Framework of e-government technical infrastructure. Case of Estonia

As information technology becomes more ubiquitous, governments of all levels must keep up with the increasing demand from the citizens for electronic services of all kinds. The service, policy and governance issues of this struggle are progressively well understood. Its technical aspects, however, are often considered to either be a commodity or covered by research in the field of enterprise architecture. Both experience in international cooperation attempts and efforts in coordinating architecture development on the state level, however, indicate that the existing approaches are not necessarily suitable for inter-enterprise coordination and governance purposes. In this paper we outline requirements for a framework suitable for framing the technical aspects of e-government, describe such a framework and discuss its application in the context of a small nation of Estonia.