An investigation of electronic government transition case study in health: Hospitals in Erbil

Electronic government initiatives and public participation to them are among the indicators of today's development criteria of the countries. After consequent two wars, Iraq's current position in, for example, UN's e-government ranking is quite concerning and did not improve in recent years, either. In the preparation of this work, we are motivated with the fact that handling geographic data of the public facilities and resources are needed in most of the e-government projects; such examples are reported to the literature. Geographical information systems (GIS) provide most common tools not only to manage spatial data but also to integrate such type of data with nonspatial attributes of the features. With this background, this thesis proposes that establishing a working GIS in the health sector of Iraq would improve e-government applications. As the case study, investigating hospital locations in Erbil is chosen. The results show that setting up a GIS in Erbil does not require extreme technical knowledge; however, a strong limitation that obtaining clean and up-to-date data is an important concern. Although it is possible to establish a GIS in this sector, the starting point should not be acquiring hardware and software but to collect clean data from the field and to ensure that the data gets updated timely. Keywords: e-government, Iraq, Erbil, GIS, spatial data, hospital locations