Mobile government: A challenge for agriculture

Mobile government (or mGovernment) is a subset of electronic government comprising an alternative provisioning channel of governmental information and services. Governments are increasingly making efforts to provide more access to information and services for citizens, businesses, and civil servants through wireless devices. One of the future challenges for the implementation of mGovernment is the creation of effective business cases (e.g. tourism, health, agriculture). Within this context, the scope of this paper is to study the deployment of mGovernment services in the agricultural sector, taking into account its peculiarities, priorities, and needs. The objective of this paper is twofold: first, to present a framework for identifying appropriate and cost-effective mGovernment services for the agricultural sector and, second, to illustrate the application of the proposed framework, describing a case study for a particular agribusiness sector. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.