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Book Reviews: Whither E-Government?

The very publication of the books considered in this review reflects the fact that information technology (IT) has become part of the infrastructure of public organizations, and e-government has achieved high visibility. A number of public administration researchers are now concentrating on this area, which 25 years ago was the sole province of Kenneth Kraemer and his associates. Likewise, public administration curricula are now expected to cover the study of public sector information management. Five new books concerning e-government will be of interest to scholars and will help to meet these teaching needs.

E-government is defined narrowly by Peter Hernon, Rowena Cullen, and Harold C. Relyea in Comparative Perspectives on E-Government: Serving Today and Building for Tomorrow to refer to "the provision of government services and information via the Internet for businesses and citizens" (5), but I prefer the broader definition employed by Richard Heeks in Implementing and Managing eGovernment: An International Text, "all use of digital information technology in the public sector" (2). In reviewing these books, I will relate their content to four major sets of questions:

1. What is the relationship between the theory, research, and models of e-government and public administration theory and research? Can there be a better integration of research, theory, and prescriptions of public sector IT research with the mainstream of public administration theory and research?

2. E-government practitioners and much of the literature believe that e-government will improve governmental efficiency and processes-and hence the speed and quality of public services-while furnishing greater opportunities for citizen interaction with government. To what extent have these assumptions and prescriptions been proven true? Overall, what has been the impact of e-government and other forms of digital technologies on public sector performance? Has it resulted in major transformations of government performance?

3. To what extent, if at all, should there be differences between public and private sector technology practices? Should the same strategies and procedures employed in private sector IT be applied to the public sector? To what extent should public sector IT functions be outsourced to private vendors? If this is done, what is the role of the public sector IT staff and managers?

4. What are the key research areas that most need to be pursued related to e-government? Has there been an overemphasis on Web-based IT applications as the focus of research and teaching?

Each of the five books reviewed here touches on these issues.

Despite the growing importance of g-government, it remains unclear how the study of e-government and other aspects of public sector IT fit with public administration theories and research. G. David Garson is one of the few scholars to devote serious attention to this issue. Garson's book, Public Information Technology and E-Governance: Managing the Virtual State, covers several major areas, including such management issues as planning, contracting, procurement and outsourcing, implementation, and evaluation. He also discusses political and policy issues in chapters on e-democracy, the digital divide, access and transparency, privacy, security, and regulation. However, the most innovative aspect of Garson's book is his attempt to develop middle-range theory for public information technology by drawing on four theories to analyze public sector information technology: (1) reinforcement theory, which holds that technology tends to reinforce the existing power structure; (2) systems theory, which contends that IT can be used to integrate organizations; (3) technological determinism, which focuses on technological factors as a way of achieving change; and (4) sociotechnical theory, which views human factors as most important in determining the outcomes of technological change. Garson emphasizes that the study of IT is caught in a struggle between utopians who view IT as a strong positive force and dystopians who consistently foresee negative results from technological change. To illustrate, Garson cites the utopians' view that the increased use of IT will flatten organizational structures, leading to more efficient and responsive governments, whereas dystopians worry about greater employee surveillance and control from the same changes (464). Garson argues for a balanced approach and goes on to acknowledge that there is no "unified field theory" of public information systems.

Richard Heeks has written a textbook that focuses on the tensions between two approaches to solving problems in planning and implementing e-government. There is the "hard" approach, which concentrates on technical issues and the use of the formal organization. The other is the "soft" approach, which stresses nontechnological factors and the organization's informal system. Heeks illustrates hard and soft approaches to solving technology dilemmas and argues that the most successful method is often a hybrid that merges the strengths of the two. Heeks employs numerous acronyms in his book, such as ITPOSMO, which stands for information, technology, processes, objectives, staffing, management, and other resources. The acronyms are intended to act as checklists that managers should heed when dealing with IT issues to prevent the tendency to focus on only one aspect of technological change. One of the few early texts in the field, by Andersen and Dawes (1991), emphasized the need for "amphibian" managers who understand both technology and programs. Heeks makes the case that managers need to be "tribrids" who understand the technology, the business of government, and the role of information in government (223).

Heeks identifies four methods that managers need to employ in order to gather information to solve IT problems: interview/discussion, questionnaires, document analysis, and observation (173). Notably, two of these four methods rely on nontechnological, qualitative sources of data. One of the primary tenets of the e-government movement is the need to conduct major overhauls of the business processes of organizations to fully benefit from technological change. Heeks argues that these approaches often overemphasize the hard, technological approach; that a hybrid approach using a more incremental redesign is often best; and that many IT failures can be prevented by gathering qualitative data and focusing on "soft" methods (202). Heeks's book presents examples of how to solve dilemmas concerning a number of managerial issues, including e-government strategy, the management of public data, risk assessment and mitigation, and project assessment. His book contains in-class activities, assignment questions, and practitioner exercises, drawing on international as well as U.S. examples to illustrate points.

I think that both Garson and Heeks are correct to emphasize the importance of nontechnological factors, and I would go further to argue that when IT is intended to make major changes in organizations, an informed manager must understand the organizational theory and behavior literatures in order to anticipate the likely consequences of technology-inspired business process changes. Implementers of IT would do well to educate themselves in personnel management theory. For example, in Erwin A. Blackstone, Michael L. Bognanno, and Simon Hakim's edited volume Innovations in E-Government: The Thoughts of Governors and Mayors, the mayor of Baltimore is described as using individual rewards to benefit high-performing workers based on the data provided by the city's computerized CitiStat system (37). Is it wise to use such rewards? Clearly, personnel theory and research would be relevant to decisions about how incentive systems should relate to new technologies. Likewise, most new computer systems cut across departmental, if not organizational, boundaries, and there have been substantial difficulties in developing consensus on how to fund such projects. In his chapter, Jeffrey Seifert identifies the difficulty of achieving cross-agency funding as a major challenge to the success of e-government in the United States (48). What does the literature on public sector budgeting have to say about this dilemma? In my view, the information system is a subset of the overall organization, and there needs to be an integration of the organizational behavior and theory literatures with the e-government models. Of course, the issue cuts both ways. Researchers in traditional public administration fields cannot afford to ignore the substantial importance of IT either. Although both Garson and Heeks make contributions to theory, the systematic integration of public administration and e-government theory and research remains a goal to be achieved.

