This Course is for students of Information Systems Engineering [Professional BA], National School of Applied Sciences, Safi-Morocco.

1. Glossary/Terminology I
ICT for Sustainable Development
Courses Prepared for Students of :
Licence Professionnelle: Ingénierie et Conception des Systèmes d’Information at
Ecole Nationale des Sciences Appliquées de Safi, School-Year 2004/2015.
- Redouane Boulguid boulguid.redouane@gmail.com
1. E-governance can be defined as the application of ICT
tools in (1) the interaction between government and citizens
and businesses, and (2) in internal government operations to
simplify and improve democratic governance.
Explanatory Note: E-Governance is the public sector’s use
of information and communication technologies with the aim
of improving information and service delivery, encouraging
citizen participation in the decision-making process and
making government more accountable, transparent and
effective. The concept of electronic governance chosen by the
Council of Europe covers the use of electronic technologies in
three areas of public action: - Relations between the public
authorities and civil society - Functioning of the public
authorities at all stages of the democratic process (electronic
democracy) - The provision of public services (electronic
public services). (E-Governance).
2. Accountability refers to the obligation on the part of public
officials to report on the use of public resources and
answerability for failing to meet stated performance
objectives. (Governance).
3.Accessibility refers to the accessibility of web pages to all
users. People with impaired sight, hearing, manual dexterity or
cognitive function encounter barriers when they attempt to use
the internet. (E-Governance).
4. Access Authorization: Giving access to the possibility to
communicate electronically. (E-Governance).
5. Assistive technologies comprise software and hardware that
is intended to assist disabled people with their daily activities.
In the area of information technology, some examples are
screen readers, screen magnifying glasses, special keys and
speech input software. (E-Governance).
6. Back-office Reengineering is the reorganization of
technology, processes, systems, skills and mindsets of public
officials in the government (achieved through integration,
consolidation and innovation in the back-end/back-office) to
achieve improved service delivery (front office - what the
citizen sees). (E-Governance).
7.Capacity:The ability of individuals, institutions and
societies to perform functions, solve problems, and set and
achieve objectives in a sustainable manner (UNDP, 2002).

2. There are three levels at which capacity should be developed:
Individual (experience, knowledge, technical level),
Organizational (organizational systems and procedures), and
Systemic or related to the enabling environment (policies,
legislation, social norms, etc.). (Capacity Development).
8.Citizen Participation implies the involvement of citizens in
a wide range of policymaking activities, including the
determination of levels of service, budget priorities, and the
acceptability of physical construction projects in order to
orient government programs toward community needs, build
public support, and encourage a sense of cohesiveness within
neighborhoods. There are many models of participation. At
one end of the scale sits information provision – a one-way
government-to-citizen provision in which a government
simply tells its citizenry what it wants them to know through
media or other means. At the other end is the active citizenship
or empowerment model, in which citizen groups are involved
in agenda-setting and decision-making and monitoring.
Following the continuum model of participation, the
International Association of Public Participation (IAP2)
conceptualizes participation in five categories of relationships:
inform, consult, involve, collaborate and empower (UN World
Public Sector Report 2008). (Decentralized and
Participatory Governance).
9. Civil society includes voluntary civic and social
associations that are not part of the state, private sector or the
extended family. Each civil society organization, and its
members, may be seeking to advance broad social interests,
narrow group interests, or even narrower individual interests
(pecuniary or recreational). (Citizen Participation and Pro-
Poor Budgeting, DPADM-UNDESA, United Nations, 2005).
Civil society is a vital component of governance and
decentralization, the one component that is supposed to
vigilantly hold those in power accountable and to promote
democracy. Simply put, civil society is that sphere of action
independent of the State, within the realm of civil
organizations, capable of stimulating resistance to and change
in undemocratic regimes. (Decentralized and Participatory
Governance).
10.Communication Technology: Technology used to
transmit information. Thus, in the context of “e-government”,
communication technology primarily refers to computer
networks such as the internet and other data connections, but
also includes fax, telephone, mobile phone. (E-Governance).
11. Community development is an approach to the
administration of social and economic development programs
in which government officials are dispatched to the field to act
as catalysts at the local level, encouraging local residents to
form groups, define their own needs, and develop self-help
projects. The government provides technical and material
assistance and helps the community establish institutions, such
as farm cooperatives, to carry on the development programs

3. after the officials have left. (Decentralized and Participatory
Governance).
12.E-democracy is the utilization of electronic
communications technologies, such as the Internet, to enhance
democratic processes, including elections, forums and other
participatory means. It is a relatively new political
development, as well as the subject of much debate and
activity within government, civic-oriented groups and
societies around the world. (E-Governance).
13. Electronic Government:
1. E-government is the application of Information and
Communication Technology (ICTs) within Public
Administration to optimize its internal and external functions.
(Source: DPADM/DESA, 2003).
2. E-Government refers to the use by government agencies of
information technologies (such as Wide Area Networks, the
Internet, and mobile computing) that have the ability to
transform relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of
government. (Source: World Bank, 2009).
(E-Governance).
14.E-participation refers both to government programs that
encourage participation from the citizen and the willingness of
the citizen to do so. It encompasses both the demand and the
supply side. E-participation, as defined in the UN Global
Reports, aims to achieve these objectives through the means
of: a. Increasing e-information to citizens for decision making;
b. Enhancing e-consultation for deliberative and participatory
processes; and c. Supporting e-decision making by increasing
the input of citizens in decision making.
(E-Governance).
15.Ethics:The standards which guide the behaviour and
actions of personnel in public institutions and which may be
referred to as moral laws (UN Charter for the Public Service in
Africa). The "ethics infrastructure" includes measures to
enhance and preserve organizational integrity, access to
information that promotes transparency and accountability,
and oversight by independent institutions and the public at
large. (Governance).
16.Engaged governance is ‘an institutional arrangement that
links people more directly to the decision-making processes in
a manner that does not by-pass the representational democracy
but complements it.’ (United Nations, 2005a).
Explanatory Note: Engaged governance enables citizens to
influence more directly the decision-making process of the
State so as to increase their influence on public policies and
programmes with a view to ensuring a more positive impact
on their social and economic lives. It has become an
increasingly significant feature of public governance in the
past ten years. Driven initially by new public management
techniques in both the developed and developing countries and

