A framework for analyzing cross-boundary e-government projects: the CapWin example

E-government has been a major beneficiary of Internet-enabled interorganizational systems (hereafter, IOS). IOS permit participating partners to share information and coordinate processes to achieve efficiencies in existing operations as well as to support new and more effective processes. These benefits do not come easily, given the challenges of coordinating IOS design and implementation. Moreover, the size and complexity of the federalist U.S. government tends to exacerbate the challenges of collaboration. The success of an IOS depends upon more than the ability of participating organizations and agencies to implement a good technology solution, although this is clearly a key factor in such a project. IOS designers, sponsors and participants also must take into consideration a number of environmental and organizational factors. In this paper, we propose a framework to describe the environmental, organizational and project specific factors that contribute to the success of an IOS. We illustrate this framework by describing a specific e-government IOS project, CapWIN.