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Volume 6 Issue 1
Customer Orientation in e-Government Project Management: a Case Study
Mohammed Arif
School of Built Environment, University of Salford, Manchester, UK
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Customer orientation is vital for success in today’s competitive environment. Jaworski and Kohli (1993) proposed a model to measure customer orientation comprising three components: 1) intelligence generation; 2) intelligence dissemination; and 3) organization-wide responsiveness. This model has been applied in several sectors. The flexibility of this model lends itself to applying it in analyzing a project in e-Government. This paper applies it to an e-Government organization of a municipality. The organization has four major types of people involved in implementation of the e-Government project: 1) Service Custodian; 2) Business Analysts; 3) Systems Analysts; and 4) Programmers. To apply the model, semi-structured interviews were conducted in the organization. The focus was primarily on assessing the project implementation processes followed. Some of the major findings were: 1) an absence of concurrency in the design process; 2) a lack of input in the technology selection; 3) an absence of a knowledge management system for sharing lessons learnt; 4) a reactive nature of the organization; 5) use of different personnel for design and troubleshooting; and 6) a lack of training and standardized procedures. Although, all these findings should be viewed under the backdrop of the fact that the organization had a very aggressive timeline and limited resources in meeting the deadline mandated by the government, and hence very little effort was made to proactively seek opportunities for improvement, a practice that is changing now. This research accomplishes three major purposes. The first is to elucidate customer orientation, as presented in other disciplines, the second is to elucidate how elements of customer orientation relate to e-Government, and third one was to demonstrate how customer orientation concepts can be used to suggest improvements in e-Government Project Management. All three purposes were achieved through the case study presented.
Keywords:
e-government, IT project management, customer orientation
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