Text 7. The Effects of Information Pollution.

· The first commercial text message was sent in December 1992. Today the number of text messages sent and received everyday, exceeds the total population of the planet.

B lack Technologies – different means used by the mass media to purposefully shape the negative/ positive opinion of society about a particular person, institution, process, etc. To discredit e.g. some organisation, a newspaper could publish articles intentionally providing wrong information about the organisation's activities, while emphasising the right behaviour of their competitors. This could destroy the good name of the company and prevent it from winning some important competitions.

B usiness Process Reengineering (BPR) – (re-engineering) is an approach to modernise and restructure main business processes in organisations with the aim to improving effectiveness, efficiency, service performance (productivity), and quality of products and services, whilst at the same time reducing costs and effort, and exploiting the potentials of modern ICT. BPR requires profound reconsideration of functions and radical redesign. Motivators are a rapid reaction to market changes and responding quickly to changing customer needs.

R SS – (most commonly translated as "Really Simple Syndication" but sometimes "Rich Site Summary") – is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.

C ertificate – In practical terms, a certificate is a digital identity card or a digital certification provided with a digital signature. A digital certificate from a certificate authority enables a person to prove his or her authenticity and to verify that a public key does indeed belong to its owner. Certificates are not only issued to identify and authenticate persons but also the organizations, servers, application programs etc. in a network. A certificate has a given validity and can be revoked or disabled by a certificate authority.

C hip Card – The term Chip Card describes different forms of plastic cards with an embedded microchip. Two types of chip cards can be distinguished: cards which simply store information (memory cards) and cards which are able to store and process data (smart cards or integrated circuit cards (ICC)). The latter are used e.g. for authentication (see signature card) or for electronic payment

C omputer-supported (or computer-mediated) Communication – the computer supported forwarding of messages between two or more persons. These are, for example, eMails, posts on bulletin boards or chat messages. Characteristics of this kind of communication are: independence of the communication partners from their locations, the communication is mostly text based, the communication partners do not have to know each other and a communication between several persons is possible.

C ontrolling –describes systems, concepts and instruments for the controlling and coordination of operative and strategic management in an organization. Controlling supports the management unit by delivering relevant management information to control and steer an organization. Thus it also supports decision-making processes.

D ata protection – an emerging need, which is addressed in several initiatives to provide a range of measures to protect personal and sensitive data from unauthorised public access, and to control the flow of such sensitive data and information.

D atabase – an electronic memory for saving and managing a large amount of data. It is concertedly used by different programs and users and provides fast access to stored data.

D imension – a variable depicting two opposing extremes on the future of eGovernment in 2020 and is a particular type of issue. For example, in the dimension "trust in government", one extreme is "distrust in government" and the other extreme is a "high trust in government". A dimension has at least two opposing topics, (i.e. denoting the extremes) and can contain further topics along the scale.

E ffectiveness – the extent to which an organisation or programme accomplishes its mission, goals, and objectives, especially from the perspective of key stakeholders. It is part of the three Es (Economy, Efficiency and Effectiveness). If Economy means spending less (reduce input), and Efficiency spending well (more output for a given amount of input), Effectiveness is spending wisely, that is use input in such a way as to maximise the likelihood of achieving a maximum outcome.

E nvironment – a dimension which indicates that the future can either be stable or disruptive. A stable environment can be characterised by economic growth, a balanced world order, living in harmony, prosperity and welfare. Whereas in a disruptive environment all kinds of crises, terrorism attacks, cyber wars and other types of unexpected incidents occur. Also, religious tensions and a large social divide exist in an instable or disruptive environment.

G ap –is defined as a mismatch between the issues (dimensions or topic of interest) in the state of play and future scenarios, or a lack of recognition of issues that are not in the state of play but required in the future scenarios.

I nformation architecture – a component of an organisations enterprise architecture and refers to a snapshot of an organisations systems and information landscape. Thereby the interdependencies and information flows among system components, and the interfaces between them are described.

I nformation Overload – describes the circumstance where too much information is available and provided, and due to this overload, the right information cannot be identified and/or accessed quickly any more.

I nformation Society – describes an economic system and a form of society which is heavily influenced by, and based on information and communication technology (ICT). The attaining, storing, processing, spreading and use of information and knowledge plays an essential role in all areas of life.

I nformation Technology (IT) – the collective term for all technical processes and devices for automatic electronic data processing. It used to be called data processing or electronic data processing (EDP).

I nformation and Communication Technology (ICT) – the collective term for all technical processes and devices for electronic data processing and for the support of communication over electronic media. ICT extends the term Information Technology (IT) to include electronic communication.

N etworked governments – refer to the concept of governments being fully inter-linked with their partners and constituencies via modern ICT in order to fulfil their public duties. A key precondition thereby is full interoperability at all levels.

O nline Services – the collective term for all kinds of service offers which can be used over the Internet. It also includes basic (or trivial) services which only provide access to the Internet and to the available content.

O pen Source – software which is freely available. Arbitrary copying, use and distribution of the software is permitted. The source code is also freely accessible and visible for users and can be changed, passed on and published by other developers.

O penness – refers to the quality of an organisation, programme or society which encourages broad participation and multiple view points, and accepts new ideas and external influences.

P roject Management – refers to the planning, orchestration, organization and controlling of all activities relevant for a successful project implementation, including coordination and leadership of the project team.

S tandard – mostly used for common, well-known and generally approved rules for engineering approaches and solutions in specific contexts. When used as a synonym for norms, the expression refers to a set of legally approved rules which have undergone an official evaluation procedure at an (international) standardization organisation (ISO, ITU, W3C, etc.).

U sability – the degree to which users are able to use a system with the skills, knowledge, stereotypes and experience they can bring to bear.

W eblog (short: Blog) – derived from "web" and "log" and means an Internet logbook or web diary. These are web pages which are regularly updated with articles by one or more authors (so-called Bloggers). The articles are sorted by date and categories and are usually about a certain topic. Reader are often able provide feedbackcommenting on articles and discussions.