Managing e‐Government: value positions and relationships

Abstract

Abstract. Public sector managers take much of the responsibility for selecting, commissioning, implementing and realising benefits from information technology (IT) projects. However, e-Government initiatives often suffer from complexity, vision failure, lack of goal clarity and insufficient commitment. These problems may stem from value traditions that are deeply ingrained in managers' cultural environments but not always in harmony with each other. A first step towards working with value complexity is to understand it; we synthesise a model of value positions for e-Government derived from major traditions in the public administration literature. Four value positions relevant to e-Government together with their IT assumptions are identified; they reflect the ideals of professionalism, efficiency, service and engagement. A qualitative investigation of Danish local authority managers displays both value congruence and value divergence. The interpretive study results in a theoretical model that combines value positions and relationships, and the model's implications for researchers and practitioners in focusing successful e-Government initiatives are outlined.

Useful business cases: value creation in IS projects

“…Other researchers emphasize the pluralistic, formative, and social dimensions of IS value. This line of research indicates the importance of managerial action in creating value from IS while addressing the lack of clarity in goals and expected values of IS investmentsparticularly in public organizations (Frisk et al, 2014;Frisk et al, 2015;Rose et al, 2015b). This paper extends the latter line of research by focusing on the operational synthesis of value creation with business cases in IS projects.…”

“…With collaborative practice research, usefulness addresses on the one hand the practitioners' concern for situated use in public organizations and on the other hand the research concern for empirically based synthesis of IS research on business cases (Ward et al, 2008;Maes et al, 2014) and value creation (Ward & Daniel, 2006;Rose et al, 2015b).…”

“…The concept of value has multiple dimensions that make it difficult to work with in practice and conceptualize as a construct for IS research Rose et al, 2015b). In the substantial body of IS literature on value, the discussion frays into many lines of thought in various directions that 4 make the value construct ambiguous and fuzzy (Schryen, 2013).…”

“…Furthermore, we present literature on the value creation process based on benefits management research, which is a prominent approach to support value creation from IS investments (Ward & Daniel, 2006 (Kohli & Grover, 2008;Yassaee & Mettler, 2015), but in public organizations particularly, a broader pluralistic view on value is needed (Frisk et al, 2014). The research on IS in public organizations proposes numerous conceptualizations of value that include less tangible and measurable attributes (Bannister, 2002;Persson & Goldkuhl, 2010;Bannister & Connolly, 2014;Rose et al, 2015b). For example, Rose et al (2015b) distinguish between the fundamental value positions of professionalism, efficiency, service, and engagement for e-government.…”

“…Maes et al (2014) call for research on understanding how different stakeholders can use a business case throughout the entire investment life cycle. The challenges facing chief information officers (CIOs) and IS project managers when wanting to formulate business cases are staggering in terms of: how they should go about explaining IS investment (Frisk et al, 2015), how value propositions change over time (Peffers & Dos Santos, 2013), and how different values associate with different value systems (Rose et al, 2015b). In this paper, we seek to address these challenges from the viewpoint of the stakeholders that are responsible for IS value creation -in our case with a particular focus on stakeholders in public organizations.…”