A Critical Step in eGovernment Evolution

As eGovernment is gaining popularity in administrations, business and with citizen, issues about the course of its evolution take center stage. This evolution is generally seen as a four-step process: presence phase, interaction phase, transaction phase and transformation phase. To date few countries have made a significant progress in the last transformation phase whose goal is to integrate several internal services at the vertical and horizontal levels, into a one-stop, whole-of-government with innovative services operating seamlessly across departments, agencies and programmes. In this paper, we give our opinion on the application of the emerging technologies like Web services and semantic Web currently used in the transformation phase. As an illustration, we present two systems proposed to the government of Quebec, Canada: the address change service and the investment assistance programme service.