A framework for managing the lifecycle of transactional e-government services

Filling and submission of electronic forms is a key issue for e-government, since most electronic services offered in this context include some variant of electronic forms. Insofar, IT experts are placed in the centre of electronic forms services lifecycles, undertaking the analysis, design, implementation and maintenance phases. This practice, however, implies various impediments, such as the need for multitudinous teams with diverse skills. In this paper, we present experiences from developing and maintaining a set of electronic services for the Greek Ministry of Finance, and propose an approach to handling electronic services’ lifecycle that balances responsibilities between domain experts and IT professionals. This approach enables a more holistic management of the electronic service lifecycle, by employing modelling and representation in high levels of abstraction and incorporating tools for automatically generating operative service instances from these high-level descriptions.