Business Management and new technologies to improve the services

Governments around the world have come to recognize the potential of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT’s) to reshape the ways in which they interact with citizens, businesses and other key stakeholders, hence the current move towards e-Government. A major goal of e-Government initiatives is to improve the quality of public service delivery through providing individuals and organizations with a coherent interface with government that has to be organized around their needs rather than the structure of government bodies. To that end, many governments have begun applying to their e-Government strategies the commercial concept commonly referred to as “Customer Relationship Management” (CRM), thus generating a new field of knowledge and related applications. This chapter discusses some of the key issues to implementing CRM in e-Government. It lays particular stress on the CRM capabilities of identifying and differentiating users, promoting take-up of e-Government and measuring the progress against its stated objectives. The conceptual framework will also be related to a case-study dealing with the Italian Revenue Agency, responsible for collecting tax and customs duties for government, which is developing a rich CRM program along with an ICT re-engineering process. 1.