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Volume 4 Issue 1 November 2006
e-Government: Five Key Challenges for Management
Kim Viborg Andersen,
Department of Informatics, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
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The quest to implement e-government is motivated by policy goals of increased effectiveness, efficiency, and information quality, improved interaction mechanisms and in turn, better governance tools. The e-government literature has paid substantial interest to the application of IT to help transaction focused goals be reached.
By contract, there has been limited attention to IT as a complementary mean to strategic management. Although there are being implemented various e-government services for citizens and private companies, the approach to e-government needs to be aligned with the organizational transformation of the public sector. The modern organizational literature on the public sector is arguing that the “traditional” closed and in-house communication patterns are supplemented and to some degree replaced by more open and transparent communication patterns.
Given that this general transformation of the public sector is occurring, there is a need to view the users of the public services as digital entities rather than physical entities, and consequently align the e-government application towards the external users rather than the in-house needs. To fulfill this need, this paper explores five management propositions: 1) confront the demand paradox of e-government, 2) identify the gate-keeping mechanisms of the digital street-level bureaucrats in government, 3) use IT as a mean to reduce the high labor intensity in public service provision, 4) critical assess the employees’ readiness for e-government, and 5) build IT-competences within government.
Keywords:
e-government, strategy, management, demand, entities, gate-keeping mechanisms, labor intensity, readiness, competence
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