Vision of future e-government via new e-government maturity model: Based on Korea's e-government practices

This paper analyze that the social paradigm shift caused by the new IT has brought the current highly-advanced information society following the industrial and information societies, and proposes a new e-government development model called as “E-Government Maturity Model based on Socio-political Development” that incorporates the level of social maturity based on e-democracy and the maturity level of civic society with statistic model. The new model classifies e-Government development into four stages: “Bureaucratic model”, “Information management model”, “Participatory model”, and “Governance model”. This paper also attempted to apply this model to e-government practices in Korea on the flow of time. E-government in Korea has mainly shown features of one distinct type at a time among four stages, as so far explained above. In this case, the former stage developed to the next level after going through the process of maturation in advancement of ICT and social maturity and political stability. This paper defined the ‘smart society’ as the highly-advanced information society from the Korean case study. Instead of literally interpreting the term ‘smart’, it should be comprehensively re-interpreted as a new academic term that reflects perspectives of social and technological changes, introducing new meanings. The definition and concept or the maturity level of the smart society shall be left for the future study suggestions. We have so far analyzed the characteristics of progressing toward the smart society based on Korea's cases of e-government development. The analysis, though started from certain cases of Korea, will be an applicable model to other countries as well, since Korea is in the leading group in terms of informatization. This paper is distinguished from the other studies because it is an analytical study on the non-technological factors of e-government development: especially focused on the political, socio-economic aspects of e-government. Despite the contribution mentioned above, this paper also has an academic limitation on the generalization of findings because of its a single case study on the Korea. So we will try to explain and analyze the other countries' cases with the research framework: E-Government Maturity Model based on Socio-political Development of this paper in the next studies. So, this model will be expected to be generally expandable and applicable to e-government cases of other countries.