Information Polity

In this article we expound on the possible effects of eGovernment evaluation studies on countries' eGovernment policy. Performance measurement and benchmarking are two well-known tools for policy evaluation and feedback. Performance information has a supply side as well as a demand side, which do not necessarily match. In the eGovernment sphere we notice a large supply of performance information. We ask ourselves to which degree this supply meets an actual demand from governments. We discuss the results of a thorough analysis of 18 international comparative eGovernment studies and warn for an unreflective feedback of these studies' results in countries' eGovernment policies.

The development of e-government in most countries is still primarily aimed at developing electronic services that customers can access via the internet. This has been matched by the methods for monitoring e-government development, which fall far short of providing a true overall assessment. Such a narrow focus on e-government has led to a significant slowdown of development in most countries. Countries have used "quick fix, quick win" solutions, while continued development require above all the development of an integrated government portal and reengineering of back-office processes. The more developed countries are therefore increasingly tailoring their e-government strategies in the direction of customer-orientation and instead of persisting with rigid organisational structures are working on integrating services and processes across individual administrative bodies and institutions and even include private businesses. The development of e-government therefore demands a holistic strategic approach that encompasses the entire public administration and is not limited to individual bodies and institutions, or individual sectors and levels of administration. The methods of monitoring, evaluating and benchmarking e-government development will have to follow the same principles. Based on critical analyses of existing approaches, this paper attempts to define the areas and aspects that must be included within the integrated approach in order to facilitate the progress of e-government towards its strategic objectives, that is the development of services based on user's needs and problems, i.e. integrated services or life-events.

During the 1990s a new policy area – ICT-policy – evolved in Swedish politics. It manifested itself through a number of unprecedented initiatives from the government including a new type of institutional set-up. These initiatives all encompassed an underlying idea of governing the new policy area in a manner different from previous modes of governing which emphasised a parliamentary chain of command. Governing concepts such as"dialogue", "networks" and "visionary hearings" became cornerstones for"leading" Sweden into the new "information society". In this article we have the ambition to analyse how a new phenomenon in politics have been received in an age characterised by deregulation, new paradigms in governance and a welfare state in transition. Based on a comprehensive interview survey and a discourse analysis of official documents we can conclude that the new modes of governance have not been efficient tools to accomplish the high ambitions and objectives of the policy. Rather, the new institutions set up to manage 'the future' have in many cases become 'garbage cans' for issues the traditional "institutions" have not been capable of managing. Moreover, they have in confrontation with old institutions become omitted from actual influence.

In spite of rich experience in ICT projects' management, a considerable number of them fail. Success of ICT projects is even further endangered in transitional countries, where two parallel processes of informatization and re-engineering of public institutions is taking place. Measures of successful ICT projects' management are defined in strategic documents of egovernment development, however they are not enough to avoid failures. The risk concerning execution of ICT projects is defined in relation to the decision-making theory and organizational theory. Major parameters of ICT decisions and their implementation are analysed: changing laws and regulations, the scale and diversity of ICT projects executed in public institutions, expertise and skills in ICT management, relations between public institution and private partner. Results of activating those parameters are presented in four examples of large systems projects accomplished in public administration in Poland.

In a previous article in Information Polity [1] we looked into the question of whether integration of its information domains is leading to centralization in the Dutch police system. In this article we attempt to find out how such integration came about in the first place. Trying to establish an overall information management in or between organizations can be viewed as an attempt to create a common pool resource (CPR). Is hierarchy really the only way to establish such a CPR as, for instance, Davenport appears to assume? The experience of the Dutch police seems to point in a different direction. As it happens the 25 regional police forces, and the national police services have formed a 'Board of Direction' (Regieraad) in which the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office also partake. These parties are to decide on the shaping and operating of the police's information systems on the basis of equality. All evidence seems to point to the fact that this has been accomplished without making use of hierarchy. If we want to account for the Dutch police's success in establishing an overall information management without making use of hierarchy, there are three explanations that stand out in the available literature. These are Kollock's application of Ostrom's design principles of communities successful in creating CPRs to electronic environments, Monge, Fulk and Flanagin's stress on the advantages that fall to those who found a CPR, and Scharpf's concept of `negotiation in the shadow of hierarchy'. In this article we try to establish which one of the three holds good in the case of the Dutch police.

In this article has investigated how we can improve the use of the Internet to design new virtual governance arrangements that take into account the somewhat disappointing results of on-line debates and use the experiences of more virtual community-based approaches of deliberation and learning. Four sources of inspiration are explored: a) experiences with on-line debates, b) the functioning of communities on the internet, especially the Linux community, c) experiences with community of practice and d) experiences with so-called virtual policy communities. The article ends with a number of design principles that can be used to shape governance arrangements in which public participation, deliberation and learning are important political values and which can help us to redesign on-line debates.

In this article we will argue that trust is an important factor in establishing new forms of digital administration. ICT is an enabler for the innovation of boundary-crossing processes. However, the more public administrations collaborate and integrate their processes through the use of ICT, the more interdependent and vulnerable they will become. In order to accept a growing interdependence and vulnerability administrations have to trust each other. Two Belgian cases, the Crossroads Bank for Social Security and the Crossroads Bank for Companies show the role that trust plays in a context of digital administration. The attention that was given to the creation of trust between the different administrations involved made or broke the success of the two projects.

The emergence of e-commerce in Europe is a fascinating policy study with key actors in all EU countries firmly assured that digitalization of the economy is the key to the magic kingdom of strong economic growth and the facilitation of global commerce. Moreover, the digital economy would require asserted policy responses to ensure that European jobs would not be taken over by the dominant US IT industry and the global, multinational industry players utilizing the technology. In this contribution we reveal how Denmark, Germany and France had rather similar policies furthering knowledge diffusion but were rather reluctant to use direct economic incentives, normative instruments, or e-government initiatives such as e-tendering and e-procurement. Yet the three countries pursued very different paths on the route towards the digital economy both when it comes to the responsiveness of government and to the implementation in society.