Secure and privacy-preserving eGovernment: best practice Austria

In the past, contact with public authorities often appeared as winding way for citizens. Enabled by the tremendous success of the Internet, public authorities aimed to react on that shortcoming by providing various governmental services online. Due to these services, citizens are not forced to visit public authorities during office hours only but have now the possibility to manage their concerns everywhere and anytime. Additionally, this user friendly approach also decreases costs for public authorities. Austria was one of the first countries that seized this trend by setting up a nation-wide eGovernment infrastructure. The infrastructure builds upon a solid legal framework supported by various technical concepts preserving security and privacy for citizens. These efforts have already been awarded in several international benchmarks that have reported a 100% online availability of eGovernment services in Austria. In this paper we present best practices that have been followed by the Austrian eGovernment and that have paved the way for its success. By virtually following a traditional governmental procedure and mapping its key stages to corresponding online processes, we provide an insight into Austria's comprehensive eGovernment infrastructure and its key concepts and implementations. This paper introduces the most important elements of the Austrian eGovernment and shows how these components act in concert in order to realize secure and reliable eGovernment solutions for Austrian citizens.