Research on Evolution Process and Countermeasures of

E-Government based on Supply Chain Theory

Dandan Shi

and Xiao Wu

Harbin University of Commerce, Department of Finance and Public Administration, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China

Keywords: E-Government, Internet Technology, Supply Chain Theory, Public Services.

Abstract: With the rapid development of Internet technology, many traditional industries and departments are

experiencing an information revolution, and e-government based on the Internet has gradually grown up with

the development of the Internet. Originally, the supply chain was designed to solve the problems in the

production process of enterprises. E-commerce was produced based on the supply chain technology, which

greatly improved the production efficiency of enterprises and created considerable social wealth. When the

supply chain technology is applied to other fields, it also shows great vitality, which provides new ideas for

solving problems in other fields. On the basis of reviewing the evolution of e-government, and analyzing the

characteristics and functions of e-government in each stage, this paper concludes the development process of

e-government from "digital government" to "intelligent government" and finally to "intelligent government",

and finds out the existing problems in e-government. The theory of supply chain is introduced into the field

of public management, and the enlightenment to solve the problem is obtained. Finally, the corresponding

suggestions are put forward. Thus, e-government can be continuously optimized in the era of rapid

development of Internet technology, and relevant departments can also provide more perfect public services.

1 INTRODUCTION

With the exquisite application of computers and the

rapid development of information technology, the

traditional departments and industries that have

undergone a long evolution process are hard to resist,

and they are forced to make digital changes in order

to adapt to the new social ecological environment.

The same is true of government departments and

operation modes based on bureaucratic organization

theory, which has been confirmed in the change of

"traditional government affairs-office automation-e-

government affairs". As early as 1980s, the

phenomenon of using computers to process

documents and manage archives has appeared in

Chinese government departments, that is, the

embryonic form of the concept of "office

automation". Although it is not really e-government

in essence, the transformation of its way of realizing

government affairs from "paper age" to "electronic

age" should belong to the category of e-government

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9517-6356

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6690-2213

and start the journey of development and research of

e-government in China.

After more than 30 years' efforts, especially the

comprehensive and rapid development in recent

fifteen years, China's e-government has achieved

remarkable results in information disclosure, mobile

government affairs, online service, electronic

participation, new technology application ability,

business and regional coverage. As shown in Figure 1

(

Bertot 2010).

In the development process of China's e-

government, both Max. Weber's bureaucracy, what

Hu De called "new public management", Robert B.

Denhardt and Janet V. Denhardt's new public service,

and Goldsmith and Egers' network governance, all

provide guidance for its development in a certain

period of time. E-government in the digital age is no

longer a problem at the level of information

technology, or simply a problem of system

management and information management. It is

necessary to study it with reference to the theoretical

system of public management, and explore how the

306

Shi, D. and Wu, X.

Research on Evolution Process and Countermeasures of E-Government based on Supply Chain Theory.

DOI: 10.5220/0011343700003437

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Public Management and Big Data Analysis (PMBDA 2021), pages 306-313

ISBN: 978-989-758-589-0

public departments and institutions with the

government as the core can use modern information

technology and governance theory in the digital age

to improve the way of handling government affairs

and improve the efficiency of public services. This is

not only a realistic task for government governance,

but also a necessary way to achieve a higher level of

public services, and it is also a forward-looking move

to scientifically develop China's e-government.

At present, the understanding of e-government is

not sufficient, and there is no specific means to solve

the problems. On the basis of reviewing the world's e-

government research literature, this paper analyzes

the characteristics and functional characteristics of e-

government in each stage, summarizes the

development process from "digital government" to

"intelligent government" and then to "intelligent

government", finds out the existing problems of e-

government, and focuses on how e-government

obtains enlightenment and solves problems with the

aid of supply chain.

Figure 1: China's Ranking in UN E-government Survey.

2 EVOLUTION AND EXISTING

PROBLEMS OF

E-GOVERNMENT

2.1 E-Government Development

Process

In the process of e-government development,

technology will become more and more complex, so

the difficulty of integration will also increase. It can

be roughly divided into four stages: the first stage is

the document cataloguing stage, in which the

government releases information to the outside by

establishing a website. The second stage is the

transaction stage, in which the government can

conduct online transactions through the Internet. The

third stage is the stage of vertical integration of

government functions. The fourth stage is the

horizontal integration stage. The first two stages

focus on the development and establishment of an

electronic interface for government information,

which belongs to the digital government stage. The

latter two stages are the integration of e-government

under the existing government structure, so they

belong to the intelligent government stage and the

intelligent government stage respectively.

