Public Sector Transformation through E-Government

Experiences from Europe and North America

Vishanth Weerakkody, Christopher G. Reddick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136219252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Government & Business
• Index: Business

Over the last decade governments in Europe and North America have attempted to improve efficiency of public services through Information and Communication Technology, commonly branded as electronic government (e-government). Public Sector Transformation through E-Government explores the influence that e-government has on public sector organizations, the organizational complexities that result, and its impact on citizens and democratic society.

This book examines e-government's potential to transform public services from a theoretical perspective, and provides practical examples from leading public sector institutions that have utilized e-government as a basis to bring about change. It further investigates the relationship between citizens and government and how they are affected by e-government policies and programs. Aimed at students and researchers of public administration/management and information systems, this book serves as a welcome tool for examining and understanding e-government and transformational change.

1 Public Sector Transformation through E-Government

Vishanth Weerakkody and Christopher G. Reddick

TRANSFORMATION AND E-GOVERNMENT

Over the last decade, governments in Europe and North America in particular have intensified their efforts to improve efficiency of public services through electronic government (e-government) influenced transformation of public institutions. It is in every government’s interest to make their public services more efficient and available in order to gain citizens’ trust, which has often eluded many governments and political leaders in modern society. Such efforts are now seen by governments as a necessity rather than an option, whereas citizens consider it as their right to have access to government services at anytime from anywhere. In this backdrop, Public Sector Transformation through E-Government explores the influence that e-government has on transforming public sector institutions and the resulting organizational complexities that need to be tackled as well as its impact on citizens and democratic society. This book does this in the context of experiences in governments in Europe and North America.

E-government can be broadly viewed as the adoption of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in government institutions to improve public services. For many countries, e-government implementation efforts began in the late 1990s. Since then, the e-government influenced implementation of ICT in public administration has enabled governments to offer better, faster, and a more transparent way of delivering services to citizens and other stakeholders. Equally, it has also created a platform for better collaboration and information sharing between various government institutions. In the last few years in particular e-government implementation efforts in most countries have evolved from basic information provisioning online to more integrated service offerings. The implementation of such integrated online services has enabled public institutions to offer more joined-up and citizen-centric service facilitated primarily through cross-agency process and information systems transformation. However, public sector service transformation is a complex undertaking involving distributed decision-making that requires a good understanding of the political context, business processes and technology as well as design and engineering methods capable of transcending the traditional boundaries that exist between departmental silos in public institutions. Conversely, from a demand perspective extensive efforts are required to increase citizens’ awareness about the transformation of the delivery of government services and their online availability.

Transformation through e-government involves fundamentally changing the relationship between how governments interact with citizens as well as other stakeholders such as businesses and non-governmental organizations. In the context of highly strained economic resources and related social consequences, governments have been devoting signicant effort on reorganising public institutions through examining strategies for eliminating non-essential back office operations and management activities and providing platforms for different stakeholders to collaborate, participate, share resources to undertake work traditionally seen as the sole preserve of the public sector. In this respect, many governments have embraced new technologies such as Web 2.0 based social media applications to engage citizens in policy modelling through e-participation and worked towards enhancing transparency of their governance processes.

Yet, sceptics have argued whether these new ICT tools save the public sector money and make it more productive, as well as provide more trustful, engaging and useful services for citizens. Further, the continued debate about adoption looms large particularly in Europe as the take up of e-government services have been disappointing due to issues such as digital divide and social exclusion. In fact, the European Commission has repeatedly called for research into social inclusion in the realm of public service transformation and digital era government. In order to prevent digital divide and social exclusion in terms of using e-government services, it is necessary that citizens from all facets of society are equipped with basic ICT skills as well as access to high-speed Internet connections. Yet, despite the availability of innovative technologies, governments are faced with many technical, organizational, and socio-economic challenges that need to be addressed when developing, adopting, and diffusing e-government systems and services. Furthermore, from an organizational perspective e-govern-ment has introduced an environment where most public institutions such as healthcare, social services, education, employment and law enforcement have struggled with the need to balance issues such as transparency and opaqueness, or social inclusion and professionalism.