4. by d-nor agencies in the developing world, it has become a
practical enhancement to representative democracy, a keystone
to democratisation and crucial to the rebuilding of post-
conflict states. Enhanced civic engagement in public affairs
has the potential to yield pro-poor benefits, re-arrange political
institutions of decision-making, deepen democracy, create new
citizenship values, and enhance accountability and
transparency in public governance and indeed, build trust in
government. The report emphasizes that it is no longer a
question of whether participation works or if it is necessary,
rather how it should be done. (UNDESA 2008 World Public
Sector Report).
(Decentralized and Participatory Governance).
17.Globalization is increased global integration and
interdependence. It has a multidimensional character:
economic, political, social, and cultural. It is characterized by
unprecedented rapid flows of goods and services: private
capital, circulation of ideas and tendencies and the emergence
of new social and political movements. (UNDESA, World
Public Sector Report New York, 2001). (Governance).
18. Governance is “the exercise of economic, political and
administrative authority to manage a country’s affairs at all
levels. It comprises the mechanisms, processes and institutions
through which citizens and groups articulate their interests,
exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations and mediate
their differences” (UNDP, 1997). (Governance).
19. Good governance entails sound public sector
management (efficiency, effectiveness and economy),
accountability, exchange and free flow of information
(transparency), and a legal framework for development
(justice, respect for human rights and liberties) (World Bank).
In seeming agreement with the World Bank, the Overseas
Development Administration of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland (now the Department for
International Development), defines good governance by
focusing on four major components namely legitimacy
(government should have the consent of the governed);
accountability (ensuring transparency, being answerable for
actions and media freedom); competence (effective
policymaking, implementation and service delivery); and
respect for law and protection of human rights. (Governance).
20. Hierarchy: A characteristic of formal bureaucratic
organizations a clear vertical "chain of command" in which
each unit is subordinate to the one above it and superior to the
one below it one of the most common features of
governmental and other bureaucratic organizations.
(Leadership & Human Resources).
21.Human Capital: The set of skills which an employee
acquires on the job, through training and experience, and
which increase that employee's value in the marketplace is
human capital. Human capital refers to the properties of
individuals. (Leadership & Human Resources).

5. 22.Human resources is a term with which many
organizations describe the combination of traditionally
administrative personnel functions with performance,
Employee Relations and resource planning.
The field draws upon concepts developed in
Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Human resources has at
least two related interpretations depending on context. The
original usage derives from political economy and economics,
where it was traditionally called labor, one of four factors of
production. The more common usage within corporations and
businesses refers to the individuals within the firm, and to the
portion of the firm's organization that deals with hiring, firing,
training, and other personnel issues. (Leadership & Human
Resources).
23. Human security means protecting vital freedoms. It
means protecting people from critical and pervasive threats
and situations, building on their strengths and aspirations. It
also means creating systems that give people the building
blocks of survival, dignity and livelihood. Human security
involves different types of freedoms: freedom from want;
freedom from fear; and freedom to take action on one’s own
behalf. (Governance).
24. Innovation is a creative idea and implementation, which is
different from invention. It is the act of conceiving and
implementing a new way of achieving a result and/or
performing work. An innovation may involve the
incorporation of new elements, a new combination of existing
elements or a significant change or a departure from traditional
ways of doing things. It refers to new products, new policies
and programmes, new approaches and new processes. Public
sector management innovation may also be defined as the
development of new policy designs and new standard
operating procedures by public organizations to address public
policy problems. Thus, an innovation in public administration
may be an effective, creative and unique answer to new
problems or a new answer to old problems. (Public
Administration Institutions, Policies and Processes).
25. Knowledge Management: Knowledge management
refers to how an organization gathers, organizes, produces,
shares, and analyzes its knowledge in terms of resources,
documents, and people skills. Strategies and processes
designed to identify, capture, structure, value, leverage, and
share an organization's intellectual assets to enhance its
performance and competitiveness. It is based on two critical
activities: (1) capture and documentation of individual explicit
and tacit knowledge, and (2) its dissemination within the
organization. (E-Governance).
26. Ombudsman is a term of Scandinavian origin, then
adopted in many countries and in international organizations.
The term indicates a public body charged with vast powers,
including the control on public administration acts and the

6. redress of complaints against maladministration. (Public
Administration Institutions, Policies and Processes).
27. Transparency refers to unfettered access by the public to
timely and reliable information on decisions and performance
in the public sector, as well as on governmental political and
economic activities, procedures and decisions (UN/DPADM,
"Public Sector Transparency and Accountability in Arab
Countries: Policies and Practices", p.11. (Governance).
Source: http://www.unpan.org/

7. redress of complaints against maladministration. (Public
Administration Institutions, Policies and Processes).
27. Transparency refers to unfettered access by the public to
timely and reliable information on decisions and performance
in the public sector, as well as on governmental political and
economic activities, procedures and decisions (UN/DPADM,
"Public Sector Transparency and Accountability in Arab
Countries: Policies and Practices", p.11. (Governance).
Source: http://www.unpan.org/