2.2 E-Government Problems in the

Development Process

2.2.1 The Service Capability of Government

Websites Needs to Be Strengthened

The construction of government websites has not

received sufficient attention. In November 2003, the

United Nations Bureau of Economic and Social

Affairs inreleased the survey report Global Public

Sector Report 2003: E-government at Crossroads.

The report assesses the e-government level of the 173

UN member states that have launched government

websites from key indicators such as the accessibility

of government websites, the construction of network

infrastructure and the level of e-government. It

released the ranking by way of "digital government

completeness index", ranking China at 74th. The

report also evaluated the residents' convenience in

obtaining government information and their

enthusiasm in participating in government decision-

making by measuring "electronic participation

index", ranking China at 86th. As can be seen from

the comparison of the average value of the first-level

government service capability index of the provincial

government websites in China from 2017 to 2020, as

shown in Figure 2, the online service maturity index

and online processing maturity are relatively low,

which further illustrates the problem that the

government website service capability needs to be

strengthened.

Research on Evolution Process and Countermeasures of E-Government based on Supply Chain Theory

307

Figure 2: 2017-2020 comparison of the average value of the first level index of government service capacity of provincial

government websites in China, Data source: https://publicadministration.un.org/egovkb/en-us/data-center.

2.2.2 The Low Efficiency of Electronization

Many government websites show that they have the

function of handling affairs online, but when users

click on it, the system is usually being maintained, or

there is only one flow chart, which does not really

have this function. This is the typical low efficiency

of electronization. We can see that many government

websites only hang the names of the businesses they

handle on the front page, but they do not have this

practical function and can only be regarded as a

simple open process. This cannot be done by

electronic means to improve administrative

efficiency. This reflects the current form of electronic

government affairs in China.

2.2.3 E-Government Projects Lack Uniform

Standards

At present, China's e-government is developing

rapidly. Most of the provincial, municipal and county

government departments have their own websites.

However, problems such as repeated construction,

unreasonable website design, unclear website

objectives, poor operability and nonstandard security

management have become obstacles that hinder

China's e-government to move to a higher level. For

example: < font > tags have been listed as deprecated

tags by the W3C as early as April 1998 in the

HTML4.0 standard, but many websites have little

code like < font color=blue > on their home pages. In

fact, most of the large-scale websites fail to pass the

W3C's strict correctness verification. There are many

reasons for this situation, such as the adoption of the

old information release system, and the lack of skills

and awareness of web designers. However, the root

cause of this problem is the lack of standardization

and standardization of our government websites. "In

the average score table for website monitoring of the

third and fourth level cities in the Research Report on

China's Prefecture-level Cities' E-government, the

highest score is 7.1819 and the lowest score is 0.52

(there are 27 cities with zero scores), which shows the

large gap.

100

Service

completeness

index

Online service

effectiveness

index.

Online

maturity

index.

Guide

accuracy

index.

Service item

coverage

index.

2017

2018

2019

2020

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2.2.4 Lack of Integrated Government

Supply Chain

In the traditional sense, the government business

process usually starts from the actual operation of the

department, and lacks of unified coordination and

overall planning between departments. This directly

results in the actual operation of each department and

the formation of a government supply chain with the

department itself as the center. In the final analysis,

the formation of this supply chain is due to the

specific business processes between departments.

The motive force for the development of e-

government in China came from all levels of

government departments at the earliest. While

carrying out e-government activities, all levels of

government departments often have a fragmented

situation and lack of macro-control and unified

planning, which results in the lack of large-scale

unified integration of all e-government supply chains.

In solving the above problems, many scholars

have found that in the actual operation process of e-

government, there are many characteristics similar to

supply chain, and they have the idea of obtaining

inspiration from supply chain theory and looking for

countermeasures.

3 E-GOVERNMENT BASED ON

SUPPLY CHAIN THEORY

3.1 The Introduction of Relevant

Concepts

Supply Chain (SCM) refers to an enterprise that

considers the upstream suppliers and downstream

distributors of the core enterprise as a whole in order

to maximize the enterprise's revenue. It runs through

the whole process of raw material procurement,

product processing, distribution and distribution,

terminal sales and customer service, as shown in

Figure 3. It pursues the minimum circulation cost

among the processes and seeks the maximum

circulation benefit.

Figure 3: Circulation in supply chain.

