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If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to promote academic discourse around the understanding of the concept of value of eGovernment and how a diverse set of benefits or values can be realized from eGovernment efforts. Design/methodology/approach -The paper is designed as a viewpoint paper with emphasis on grounding a set of arguments on current practice and relevant scholarly papers. Findings -Although not based on a formal, structured review, the paper proposes that the concept of value in relation to eGovernment is insufficiently discussed and defined in the eGovernment literature. Based on the high failure rates of eGovernment efforts, it further proposes that structured approaches to benefits realization, in combination with increased focus on (public) value, can be fruitful avenues for future research. The complexity of the context and the research challenges makes interdisciplinary research teams a necessity. Originality/value -If addressed, the research propositions can lead to an increased understanding of the complexity of the concept of value related to eGovernment. Further, the propositions promote research that can lead to more pertinent documentation of the actual value of various eGovernment efforts as well as research of good practice on how government organizations can increase their opportunities to maximize value from their eGovernment spendings.

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In this paper, we present a research-in-progress study that examines the characteristics of IT-departments that consist of a single employee. Spurred by the findings of a master's student project, we examined the data from another study we had conducted that revealed that fully 44% of municipalities in a Scandinavian country have such one-person-departments. Our survey also revealed that these "departments" provide full service to the municipalities which are quite heavy users of IT services. The obvious question is "how is it possible for the apparently skeletal IT department to provide full service?" Have we stumbled upon a new form of organizing the IT function? In this paper, we aim to map such departments to the models and frameworks that appear in the IS literature. We plan to conduct a series of interpretive case studies to understand how and why this structure emerged and what implications this has for IT personnel employed in these departments and the IT service delivery for organizations.