Context. The electronic government has become a trend for transforming public management to comply with the performance of an efficient, modern state. The processes for public procurement and personnel recruitment represent an essential fraction of a country’s public spending. Objective. Maturity models are tools for assessing different management dimensions resulting in some level of organizational maturity on an ordinal scale which can show null, partial, or total progress towards the desired state. This paper presents an e-government maturity model for public procurement and personnel recruitment processes, based on a literature review to determine the current state of research in the field. Methodology. We have used a known procedural model from Becker to support the design of the proposed model. Later on, we have tested it with government buyers and personnel recruiters. Findings. These initial results show that users understand the questionnaires designed for the study, and their answers allow us to obtain deep validation. A tool with these characteristics can be handy for measuring the degree of transparency in public entities, thus reducing corruption levels in their processes. Conclusion. This proposal describes the complexity of variables that influence the transparency of a socio-technical process in public tenders. We describe five levels of transparency for software procurement through development projects. These classifications enable the maturity levels of the transparency of electronic procedures used by government agencies to be measured in different dimensions. Implications. One of the crucial challenges to increasing a government’s transparency is defining a regulatory or legal framework that regulates its processes and allows the levels of transparency or corruption to be measured in its different departments. Thus instruments and metrics play a crucial role in monitoring the expected change. With direct application in the industry, a model is an essential step for fundamental transparency in electronic governments.

Goal-oriented and agent-oriented modelling provides an effective approach to the understanding of distributed information systems that need to operate in open, heterogeneous and evolving environments. Frameworks, firstly introduced more than ten years ago, have been extended along language variants, analysis methods and CASE tools, posing language semantics and tool interoperability issues. Among them, the i* framework is one the most widespread. We focus on i*-based modelling languages and tools and on the problem of supporting model exchange between them. In this paper, we introduce the i* interoperability problem and derive an XML interchange format, called iStarML, as a practical solution to this problem. We first discuss the main requirements for its definition, then we characterise the core concepts of i* and we detail the tags and options of the interchange format. We complete the presentation of iStarML showing some possible applications. Finally, a survey on the i* community perception about iStarML is included for assessment purposes.

Over the last two decades, governments have increased their investment in information technology to improve the use of public resources, using public electronic procurement systems to obtain better prices, better solutions and to show transparency in the procurement process. Public procurement of software development projects is specific acquisitions having specific technical, methodological, and management constraints that make transparency an elusive target. This article proposes a maturity model as a tool to measure tendering transparency when government agencies procure software development. We have used a procedural model to support the design of maturity models along four dimensions: Institutionalization, Software procurement process, Communication, and Accountability. We have defined a five-step model, and we have tested it with real government buyers. The model is supported by an appraisal tool that helps to guide the next steps in the transparency of software acquisitions.