Twenty Years After the Hype

Abstract

In this study the authors analyze the effects of e-government reforms that began in mid-90ies by confronting the promises which these reforms made to government performance in the period before and after the reforms took place. The authors use fiscal and performance indicators of the Slovenian government and courts to argue that e-government did not yield any notable effects on the state performance. Finally, the authors analyze the reasons why e-government technology cannot be regarded as sustainable and suggest a different approach towards researching how to sustainably improve governance for generations to come.

Citizens' Intentions to Adopt Innovative E-Government Services

“…Although, innovative e-government services are theorized to reduced cost, improve services, be more responsive to citizens, and improves accountability (Warkentin et al, 2002). But due to the slow pace of adoptability of innovative e-government projects, scholars now debate about the potential of innovative e-government projects and the failure of adoption due to low citizens' interest (Janssen et al, 2013); even to the preference to turning back to the traditional channel selection (Reddick & Anthopoulos, 2014) question the sustainability of innovative e-government projects (Paulin, 2015). Thus, we tried to identify the influencing factors that may help increase practical utility of the innovative e-government projects.…”

Informating Public Governance

“…The structure of a society's institutions, their mandate, their naming, the role of individuals within and towards them, etc., are all products of evolution. This very evolutionary nature, Paulin (2013Paulin ( , 2015 argued, crucially impacts the sustainability of (computerized) black-box governance systems with predefined semantics, such as one-stop-shops (Wimmer, 2002), or government platforms (O'Reilly, 2010). In same manner, governance informatization would be influenced by the evolutionary nature of formalized governance, impacting the sustainability of complex informated abstractions of real world governance entities, such as e.g.…”

Informating Smart Cities Governance? Let Us First Understand the Atoms!

“…If governance informatization is attempted from the premise of governance being about handling information, the objective of governance informatization becomes the aim to informate the perpetually-transforming myriads of heterogeneous artefacts, which are handled by uncountable governance bureaus, institutions, and stakeholders of the system-of-systems that makes up the society. Taking the findings of Lenk (2012) and Paulin (2015) into consideration however, this objective would be rendered impossible to reach-governance informatization would thus become a dead end.…”

“…The evolutionary and multi-stakeholder nature of public domain action impacts the ability to use traditional software engineering approaches in creating artefacts to automate, or informate, respectively, public domain action that would be able to sustain for future generations (Paulin 2015).…”

“…With typical application scenarios and research endeavours centring on mass-scale applicative contexts such as traffic management, urban planning, public transport, communal service provisioning, etc., crucial implications of political spaces are often marginalized and taken out of consideration in scientific and industrial research. As has been argued (Paulin 2015), ignoring political and jural implications can have severe adverse effects on the sustainability of technical artefacts, in terms of premature project failure, vendor lock-in situations, and the violation of democratic principles.…”