Management Aspects of e-Government Projects: Contextual and Empirical Findings

On the basis of existing literature and benchmarking efforts for various facets of e-Government (expected benefits, existing barriers, methodological guidelines) the paper identifies a number of factors that affect e-Government projects (broader environment, political, funding, public management and service delivery frameworks, customer engagement, technology and effort supply, core processes) and proposes a holistic model for e-Government projects. On the basis of this holistic model, it is argued that realization of the e-Government process and operation of e-Government services exhibit complexity, emergent behaviour, and a number of characteristics of open and complex systems. These arguments, applied on a real example where empirical e-Government good practice is verified ex post via laws and principles governing the behaviour of general open systems, are considered to legitimise systems thinking about e-Government. It is proposed that further pursuing a systemic approach to e-Government projects represents, together with the deeper understanding of user needs, a major direction of further work for e-Government project management.