Consequently, there has been increasing pressure on the academic and practitioner communities for research that focuses on bridging the gap between e-government theory and practice as well as availability versus demand for services. In such as backdrop, various researchers and practitioners have attempted to offer insights into the implementation (Irani et al., 2007; 2008; Weerakkody & Dhillon, 2008; Weerakkody et al., 2007a; Janssen et al., 2007; Weerakkody & Choudrie, 2005; Kamal et al., 2009; Beynon-Davies & Martin, 2004), acceptance (Carter & Belanger, 2005), and diffusion (Alsha & Weerakkody, 2008; Warkentin et al., 2002) of e-government services. The last few years have seen e-government being regarded with the same level of importance that electronic business (e-busi-ness) was treated with in the mid-1990s.

When examining e-government literature, it can be concluded that principally three key themes have emerged in published research on e-gov-ernment. These include (a) research that examine the implementation of e-government from a policy-oriented perspective that includes strategic, organizational, technical, and wider socio-political dimensions (Irani et al., 2007; 2008; Weerakkody & Dhillon, 2008; Beynon-Davies & Martin, 2004; Ramaswamy & Selian, 2007; Janssen et al., 2005; 2007); (b) studies that take a citizen-centric perspective on e-government through adoption and diffusion or in other words e-participation research (Niehaves et al., 2009; Niehaves & Becker, 2008; Al-Sha & Weerakkody, 2008; Carter & Belanger, 2005; Warkentin et al., 2002; Welch et al., 2005; Huang, 2007); and (c) research that explore the complexities of transforming governance practices in an e-government context (O’Donnel et al., 2003; Ramaswamy & Selian, 2007; Irani et al., 2007; Weerakkody at al., 2007b). Therefore, the themes of policy modelling, participation and governance emerge as key areas for research in the area of e-government influenced public sector transformation as this book explores.

From a conceptual angle, a review of the extant literature also suggests that despite committed efforts, many countries have struggled to successfully achieve transformational change in public institutions due to various organizational, social, political and technology related challenges (Irani et al., 2007; 2008; Beynon-Davies & Martin, 2004). Studies have conrmed that implementing transformational change in the public sector through e-government involves a radical paradigm shift in comparison to any previous efforts of organizational change seen in the public sector. Moreover, to realize transformational change, public institutions will need radical changes in core processes across organizational boundaries, in a manner that has not been seen before in the public sector (Andersen & Henriksen, 2006; Kim et al., 2007; Weerakkody, & Dhillon, 2008).

Consequently, success will require the ability to rethink processes in a cross-functional way as championed by management approaches such as business process reengineering (BPR). In this respect, public sector agencies have indeed tried to replicate concepts such as BPR, Lean Management, Total Quality Management, and Public Value Management with a view of improving key public services such as healthcare, social service, education, transportation and local government. Yet, although large sums of money have been invested in transforming such key public services in recent years, research has shown that these initiatives have not met the expectations of stakeholders and delivered policy outcomes which have resulted in services that facilitate social inclusion and democratic processes. Rather, the application of these management concepts to transform public institutions has resulted in the tax payers’ money not being sensibly utilized and in some cases created social exclusions. A broader example would be that of e-business ideas being borrowed from the private sector and applied in the context of e-government resulting in major digital divides and exclusions among citizens and inequality of service provision. While the implementation of such approaches and management concepts have proven difficult in the private sector, research suggests that government entities face even greater challenges (Fagan, 2006; Tan & Pan, 2003). Indeed, while much of the early e-government research efforts have focused on identifying and analysing these challenges that impact implementation, more recent research has emerged that identifies determinants of adoption and diffusion from a citizen-centric perspective. Nonetheless, very few studies have attempted to systematically synthesise theory with practice to generate knowledge about the gaps that exist between implementation and diffusion (service provider or government’s perspective on policy formulation and governance) and adoption (service recipient or citizens’ perspective on participation). This book attempts to provide both theory and practice of transformational change from e-government. This book offers readers the theoretical context of the potential of e-government to transform public services, and practical examples are provided from leading public sector institutions that have attempted to use e-government to bring about transformational change.

