Design in e-Government curricula: Bottom-up vs. top-down

Design should be a key paradigm in e-government curricula, because e-government is the design of new administrative, organizational and technical systems. For the technical aspects of e-government, a design perspective may guide the identification of topics that a curriculum should cover, such as software architecture, and the selection or development of approaches to teaching them. A survey of recently published ACM and IEEE curriculum reports indicates that their main approach to the teaching of technical design is bottom-up. In a bottom-up approach, the subsystems of a system are studied as a prerequisite for understanding the design of the system as a whole. Two alternative approaches are sketched: generic design and top-down design. While the latter approaches are less prevalent and perhaps less well understood, they deserve further exploration because they may provide the only realistic road for students to ever reach the point of studying the level of an e-government (or other) system as a whole.