E-Government as an Innovative Product: Theories and Case Study - Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administration - page 131

This case study shows how e-government project failures can occur and have
widespread impacts beyond just failed management practices. This Healthcare.
gov website was a significant “embarrassment” for President Obama and fuelled
anger against the new healthcare law providing coverage to millions of uninsured
Americans. Moreover, this case study shows how politics can intersect with project
failures and exacerbate issues and differences among stakeholders. Normally, for
e-government projects, failures are seen as isolated incidents with very little media
attention. The failure of the Obamacare website created a very visible event, which
demonstrates what can go wrong if there is no proper project planning and imple-
mentation. Finally, this case study depicts what can happen when e-government is
not viewed as an innovative product.
6.3.2 E-Government as an Innovation
The first research question is answered with the findings from the corresponding
literature review: In case the public sector is seen as a unique organization, then its
mission concerns the delivery of goods (i.e., public infrastructure) and services to
citizens and enterprises, the definition of policies, and the legislation of rules that
ground these policies. Then, the “e” stands for the utilization of ICT to streamline
the above processes (Ho, 2002). This definition of e-government leads to the con-
clusion that “e” updates the original government processes in a rather incremental
manner, meaning that “e” concerns an evolving substitute of the original product.
It is difficult to see e-government as radical or systemic because traditional processes
(i.e., paper-based and face-to-face contacts and negotiations) are still performed.
Thus, e-government can be considered an innovation for the public domain, which
could be classified as “incremental,” “process” and/or “organizational,” and “tech-
nological” because it is based on emerging ICT.
With regard to the second research question, literature findings illustrate that govern-
ments approach e-government with e-strategic planning, which is specialized with pro-
gram planning and transformed to deliverables with project planning (Anthopoulos &
Fitsilis, 2014). This process is iterative and can be repeated according to e-strategic evo-
lution. This approach does not concern an innovation management process. Moreover,
the outcomes from the case study validate that representative e-government projects
with high social impacts and extreme, even political, implications are not analyzed and
treated carefully, even with simple project management techniques; this will not lead to
project success. Both the theoretical and the case studies justify that past and existing
e-government implementations have the following characteristics. They:
1. Are rather politically oriented, lacking the appropriate capacity that the pub-
lic sector must have.
2. Aim to “boost” public administration's efficiency, but without calculating the
required cost, neither the added values that will be created to citizens, enter-
prises, and the public sector.