e-Government in the Finnish Early Childhood Education: An Analysis of Current Status and Challenges

With the increasing number of citizens accessing the Internet, governments at all levels around the world have no other choice but to utilize information technology, especially the Internet, to provide improved services to their citizens. This paper studies and analyzes the status and challenges of e-government services within early childhood education context in ten of the largest municipalities in Finland. The study draws upon previous research on e-government stage models and e-government challenges. Our analysis indicates that there is significant development work in progress in the field of early childhood education and e-government in many Finnish municipalities. Many of them have reached relatively mature stage in developing early childhood education e-services. The paper also discusses the challenges municipalities face when they try to implement e-government services. Overall, the paper tries to provide examples and ideas for researchers and practitioners for developing better quality early childhood education e-government services.