Bridging theory and practice in e-government: A set of guidelines for architectural design

The diverse array of contributions to the discipline of e-government, from evaluative frameworks and conceptual models to guidelines for initiatives and implementation architectures, evidences the requirement, both from the researcher's and the practitioner's standpoint, of sound theoretical foundations that can be applied directly in practice. We propose a cycle between theory and practice where theoretical approaches will support informed empirical studies of initiatives and enable the processes for future implementations, the analysis of which will lead to more encompassing theories. Upon this proposition, we present a theoretical analysis of e-government evolution and subsequently test the results of this analysis against two real-life cases. The juxtaposition of the theoretical positions and the practical findings leads us to the development of a set of guidelines for the analysis and design of e-government information systems. We frame these guidelines into an existing reference model for information systems development. Thus, the paper's contribution lies on three axes: first, the furthering of a theoretical perspective of e-government; second, the combination of theory and practice in the effort to understand practical particularities of the field; and third, the introduction of a usable set of design guidelines that can be applied in future implementations.