Internet of Things in E-Government: Applications and Challenges

Introduction

IoT is a very promising technology and is predicted to flourish within the next years, as 127 new devices connect to the Internet every second (McKinsey, 2018), with the number of IoT devices being expected to exceed 64 billion by 2025 (Business Insider, 2019). With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) machines and objects constitute dynamic intelligent actors of networked environments providing novel services. The ubiquitous nature of IoT brings dramatic changes to the way we work and live, with an increasing adoption in various domains of personal and organizational activity. IoT can bring unprecedented benefits in the public sector, making a shift from e-government to smart government, transforming G2C, G2B, and G2G transactions and processes. According to industry forecasts, the smart government market is estimated to reach USD 52.19 billion by 2026 (Reports and Data, 2019). IoT-enabled government information systems and applications can offer innovative services or extend the type and the quality of existing ones with smart provisions across a wide spectrum of domains, such as health, transportation, environment, communications, security/safety, energy, defense and smart cities. In each of these sectors IoT can be used to provide a variety of sophisticated e-government services that can be valuable and helpful to citizens, the society and the environment. In all these cases, IoT systems and applications enable the provision of advanced services to people and the society in general, that can enhance their security and safety against a number of threats and risks and in diverse contexts, allowing for the protection of the public, the prevention of disasters and the immediate and effective response to emergency situations. In addition to the critical safety provisions, thanks to the use of IoT, these electronic government-to-citizen (G2C) and government-to-society (G2S) services allow for a better quality of life by protecting the environment and by facilitating everyday activities. Despite the increasing progress and interest in both areas of IoT and e-government, research on their combined use is limited (e.g. Wirtz et al., 2019; AlEnezi et al., 2018; Brous and Janssen, 2015a, 2015b). Literature focus is largely on technology or governance aspects or a specific application area such as smart cities. How e-government can benefit and grow from IoT has not been fully addressed yet. In order to gain a better understanding about how e-government can successfully leverage the IoT potential, a comprehensive, holistic approach of applying IoT in e-government is needed, covering challenges of both technical and non-technical nature, associated with the combined use of e-government and IoT systems. In this paper an attempt is made towards setting a framework for designing and implementing smart citizen and society-oriented government services with IoT-based systems. In this direction, after an overview of the research literature related to the topic, we describe several application domains of IoT in e-government, with a particular focus on critical services provision, in areas of public security/safety, healthcare, environment, transportation, energy, waste management and smart city. Then, we identify the challenges, technical and non-technical, that can be encountered in the development of successful IoT egovernment systems and we propose solutions that can be used to tackle these challenges. The paper proceeds to showcase the potential of IoT-based e-government as well as the challenges and how they should be addressed through an example case. Finally, the paper summarizes our findings and provides conclusions and guidelines. The paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of how the IoT promise in government can be realized and to provide insights that can be of value for both researchers and practitioners active in the growing field of IoT and e-government.