Big Data in e-Government Environments: Albania as a Case Study

Nowadays, the new trend in e-government environment is Big Data which is considered to be one of the most critical issues due to the managing, quality and privacy challenges. Creating and storing the huge volume of structured and unstructured data generated by governments in different formats does not provide any benefit for decision-making. Governments have to benefit from this data deluge to use its different aspects such as fraud detection or to measure citizen’s needs and desire for services in different area such as finance, healthcare, environment, economic and social statistics, etc. The objective of this paper is to bring Big Data in the context of e-government environment addressing main challenges that governments faced and describing opportunities in this field. This research summarizes the current situation of big data initiatives in e-government in different countries. This paper presents the current situation regarding digital transformation and e-government environment in Albania. The egovernment development and main statistics in the e-services it offers to Albanian is described as it will provide vital input for the potential of using big data as no current national initiatives exist on this field, in the country level. In this paper, we identify challenges and opportunities to start using Big Data in public organizations in Albania and we analyze methodological, organizational and processing challenges when big data is used, instead of traditional sources.