Rethinking the Relationship between Ubiquitous Government and Electronic Government

The advancement of information and communications technology (ICT) has revolutionized the way governments deliver public services, thereby fostering the development of egovernment in general and attracting increasing interests in ubiquitous government. While egovernment encourages online services which can substitute or complement conventional offline services, the presence of digital divide can create a gap in such technology-enabled service provision. While different channel management strategies have been adopted to move citizens to online channels, these strategies are not effective when digital divide prevails. More importantly, the conventional view about “ubiquitous” is rather technical in nature and consequently the conceptualization or development of ubiquitous government has been led astray by this inherent nature. In this paper, we examine e-government, channel management strategy, digital divide and ubiquitous government. According to our analysis, ubiquitous government should not be considered as a subset of e-government. We redefine ubiquitous government which in effect may be viewed as a superset of e-government. Building upon our revised definition, we plan to further extend the scope of the Ubiquitous Government Development Model and illustrate our conceptualization and analysis using the experience of governments with different paces of e-government development. The case study methodology would be used.