History of Digital Government Research in the United States

In beginning to understand the phenomenon of electronic government, it will be useful to look at the history of the World Wide Web (WWW) as it swept through U.S. government agencies. At first, the Web was used by agencies for making public paper documents available online. Quickly it became apparent that Internet technologies could be used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government service delivery to citizens and other government agencies, yet many technological and public policy challenges would need to be solved when working in the electronic or digital government domain – e-Government faces different challenges than eBusiness. The U.S. National Science Foundation understood the need for identifying these challenges and in response to the research community and government practitioners established a digital government research program in 1997. This chapter provides context, background, case studies, references and the history of the digital government research program in the United States.