Figure 4: Push Supply Chain Model.

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According to the different leading direction, the

supply chain can be divided into push supply chain

and pull supply chain. The push-type supply chain is

production-oriented and is suitable for the

"production-fixed-sales" production model. The pull-

type supply chain is customer-oriented and suitable

for the production model of "fixing production by

sales". In the actual production management process

of push-type supply chain, the enterprise will first

make the necessary forecast and planning for the

market to determine the quantity and type of products

produced by the enterprise, and then determine the

production planning on this basis, and then promote

the optimization of the entire supply chain. The push

supply chain model is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 5: Pull Supply Chain Model.

Figure 6: Push e-government SCM model.

Figure 7: Pull e-government SCM model.

The entire process of the pull-type supply chain is

driven by the customers, the customers generate

demands, information is transmitted to the

manufacturers through intermediate channels, the

manufacturers transmit to the material suppliers, and

the material suppliers determine the material supply

plan. The pull-type supply chain can make production

planning based on customers' demands, and can better

respond to changes in customers' demands. However,

this model greatly increases the response cost in the

back office and reduces the profit of the enterprise to

a certain extent. The production model of the pull

supply chain is shown in Figure 5.

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3.2 The Enlightenment of Supply

Chain Theory to E-government

Based on the explanation of enterprise supply chain

theory above, we divide the e-government SCM

model into push e-government SCM model (Fig. 6)

and pull e-government SCM model (Fig. 7).

The push-type e-government SCM model and the

pull-type e-government SCM model have their own

advantages and disadvantages. However, careful

study shows that with the continuous development of

society and economy, both the push-type e-

government SCM model and the pull-type e-

government SCM model will increasingly expose

problems. In the push-type e-government SCM

model, the government's long-term planning is not

compatible with the changing needs of enterprises

and citizens. In the pull-type e-government SCM

model, the government can better take into account

the changing needs of citizens and enterprises, but it

will affect the government's long-term development

planning. It is necessary to establish a comprehensive

e-government SCM model, which can not only ensure

the government to establish a long-term development

plan, but also allow the government to take into

account the changing material and cultural needs of

enterprises and citizens.

Comprehensive e-government SCM model: refers

to the alternative use of pull-type e-government SCM

model and push-type e-government SCM model in

the process of e-government construction. In different

stages, push-type and pull-type respectively play a

leading role, and the government can make choices

according to specific conditions, as shown in Figure

Figure 8: Integrated e-government SCM model.

4 COUNTERMEASURES AND

SUGGESTIONS BASED ON

SUPPLY CHAIN THEORY

4.1 The Government Portal Website

Group Technology Implementation

Enterprise supply chain is often built around a large

enterprise. E-government supply chain has

increasingly manifested this development trend, in

which the concept of government portal website

group is a concrete expression of this theory in e-

government. Therefore, how to effectively provide

public services through government websites and

how to improve the public's awareness and

satisfaction of the construction of government

websites have increasingly become hot issues in the

new stage of e-government construction. The

establishment of the government portal website group

system is supported by the content management

system. Through the distributed information

maintenance mode and audit mechanism, the

hierarchical management of information and resource

sharing are achieved. Technically, the implementation

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of content management of government portal

websites is divided into the following six parts:

The first is the data layer, which schedules and

stores structured data and unstructured data, including

XML and DBMS. Unstructured data includes: text

files, audio and video files, graphics and image files

and files in other formats such as PDF. Web Service

modular components are supported on the data

interface. At the same time, the data service also

provides its upper layer with an application

programming interface API for a large number of data

operations. The second is the support layer, which

provides strong support to the system application

layer through the application server, including:

information capture, data conversion, search engine,

unified users, workload and access statistics, WAP

management, process definition, data submission and

sharing. And through API, PORTLET,

WEBSERVICE, JMS, MQ, DI, URL, DBMS and

other interface services, external resources are

supported to integrate the basic data of content

management and the application data of content

management to external data resources (Shen 2008).

The third is the application layer, which is a very

important part of the government portal website

group and an important part of information

processing. According to different functions, it can be

divided into: information release management,

website group management, system management,

plug-in component management, single sign-on,

personalized customization, content aggregation

RSS. The fourth is the performance level. The final

performance of the government portal website group

is a group of website group systems with the same

standards and the same standard system. It covers the

government master station, all levels of government

sub-websites and all kinds of special sub-websites. At

the same time, the system provides information

resources support for different applications of the

application layer. For example: web, wap, portlet, rss,

E-mail, SMS. Fifth, the access layer. Customers

access the performance layer through devices (such

as mobile phones, PDA's, browsers.) to obtain

information resources. Finally, external public

interfaces provide a large number of application

interfaces for the management layer, application layer

and presentation layer of information resources,

including API, PORTLET, WEBSERVICE, JMS,

MQ, URL, DBMS (

Carter, 2015).

