Explaining the eGovernment paradox: an analysis of two decades of evidence from scientific literature and practice on barriers to eGovernment

Despite the plethora of research, policy analysis and practice works produced in the last two decades for explaining the potential of eGovernment and its impact on society, there is still very limited evidence that the promised productivity gains have been achieved. To date, its potential remains hypothetical. This eGovernment paradox contrasts the level of investments with the little impact produced and/or demonstrated so far. In this paper we attempt to provide an interpretation of this paradox, looking specifically at the sharp mismatch between the supply of online public services (deployment) and their usage (adoption), which we define as the "Adoption paradox". The paper on the bases of a systematic review of the adoption barriers uncovered by almost twenty years of scientific and practitioner-generated analysis and evidence, rises the conclusions that, in most mature governments, the key barriers to real take up of eGovernment are those related to the lack of both a structured policy evaluation process and an effective stakeholders' engagement. The paper suggests that the critical success factor for eGovernment adoption is a transparent and trustworthy policy decision making process and that its key prerequisite is the definition and implementation of a well organized and fully participatory evaluation framework.