eGovernment Maturity

As we review our progress in eGovernment, we have much of which to be proud.
Three or four years ago, what passed for eGovernment was not much more than
a collection of agency web sites with individual designs that gave some
information about the agency and, perhaps, contained some forms that could be
downloaded, printed out, and mailed in. Today our web presence consists of
numerous, transaction-enabled services with a common look and feel. Given our
progress, the question naturally arises as to where we go from here. No doubt,
in three or four years, our current situation will look as immature as our earlier
efforts appear today.

One tool we can use to determine the road ahead is called a maturity model. A
maturity model is a method for judging the maturity of the processes of an
organization and for identifying the key practices that are required to increase the
maturity of these processes. Maturity models exist for a number of processes.
One of the most well known is the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for software
development from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon
University.

An eGovernment maturity model provides us with guidance on how to gain
control of our processes for developing and maintaining eGovernment services
and how to evolve toward a culture of excellence in providing and managing
eGovernment. A maturity model can guide us in selecting process improvement
strategies by determining current process maturity and identifying the few issues
that are most critical to eGovernment quality and process improvement. By
focusing on a limited set of activities and working aggressively to achieve them,
we can steadily improve our organization-wide eGovernment processes and
enable continuous and lasting gains in our eGovernment capabilities.

Maturity models can be very involved and take years to master. The CMM
referred to earlier is one such model. However, in its simplest form, a maturity
model is an enumeration of attributes for a sequence of maturity levels. For good
or bad, no well-developed maturity models for eGovernment exist; the best
available models are simple, but still useful for understanding some key facts
about eGovernment.