Right on Time: Understanding eGovernment in Developing Countries

Abstract:

Many, if not most, developing countries today engage in electronic government (eGovernment) projects. There are big hopes, not just for modernizing government and making it more effective and efficient; eGovernment is also expected to drive the
general development toward the information society, both by examples of good practice and by major investment. However, many
sources claim that the project failure rate is high. Reasons are found in many places, but it is reasonable to summarize them
by saying that project goals are too ambitious given existing production capacity. Hence there is need to find ways of choosing
and defining projects so that they meet the conditions in the country and sector where they are going to be implemented. To
do so, this paper presents two tools, a checklist and a maturity model, for assessing the preconditions for eGovernment projects
in developing countries. The under-lying data sources are threefold: eGovernment readiness indexes, project experiences, and
assessments of social and political conditions. The checklist matches requirements for successful eGovernment against supply
and demand side factors, hence providing a guide in choosing which projects to initiate and which to avoid. The maturity model
supports mapping projects on a wider development agenda, hence helping avoiding dead ends such as investing in unused technology,
or supporting dysfunctional processes with ICT (information and communication technology) instead of first redesigning them
and then putting in ICT that support the new and better processes. In particular, the tools show the close relation between
eGovernment and other development agendas, for example education, investment policies, or telecom (de)regulation. Without
alignment with such programs, eGovernment is likely to fail. The two tools help make factors pertinent to success and failure
more explicit and hence improve decision making.

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