Public-Private Partnership in e-Government: A Case Implementation

Public-private partnerships (PPP) are used by governments as a means to finance infrastructure services such as roads, bridges or hospitals. In e-government, public services are provided and delivered to citizens and businesses through the Internet. The end user should be able to measure a difference in terms of service quality and comfort, or necessary effort, delay, and cost, between acquiring the service over the net vs. using traditional channels. This paper presents a case implementation of PPP in e-government in Geneva, Switzerland. In this scheme, a private third party is introduced aside the public administration and the end-user in order to maximize the added value to the user. In comparison to the traditional client-server model of Internet transaction, several new problems are encountered at the organizational, process and technical levels. The paper describes the solutions and underlying architectures.