Strategies and Challenges on the Accessibility and Interoperability of e-Government Web Portals: A Case Study on Brazilian Federal Universities

Abstract

The low adoption of standards defined by the federal government may be preventing Brazilian e-government to reach more mature levels. In this context, the aim of this paper is to present an investigation we conducted in the Brazilian education sector to check whether federal universities comply with e-government standards when developing their web portals and which are their main strategies and challenges in this environment. Results show that most federal universities' main web portals do not follow important standards because the IT teams cannot cope with the combination of staff shortage, high demand, tight deadlines, and the lack of specific development methods. Such findings point to many possible improvements on the Brazilian Digital Government scenario that may also be useful to governments of developing countries.