An Overview of the State of the Art and Future Trends in ICT Innovation for Business-to-Government Interaction

The extended invited papers were duly reviewed which resulted in four accepted papers for this special issue. The theme of this special issue of IJEGR is an Overview of the State of the Art and Future Trends in ICT Innovation for Business-to-Government Interaction, which can be further detailed as follows. Government supervision and enforcement authorities, such as customs, tax, police, and food and product safety inspection agencies, have to carry out inspections at the borders to make sure that global supply chains become safer and more secure. Public agencies on various levels and from various countries are involved, as global supply chains cross national borders. However, inspections at the border often cause major interruptions and delays in these chains. Hence, both governments as well as businesses aim to make these inspections more efficient and less disruptive for global supply chains, by simplifying and harmonizing cross-border control procedures. This requires a lot of information exchange in which a company typically interacts with, among others, customs, tax, police, and food and product safety inspection agencies. IT-enabled inter-organizational information sharing plays a key role in this simplification and harmonization of cross-border control procedures, where paper-based procedures are replaced by electronic procedures. Recent developments in enabling inter-organizational information sharing across different government agencies and businesses are Integrated Service Delivery and Coordinated Border Management which require government agencies to introduce new governance models how to share information among themselves and with businesses. These governance models should describe both the business and the coordination logics ii of creating the new service offerings, and the logics should be captured by six elements: (1) organizations in the public service network, (2) service of¬ferings, (3) network coordination, (4) business processes, (5) shared resources, and (6) network capabilities. Coordinated Border Management (CBM) aims to improve the management of the large number of cross-border inspections by sometimes 10-20 different government agencies within ports and airports. Each of these government agencies apply their own procedures and regulations, and typically require that businesses exchange information with them via their own IT applications. In many cases this lodging of data by businesses to government agencies is mandatory for these businesses. Hence, businesses have to implement many different IT applications on top of their ERP systems to share information with all these government agencies. Similar information based on different data structures and technology has to be shared for each transaction with several government agencies with …