Abstract
in essence, governments are information-intensive service enterprises. Electronic government (e-government also known as digital government, online government, among others) is an effort to address the issues in operations, information and IT. It aims to create open and efficient interactions among many stakeholders, e.g. governments, citizens, and business enterprises [10, 14, 19, 30]. in this paper, we detail the importance of information sharing in support of citizen-based service delivery and e-government initiatives. We also describe a study of 12 New York State municipalities and their specific needs and challenges relating to service delivery. We then present our research work on the Municipal Shared Services Cloud, and describe how this technology can be used to deliver municipal government IT services more efficiently and at a lower cost while providing enhanced and customizable information sharing capabilities. © 2011 IEEE.