A Goal Oriented and Knowledge Based e-Government Project Management Platform Demetrios Sarantis National Technical University of Athens dsaran@epu.ntua.gr Yannis Charalabidis National Technical University of Athens yannisx@epu.ntua.gr Dimitris Askounis National Technical University of Athens askous@epu.ntua.gr Abstract There is a growing need for better project management in e-Government endeavors to bring together people with diverse knowledge and skills so they can develop and implement project activities effectively and efficiently. This paper is a research report on eGTPM (e-Government Transformation Project Management) platform, a project management tool which assists implementers and decision-makers in e-Government project planning and control. eGTPM Platform improves most existing commercial tools by integrating goal orientation and dynamic enterprise modeling (DEM) principles into the knowledge building tool developed at the Decision Systems Laboratory in National Technical University of Athens. By employing goal orientation and DEM principles’ concepts, eGTPM facilitates communication and collaboration among all involved parties in order to jointly identify project needs and requirements and to reduce the number of changes due to misunderstandings. eGTPM also includes a knowledge based project control advisor which contains heuristic knowledge to guide users to possible design alternatives. The paper describes eGTPM's components and possible directions for future work. 1. Introduction e-Government projects hold the promise of optimizing and improving services provision and increasing the productivity and efficiency of public administration established work processes. Yet, few development projects deliver on this potential, instead falling victim to any of a collection of pitfalls. Examples of implementation problems, delays and failures in the area of e-Government can be found in practically all countries [1], [2]. In Germany, for instance, the failure to set up a satellite-based highway toll system has led to a national debacle, a loss of 156- 180 million euros per month since then and calls for resignation of the transport minister [3]. In UK, a social benefit-payment card scheme is reported to have collapsed after three years, wasting 300 million British Pounds. In 1999, problems with the Passport Office’s new computer system caused chaos for thousands of travelers [4]. Another case to be added concerned the Customs and Excise’s switch to paying VAT online, which caused major problems in 2002. In Austria, the implementation of an electronic insurance card in the health system has been delayed for several years. After the continued failure of an international consortium to provide the e-card, the Federation of Social Insurances finally cancelled the contract in spring 2003 after two years and started a new tender [5]. Project managers, decision-makers and public administration employees are all too familiar with implementation and management hindrances that render the project obsolete before its completion, project escalation and costs that spiral out of control, and deterioration of communication among stakeholders. Furthermore, as the complexity and importance of e-Government applications increase, the implications of failed development efforts are magnified. An effective project management process, therefore, is critical to the successful completion of development work. Most often e-Government project failure is not due to technical problems, uncontrollable forces, or the people involved but simply to bad project management [6], [7]. The managerial causes of e-Government project failure include failure to properly control the project (i.e., knowing what to watch for, when to act, and what to do), inadequate e-Government project’s planning and goals definition [8]. Unclear project needs, poor work breakdown structures and lack of stakeholder involvement, at an early stage, in defining project requirements and scope are major contributors to the instability, conflict and numerous change requests which lead to rework, delay and failure. This paper presents a collaborative e-Government project management platform that helps alleviate the problems arising from the specific characteristics of e- Government projects. The placement of the specific paper in the overall research methodology framework is illustrated in section 2. Related work in the area of project management tools is presented in section 3. Specific e- Government characteristics related to project 1 Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2010 978-0-7695-3869-3/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE