Abstract:E-government is a move towards more use of networked information technologies in governments' services to citizens and companies. There will be strong expectations that these services are well co-ordinated and interoperable with the applications of citizens and companies. IT co-ordination is difficult, expensive and risk prone. The wide range of products and services in government makes co-ordination even harder. Co-ordination of egovernment should therefore be carefully prioritised and the ambitions should be set at a reasonable level. Analysis shows that ambitions are often unrealistic, and that political goals seem to dominate over effective, stepwise approaches to co-ordination. On a pragmatic level, there is a need to focus on simpler, process-oriented mechanisms for co-ordination and to improve governments as software organisations. There are considerable challenges in the typical split of work between ministries and operative agencies in government.public administration, e-government, IT co-ordination, technology adoption, information infrastructure