Towards an E-government Lab

E-government is emerging as the new way of coordinating relationships with business and citizens as the result of technological developments As such it requires the cooperation between many government organizations, the redesign of business processes, functions and responsibilities and the identification of opportunities enabled by information and communication technology. New government concepts need to be developed, tested and imbedded in the existing ICTarchitectures The goal of this paper is to identify the foundations for an ‘e-government laboratory’ and to explain the crucial role of simulation. In this paper the ideas behind the e-government laboratory are presented, the role of simulation is explained and a pilot project is presented. The pilot project is a simulation study to visualize the opportunities and implications of an open, flexible approach for service provision.