User-centric E-services System Requirements Modeling And Implementation

Reform in public administration started in 1970s to 1980s, caused by public hatred towards government bureaucracy, expectation of decreasing government function, strong demand of improving government efficiency and re-judging of pyramid organizational structure. Academia also started to pay attention to this field. Government reengineering theory and new public administration theory are theories that make direct impact on electronic government.Countries all attach great importance to the development of electronic government. Development plan and technology protocol are made to standardize and direct electronic government. The development of electronic government is seen as opportunity to increase government efficiency, improve government service quality and enhance government overall capability. Electronic government is among the top five of the world's most importance applications of information technology.Electronic government has also been taken seriously by Chinese government and therefore is widely used and development. Based on rough statistics, China now has more than 10000 government websites and county and above level's governments all have their own websites. But imbalance, redundancy and other problems largely exist in the development of e-government due to lack of profound research, sound law and relevant system support. Therefore the research on e-government should be very much based on China's real context.While e-service, sitting at the central part of the e-government, is to interactively provide service to public by government. Its research so far has been focusing on e-service model, back office of e-service, front office of e-service and its knowledge management.Research questions have been identified through field study on public service system of Jing'an district of Shanghai: how to understand the customer or user of e-service systerm, how to map their need to system anlysis and design, and the importance of user involvement in the process of e-service systerm implementation.This paper first discusses the concept of user in the domain of e-service. Based on literature review, case study and expert interview, users of e-service include personal user and enterprise user, which also constitute explicit user and tactic user. Explicit user means the user that is currently using e-sevice, while tactic user means all other users that are not using the e-service. Explicit user requires e-serive to improve the quality of service, and tactic user requires e-service to conduct function of survelience. Activity can serve as unit to analyse user requirement and can be well classified by two factors, life cycle and function.This paper then applies and develops activity-driven e-service modeling method. Enterprise architecture consists of business architecture, information architecture, information technology architecture and technology architecture. E-service modeling is aiming to provide practical directions through mapping business information requirement to information system requirement. In general process-based and function based modeling methods are widely used, but they are not very suitable in e-service project because of certain characteristics of public administrations and its e-service system. Activity-driven modeling method considers the information requirement from three levels, including activity information requirement, work flow information system requirement and information system requirement. Life cycle and functions are also used to classify all the activities identified in e-service project.Then the importance of user participation in the process of e-service implementation has been illustrated through the empirical research. Based on the data analysis, user participation can positively affect the organizational implementation success and project implementation success. Therefore user participation is proved to be very important in the process of the e-service implementation.