Local e-Government Transformation - An International Comparison

Governments have invested vast amounts of time, public money, and effort into technologising and transforming public sector relationships, with the goal of achieving optimised government service delivery, governance, and constituency participation. To discover the extent that transformation has actually been achieved by local government organisations, this paper provides a cross-national comparison of local egovernment effectiveness as judged by internal stakeholders in Australia, Germany, and New Zealand. It appears that e-government continues to be viewed by the policymakers charged with developing it as something that supplements, rather than displaces, their traditional government services. Far from being transformative, only incremental improvements to internal procedures and service quality were reported. Electronic government (e-government) can be defined as the transformation of internal and external public sector relationships through Web-enabled operations, information technology and communications, with the aim of achieving optimised government service delivery, governance, and constituency participation (Baum, et al., 2000). Early e-government initiatives were characterised by rudimentary Web services that pushed information to citizens, although it soon became clear that newer e-commerce technologies promised greater interactions with citizens. Today it is widely accepted that e-government can transform public sector relationships through online services that are user-centred, convenient, integrated, proactive, inclusive, and efficient. By reengineering existing relationship processes with the aid of computer-based information and communications technologies (ICT) radical improvements to the delivery of public services are being enabled (HMGov, 2005); (Transformation, 2006). But to what extent has 'transformation' actually taken place? Has the traditional bureaucratic paradigm really been replaced by a new egovernment paradigm? The purpose of the present study was to determine to what extent e-government initiatives have actually achieved transformation within the local government sector. This sector was chosen in recognition of its unique customer-facing role. In stark contrast to similar studies the study considered the impact of e-government from the perspective of internal stakeholders and aimed to identify issues associated with the philosophy and implementation of e-government from the perspective of government itself. To increase the likelihood of detecting evidence of transformative e-government in action, a crossnational examination of e-Government effectiveness in Australia, Germany, and New Zealand is provided. The next section reviews relevant egovernment literature to highlight the research gaps addressed by the study. The context of the three case countries is then outlined before the research method and data collection procedures are described. Significant findings are then presented and the paper concludes with a general discussion, limitations and opportunities for further research. 361 Dillon S., Deakins E., Beverungen D., Kohlborn T., Hofmann S. and Rackers M.. Local e-Government Transformation An International Comparison. DOI: 10.5220/0004367803610367 In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2013), pages 361-367 ISBN: 978-989-8565-54-9 Copyright c 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)