Editorial

Citation

Irani, Z. and Dwivedi, Y. (2010), "Editorial", Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, Vol. 4 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/tg.2010.32604daa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, Volume 4, Issue 4

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the fourth issue of the fourth volume of Transforming Government: People, Process, and Policy. This issue encompasses papers that are exploratory in nature and deal with up-to-date eGovernment issues from a variety of angles and, providing a mixture of theoretical and practical contributions.

This is issue of the journal starts with a viewpoint from Navonil Mustafee. In this paper, the author seeks to offer a critical look at the state-of-the-art with regard to three enabling technologies for e-science. It forms a set of arguments to support views on the evolution of these technologies in support of the e-science applications of the future. The paper identifies that although grid computing has been embraced by public-funded higher education institutions as an enabler for projects pertaining to e-science, the adoption of desktop grids remains low. With the advent of cloud computing and its promise of on-demand provisioning of computing resources, it is expected that the conventional form of grid computing will gradually move towards cloud-based computing. However, cloud computing also brings with it the “pay-per-use” economic model, and this may act as stimulus for organizations engaged in e-science to harvest existing underutilized computation capacity through the deployment of organization-wide desktop grid infrastructures. Clearly, raising issues for publically funded organizations and governments. Conventional grid computing will continue to support future e-science applications, although its growth may remain stagnant. This paper provides thought provoking realism that faces publically funded computing resources.

Karin Axelsson, Ulf Melin, and Ida Lindgren explore the importance of citizen participation and involvement in e-government projects. This research investigate if, and in that case, how and what the e-government field can learn from user participation concepts and theories in general IS research. The authors seek to contribute with further understanding of the importance of citizen participation and involvement within the e-government research body of knowledge and when developing public e-services in practice. The main results in this paper are that the e-government field can get inspiration and learn from methods and approaches in traditional information systems projects, concerning user participation but in e-government methods to handle the challenges that arise when designing public e-services for large, heterogeneous user groups needs consideration. Citizen engagement cannot be seen as a separate challenge in e-government but rather as an integrated part of the process of organizing, managing, and performing e-government projects. The analysis provided in this paper offers themes of participation generated from literature; practice, incentives, and organization can be used in order to highlight, analyse, and discuss issues regarding the challenges of citizen participation within e-government.

In the paper presented by Katarina Giritli Nygren, an analysis of everyday practices in e-government from a labor perspective is offered to understand how administrative rationalization and citizen service become connected in the organizational restructuring of the labor process, namely job codification and specification and rule observation. The analysis offered by the author applies an organizational e-government implementation perspective and labor process theory to an analysis of a Swedish municipality’s implementation of e-government, using both qualitative and quantitative data. The main finding is the formulation of two distinct types of ideal employee – “monotonized administrators” and “personalized bureaucrats” – who carry e-government work in different directions according to administrative rationalization and the service offered citizens. The paper extends knowledge of everyday practices in e-government from a labor perspective. It offers practitioners as well as researchers new insights by analysing the transformation of practice as an ongoing process, characterized by micro-political translation processes among actors, actions, and meanings in both rhetoric and practice.

Managing continuity and change within e-government is the theme explored by Saboohi Nasim and Sushil. Despite plethora of literature on change management, the rate of success of e-government projects is dismal, especially in developing countries. Deriving from strategy and change management literature, this paper presents a new approach to strategize for better change outcomes in e-government domain. A new construct of “continuity” is introduced and proposed to be managed concurrently with change forces to attain better delivery of strategic deliverables in e-government projects.

Drawing from the strategy and change management literature, it is hypothesized that “managing change in e-government can be better leveraged by consciously and concurrently managing continuity”. Based on an expert survey, out of the initial six continuity and eight change forces proposed, only one continuity force has been dropped and the rest are further modeled in the framework. Propositions for future research and implications for policy makers and implementers are highlighted. Given the low rate of success of e-government initiatives, especially in developing countries, this framework may serve as an important approach to strategizing in e-government domain and may be of value to not just the policy makers but also to other stakeholders like project planners, implementers, and also the beneficiaries.

In the paper by Alexander R.M. Schellong, he presents several frameworks to structure the discussion of e-government benchmark design based on a review of existing research and practice. To discuss the design of e-government benchmarks, a three-tier structure is proposed: guiding principles, benchmark methodology, and reporting and learning. Policy makers and consultants will be provided with a framework to approach and discuss e-government benchmarks in general and the future design of the EU e-government benchmark in particular.

Waheduzzaman explores the “value of people’s participation for good governance in developing countries”. The objective of this research is to find out the barriers to people’s participation for good governance in developing countries. The specific objective is to explore the attitude of stakeholders responsible for ensuring people’s engagement with local development programs. Two rural development projects in each of three local government institutions in Bangladesh were selected for this research study. Qualitative methods were used to investigate how actors related to these projects valued people’s participation while implementing and using outcomes of these projects. The findings showed that the meaning of the notion of good governance through effective people’s participation that has been imported from the developed democratic economies through international aid agencies remains somewhat unclear and ambiguous in a country such as Bangladesh. This study has revealed that one of the major barriers to people’s participation in local government affairs is the traditional attitude of related stakeholders. This study unlocked the practical knowledge about making people’s participation effective in implementing development programs, specifically in the developing countries. This paper offers originality and new insight into the participatory governance in developing countries.

We hope you will find this issue interesting and though provoking, and hope to receive your valuable contributions for the coming issue.

Zahir IraniEditor Yogesh DwivediEditorial Assistant