ABSTRACT
Identity management (IDM) has come to be at the heart of E-Government policy agendas throughout the world. As E-Government is evolving to transactional service applications, government needs new digitised personal identification and authentication to solve the emerging identity questions online: How can we ‘know’ the individual wanting to access online transactional public services? How can we make sure that that individual is indeed entitled or authorised to access these services? New IDM systems in E-Government service provision not only appear to enhance government’s service-providing capabilities to the citizen, but also are supposed to offer enhanced customer convenience, trust, efficiency and effectiveness of public service provision and public safety, including law enforcement, for instance. It may not be surprising, therefore, that many governments perceive these newly available IDM means as the sine qua non for modernising or even transforming E-Government and for promoting the uptake of E-Government services.1
