Interorganizational attention network in the diffusion of innovative e-Government practices

The diffusion of innovative e-Government practices in times of economic crisis and shrinking budgets is especially challenging on the local government level. Agencies are forced to accomplish more tasks with fewer resources and are therefore hesitant to innovate without knowing the consequences. Our assumption is that diffusion of innovative e-Government practices takes place incrementally through a complex network of formal and informal relationships across agencies. Public managers use a variety of information sources for decision-making (Kraemer and Danziger, 1993). This is especially true for the local level where many different actors have an impact on the decision to implement e-Government innovations (Gil-Garcia and Martinez-Moyano, 2007). As a result, studies have shown that the diffusion of e-Government practices in the public sector spreads incrementally on the local level (West, 2005). Individual municipal governments often lack the infrastructure and resources needed in order to realize e-Government innovations and our hypothesis is that they turn to their peers for informal advice. So far, there is little evidence on how ICT is diffusing from innovators to late adopters within the complex system of federal, state and local government. To understand how these diffusion processes occur, we are using a social network approach to understand the informal information-sharing network among municipal CIOs in Switzerland that might help public managers to learn about best practices of their neighboring municipalities. In our initial data collection, we included 85 municipalities of one Swiss canton. We administered an online questionnaire, asking the municipal CIOs to indicate their informal information sharing approaches when it comes to ICT and best practices of e-Government solutions. In addition, we also collected information about the inter-agency interactions between the municipalities and the cantonal (state) agencies, to understand how formal, top-down information is spread through the system and might effect the municipal decision making when it comes to e-Government practices. The first results show a tight-knit - although sporadically used - network of information sharing between municipal CIOs to exchange best practices information, as well as a hubspoke network highlighting a hierarchy of attention towards those agencies considered as high performers.