage. This is disappointing but does highlight opportunities. Practical implications This paper motivates a greater indepth analysis and study of the potential use of the grid for egovernment. The grid infrastructure promises solutions to various applications domains including egovernment. Originalityvalue This paper explored the potential of a technology infrastructure for egovernment. This exploration is based on a novel dual overview and evaluation of the technology and the application domain. The paper can be a basis and a reference for further research in different areas including, among others technology infrastructures for egovernment, grid development for various application domains, benchmarking of grid utility and usability for various application domains, grid gateways, and emerging technologies to meet the critical success factors for egovernment.