2 PLAN OF THE BOOK

The four main objectives of this book are to:

1. Understand the importance of e-government as a force for change in public sector organizations and how it has changed, or has not changed, service delivery in European and North American governments.
2. Understand both the benefits of e-government and transformational change for government and citizens and some of the challenges and complexities in its implementation in Europe and North America.
3. Explore the major schools of thoughts on e-government and related transformational change, and provide examples of public sector institutions through case studies that have used e-government to change their organization.
4. Understand the relationship between citizens and government and how they are affected by transformational change through e-govern-ment policies and programs.

There are three sections to the book that examine these objectives: (I) Transformation E-Government, (II) Benefits and Barriers to Transformation, and (III) T-Government and Public Service Delivery. Section I has chapters that deal with the important theories and concepts in transformational e-government research such as open government, service delivery reform, economic constraints, internal organizational change, and performance improvements. The overriding contribution to the research on transformational e-government is that change can occur as a result of e-government, but it is a slow process and often incremental process.

Section II discusses some of the benefits and barriers to transformation change from e-government. Again repeating some of the themes from Section I, the benefits are improvements in service delivery and increased participation by citizens in the process of governance. However, the barriers are the digital divide, or those groups that are left out of the development of e-government for transformation change.

Section III, the final section of the book, focuses on transformation government or T-Government and public service delivery. As we learned from previous chapters the overriding and notable contribution of T-Govern-ment is to improve service delivery for public sector organizations. This chapter as a result provides examples of improvements in service delivery through increased collaboration, improved technologies, shared services, and increased channel choice.

REFERENCES

Alsha, S., & Weerakkody, V. (2008). The use of wireless Internet parks to facilitate adoption and diffusion of e-government services: An empirical study in Qatar, Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), Toronto, Canada, August.

Andersen, K., & Henriksen, H. (2006). E-government maturity models: Extension of the Layne and Lee model. Government Information Quarterly, 23(2), 236–248.

Beynon-Davis P., & Martin S. (2004). Electronic local government and the modernization agenda: Progress and prospects for public service improvement. Local Government Studies, 30(2), 214–229.

Carter, L., & Belanger, F. (2005). The utilization of e-government services: Citizen trust, innovation and acceptance factors. Information Systems Journal, 15(1), 5–25.

Fagan, M. (2006). Exploring city, county and state e-government initiatives: An East Texas perspective, Business Process Management Journal, 12(1), 101–112.

Huang, Z. (2007). A Comprehensive analysis of US counties’ e-Government portals: Development status and functionalities. European Journal of Information Systems, 16(2), 149–164.

Irani, Z., Elliman, T., & Jackson, P. (2007). Electronic transformation of government in the UK: A research agenda. European Journal of Information Systems, 16(4), 327–335.

Irani, Z., Love, P. E. D., & Jones, S. (2008). Learning lessons from evaluating e-government: Reflective case experiences that support transformational government. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 17(2), 155–164.

Janssen, M., Joha, A., & Weerakkody, V. (2007). Shared service arrangements in the public sector: An exploratory study. Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, Emerald, 1(3), 271–284.

Janssen, M., Kuk, G., & Wagenaar, R. W. (2005). A Survey of E-Government Business Models in the Netherlands, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC), Xi’an, China.

Kamal, M. M., Weerakkody, V., & Jones, S. (2009), The case of EAI in facilitating e-government services in a Welsh authority. International Journal of Information Management, 29(2), 161–165.

Kim, H., Pan, G., & Pan, S. (2007). Managing IT-enabled transformation in the public sector: Case study on e-government in South Korea. Government Information Quarterly, 24, 338–352.

Niehaves, B., & Becker, J. (2008). The age-divide in e-government—Data, interpretations, theory fragments. Towards Sustainable Society on Ubiquitous Networks, Volume 286, 279–287.

Niehaves, B., Ortbach, K., & Becker, J. (2009). The demographic challenge: aging and depopulation and their consequences for O’Donnel, O., Boyle, R., & Timonen, V. (2003). Transformational aspects of e-government in Ireland: Issues to be addressed. Electronic Journal of e-Government, 1(1), 23–32. Retrieved May 24, 2007, from htt­p:/­/ww­w.e­jeg­.com

Ramaswami, M., & Selian, A. (2007). E-Gover...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Innovation, Organization and Technology
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• 1 Public Sector Transformation through E-Government
• PART I Transformational E-Government
• PART II Benefits and Barriers to Transformation
• PART III T-Government and Public Service Delivery
• Contributors
• Index