4.2 Clear Management Objectives and

Principles

The goal of e-government supply chain management

is to take the government website as a platform, to

achieve perfect government services and resource

integration, to provide perfect services for the public,

to continuously enhance the innovative services of the

government website while meeting the increasing

trend of public personalized demand, and to make

timely and effective anti-fast response to the trend of

users' personalized demand. In order to reduce the

operation cost of the whole e-government supply

chain, the construction cycle of the supply chain for

e-government is shortened while the service is

realized (

Liu 2014).

4.3 The Establishment of Standardized

E-Government

"E-government Standard System" and "E-

government Standardization Guide" mark the official

start of China's e-government standardization. The e-

government standard system consists of general

standards, application standards, application support

standards, information security standards, network

infrastructure standards, management standards, etc.

Under the basic framework of the "E-government

Standardization Guide", the E-government

Standardization Group commissioned different

agencies to carry out and complete the work of

formulating six e-government standards. The six

specific tasks include: format specification of

electronic official documents based on XML. XML

Application Guide in E-government. General

specification for design method of e-government

business process. Code for information engineering

supervision. E-government data element. E-

government thesaurus. From the overall framework,

the standard system has covered all aspects of the

whole e-government construction. This has pointed

out a basic way for the development of e-government

standards, or basically completed the "meta-standard"

for each item in the e-government application

standards (

Snyder 2011).

4.4 Establish an "E-Government

Supply Chain" based on Internet

Technology

While pay attention to that technical standards,

special attention is now bee paid to the quantitative

research and management of government affairs, and

on this basis, the construction of most government

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management projects and link is standardized, the

local and national standards of government process

links are formulated, and the non-arbitrariness of

government management and the transparency of

government processes are realized. In the practical

work involving the management of e-government

supply chain, manual and traditional information

exchange methods have failed to meet the

requirements of efficient management. Developing

various related systems and software based on

Internet technology is the only way to build an e-

supply chain (

Nations 2008).

5 CONCLUSION

After more than 30 years' construction and

development, the overall situation of China's e-

government can be summarized as a late start and

rapid progress, which has achieved remarkable results

in many fields and faced bottlenecks in various

aspects. Now, it has entered a rising period of rapid

take-off and a critical period of deep application. E-

government is an "imported product", from hardware

to software, without exception, it comes from abroad,

but it can quickly integrate with China's reality and

make continuous breakthroughs and innovations in

theory and practice. In 1980s, Chinese traditional

government departments introduced computers to

assist in simple government affairs, such as text

editing, file storage, data statistics. which started the

process of reforming the way of realizing government

affairs. In the true sense, it marked the germination of

Chinese e-government. Due to the restriction of

technical equipment, administrative environment and

other factors, it mainly served the government rather

than the public, resulting in weak public service

capacity of e-government in this period. In 1990s,

with the popularization and application of

information technology and Internet in China,

government departments actively provided favorable

conditions in terms of capital, science and technology,

policies and ideas, focused on guiding and promoting

the leap-forward development of e-government,

initially explored the great potential of e-government,

and showed its convenience and efficiency in

government affairs processing, making e-government

an indispensable tool for government departments. At

the beginning of the 21st century, the emerging

information technologies such as "internet plus",

cloud computing, big data, all-media and intelligent

mobile, on the one hand, create a broader

development space for e-government, on the other

hand, make great changes in the administrative

ecology of the government, and the existing

governance theories encounter difficulties in practice.

The e-government based on the operating mechanism

of government organizations and information

technology is also placed at the crossroads of where

to go.

By analyzing the evolution of e-government, this

paper finds that the service capacity of e-government

government website needs to be strengthened, and by

studying the supply chain model, it gets

enlightenment and finds out the corresponding

solutions (

Layne 2002).

However, there are some shortcomings in this

research. The development plan that relies on the

digital age and combines with the supply chain tends

to the theoretical level and needs to be further refined

and deepened in practice. In addition, as a new theory,

like other theories, it will be criticized in the process

of development, in order to improve and surpass the

follow-up research (

Ding 2004).

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