Bottom-Up eGovernment Environmental Factors (BUeEF): Facilitated Building and Implementation of eGovernment Systems in the SADC Region

The Bottom-up eGovernment Environmental Factors (BUeEF) was designed to automatically build, derive and extract the relevant factors that helped determine to whether a nation had the capability to establish and implement a workable eGovernment system. This application was designed primarily for Southern African Development Community (SADC). Under the BUeEF work, a knowledge architecture was designed and developed to extract the required factors needed to determine if a particular country had the necessary factors and resources in place to determine whether eGovernment was feasible. The BUeEF architecture employed the framework of the SEMINT tool for identifying attribute correspondences in heterogeneous databases using neural networks. A key part of this tool is the SEMINT Specific Parser (SEMINT-SP) which was improved and trained to extract both the affordable and unaffordable factors. The extracted affordable and unaffordable factors were processed into a hierarchical priority list, which was used by National policy makers, eGovernment planners and developers to appropriate resources to the critical factors required to accomplish development of the eGovermnet system. Once the involved Nation strictly followed and completed the hierarchical priority list, it would be expected to manage, develop and implement the eGovernment system within a timely factor. In addition, the BUeEF applied the bottom-up approach rather than the top-down as this approach extensively involved the nationals from the grass-root level and narrowly climbed to engage the fewer elite. In that way the majority of the system users would be involved, which was one of the eGovernment's requirements.