Well the first time I heard about this systems I considered them to be quite different but, unluckily, they sound very similar. So, when I started to search in this area it was very easy to be confused. Eventually I understand that by manipulating these two terms I make things more complicated and tangled. As far as I go deeper I feel to be more in trouble than two years before. Now I am using these terms everyday and each day I need to have a very good argument for using the one or the other. Couple of days ago I got a very good explanation from my Lecturer¹ on this issue. I asked him whether I can use his ideas in my blog or not. He agreed in case I credited him. Later on he sent me his Name, Title and Name of University by email. And when I inserted it into my text I realized that he has written “Dr David Kreps, Lecturer in eGovernment, University of Salford”. Meanwhile, I was thinking that he is a lecturer in eGovernance. So all this just gave me a very good cause to start writing about definitions of the terms.

Of course, I started from Wikipedia. Obviously it is the easiest way to receive any definition. Shortly I was amused ti find out that there is no definition for eGovernance. There was just a small definition of eGovernment²

The description of eGovernment sounds quite easy presented this way in Wikipedia. And why not? It is the definition of any project for government, where Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is being used. The description of the term in this frame is clear. The same explanation of the term of electronic government I got from Subhash Bhatnagar’s book: “E-government: from vision to implementation”. And probably it is the best description of the term eGovernment. Then what about eGovernance?

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1. Dr David Kreps, Lecturer in eGovernment, University of Salford [↩]
2. e-Government (from electronic government, also known as e-gov, digital government, online government or in a certain context transformational government) refers to government’s use of information and communication technology (ICT) to exchange information and services with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government. e-Government may be applied by legislature, judiciary, or administration, in order to improve internal efficiency, the delivery of public services, or processes of democratic governance. The primary delivery models are Government-to-Citizen or Government-to-Customer (G2C), Government-to-Business (G2B) and Government-to-Government (G2G). The most important anticipated benefits of e-government include improved efficiency, convenience, and better accessibility of public services. [↩]

To review the subject of digital identification technologies I needed firstly to separate two big issues in it: legal and technological. Structurally one of it depends on the other but in theory to review them we need to have their independent development and should separate one from other. It is also required to identify the target of this review, as the literature of authentication systems is enormous and it is impossible to completely full review it in this small report. Nevertheless the most important studies are discussed below. We are focusing on new technology of digital identification in the age of e-business and e-governance. Defining the objective of the research we are aiming to identify the turning-point when most of authors start to write about stupendous demand of new authentication systems and define the new technology for these systems. Some authors define the goals for these systems, others mainly describe systems and operations.

The main study that is very closely related to this research is so far an article Electronic Government: Towards New Forms of Authentication, Citizenship and Governance, (2006). According to the authors the great demand of authentication systems in systems of e-government and e-commerce consumers’ relations. The author argues that the design of Identity managements (IDM) systems should not be examined because of the technical issues in the framework of establishment better e-government or e-commerce systems but also as wider and fundamental exploration and incorporation of social design issues concerning more deep relations within consumers and citizens with governments and companies (Lips et al., 2006). Of course, their work pays attention to the fear that any new IDM brings with the possibilities of society surveillance, which always exists while integrating these new systems. Most interesting presentation in the article is the framework of the project used in the research. Project “Privacy and Identity Management for Europe” (PRIME) has been developed and implemented by group of scholars who aim to identify the needs of authentication systems in Europe and to find technical solutions for it. The most interesting achievement of PRIME project is the establishment of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). PET mainly offers personal data control to users rather than to service providing organisations and, at the same time, protects the security of e-relationships through the use of encryption techniques. This focuses on users definitely determines the future of authentication technologies: User-Centric identity management. Here the systems offer users to define the degree of anonymity they would like to have in e-service relations.¹ In the third chapter of this article the author go for IDM innovations and describe mainly future IDM systems and nowadays developments. They state that this development will bring grate citizen empowerment and perfect democracy and it would reinforce powerful actors in becoming ‘bigger brothers’ than ever before. The most important part of work is the further analysis of two lenses on modern authentication systems policy design: the Government Gateways Project, UK and DigiD initiative, the Netherlands, both of which are e-government’s identifications systems. Examining these projects from Technical and Internal Governments Lenses she came to conclusion that technical standardisation of these new authentication and identity management systems for e-service provision may appear to be an obvious development, with similar policy design but different methods of implementations.

Here we can clearly see the importance of researching and developing of Digital Identification Technologies to establish good eGovernance in EU.

Albert Poghosyan

1. LIPS, M., OII, TAYLOR, J. & J. O., O. (2006) Electronic Government: Towards New Forms of Authentication, Citizenship and Governance. Oxford Internet Institute. [↩]

In my opinion technology of electronic governance will revolutionize social communication in very near future. Although there are lots of aspects in eGovernance and eGovernment Systems, I am going to focus mainly on authentication systems as it is one of the most important issues in Modern Internet Society.

As this is the first post devoted to this category it should contain my vision of the future and perspectives on Authentication systems which, actually, I dream to develop. I am strongly sure that these systems will change the life of all people on earth - maybe turning it to be easier.

Authentication systems are created by nowadays authorities and developing organizations based on super databases. I am confident that this way of development is wrong. Authentication systems of the future should not be based on databases at all. Instead of developing systems with super defence, user-centric systems must be created and all information should be carried by a person. During each authentication transaction the main information should be transferred from user (citizen) to server (organization). This process should be authorized by the government by special authorization body. The Government should only provide information for authorization process but services should be provided by different companies on the market bases.

The authorization process should be conducted on “Two-factor authentication” principle but besides password or PIN that should be provided, the user also should have an URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) and a hardware which generates the codes. This will be the cornerstone of this future system. The hardware, provided by company who supports authorization services, will connect to citizens’ general database on the moment of the transaction. The user will keep his info on this universal hardware as well as it will be cryptographic. The hardware will provide encryptic code which will be transferred to organization with user information and must also be authorizied by governmental database at the same time (during the transaction). So in this case the government should not keep all citizens’ private information in one place and citizens can easily manage it. This concept will replace passports and all other biometric authentications in future and will help to fight against all kinds of frauds.

I completely understand that in order to express these sort of thoughts (or better to say imaginations), one must have an extraordinarily sharp-sighted prospection. At least it is all I have for now.

Albert Poghosyan