Regarding the second question, Blackstone, Bognanno, and Hakim provide 28 chapters that strongly support the argument that e-government has had mostly positive and possibly transformational impacts on government performance. Most of the chapters are overviews and citations of positive results of e-government innovations, generally written by the chief executive officer of the governmental entity. Reading most of these chapters, one would get the impression that most, if not all, e-government projects have been great successes, and one finds little information about the difficulty of implementing such projects. For example, Mayors Martin O'Malley and Rudolph Giuliani relate the positive results of implementing Citistat and Compstat in Baltimore and New York City, respectively. By way of contrast, both Garson and Heeks emphasize the high failure rate of governmental IT projects, citing studies by the Standish Group and the Gartner organization revealing that failures are common in the public sector (more than 50 percent).

Likewise, in Digital Government: Technology and Public Sector Performance, Darrell West argues that there is little evidence that e-government saves money because governments still must maintain traditional brick- and-mortar systems at the same time they are developing e-government systems (171). In Blackstone, Bognanno, and Hakim, Mayor Anthony Williams of the District of Columbia states that the city eliminated more than 30 customer service positions as a result of its implementation of an e-customer service system. There are some cases in the Blackstone book that do bring out the complexities and difficulties of implementing public sector IT projects. One such example is Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee's discussion of the complexities of developing an online automobile registration and renewal system. This application necessitated coordination and integration among the state and 75 county governments. The case highlights the necessity of an effective governance system in complex intergovernmental applications such as this. Both state and local laws had to be changed in order to integrate the system and make it workable. For example, to make the system work online, the state rescinded its previous auto inspection system. Huckabee justifies taking this step because, he says, the inspection system had been ineffective. However, this case raises the question of whether the attempt to computerize processes sacrifices important programs and, in effect, puts the cart before the horse. All of these books support the proposition that IT governance is a crucial component of e-government success because e-government applications almost inevitably cross departmental and organizational boundaries.

With the exception of Blackstone, Bognanno, and Hakim's book, these works, taken together, suggest that the impacts of e-government have been incremental rather than transformational. West's Digital Government concentrates on government Web sites and contributes some original analysis of data based on case studies, content analyses, and aggregate multivariate analyses of government Web sites. His multivariate analyses reveal two factors associated with the number and share of online services offered-legislative professionalism and state per capita income-but the relationships are modest. West outlines four stages of development in e-government (9). From West's perspective, the most advanced stage is the use of digital government to enhance interactive democracy with "accountability enhancing features," but he finds relatively few transformational changes. Overall, he characterizes the results of digital government as incremental. Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell also acknowledges that e-government in his state has not yet become transformational (Blackstone, Bognanno, and Hakim 2005, 152). Recently, Kraemer and King have argued that IT "has never been an instrument of administrative reform" and question whether we should expect anything different from e-government. By way of contrast, Blackstone et al. state that e-government is "a technological innovation and moves from an inefficient and mainly unaccountable bureaucracy to a new entrepreneurial and accountable culture" (2006, 16). Clearly, there is a need for research to inquire into these conflicting perspectives.

A consistent finding across these books is that, with certain notable exceptions (such as state and federal income tax returns, discussed in West's book), online transactional systems have achieved modest and, in many cases, extremely low usage levels. For example, in Comparative Perspectives on E-Government, Sue Burgess and Jan Houghton's study of e-government in Australia cites the need for higher "take-up rates," and Cullen's study of New Zealand also cites low rates of usage. Pennsylvania's innovative COMPASS system was responsible for only about 2 percent of the social service applications received (Blackstone, Bognanno, and Hakim 2005, 151). According to Mayor Patrick McCrory of Charlotte, North Carolina, that city's online ticket-paying system receives payments for only about 25 parking tickets per month via the Internet, and Mayor Lee Brown of Houston reports that 4.2 percent of his city's tickets were paid online in the second year of the application (Blackstone, Bognanno, and Hakim 2005, 257). In Canada, the city of Edmonton's experience shows that businesses, especially large ones, make greater use of online applications than the general citizenry (Blackstone, Bognanno, and Hakim 2005, 224). West cites the possible use of rebates for the use of online services to spur usage, though this may appear unfair, as the poor are less likely to participate. For example, Garson cites data that only about 16 percent of welfare recipients have computers in their residences (105). Cullen and Hernon's chapter on "Citizens' Response to E-Government" discusses how Web, phone, and in-person contacts with government interact with each other-Web contacts can lead to phone or in-person contacts, and vice versa-so it is likely that e-government will complement rather than replace traditional methods of contact. Yet the number of online transactions offered is one criterion that is often used to judge how advanced a Web site is, but if only a tiny fraction of the public uses these online systems, how significant is it?

E-government borrows heavily from applications and managerial approaches that originated in the private sector, such as enterprise resource planning and portfolio analysis. Nevertheless, both Heeks and Garson see important differences between the strategies of the two sectors. For example, Garson points out that a major goal of private sector IT applications is to increase consumer demand, but this goal is not generally applicable in the case of the public sector. It is often assumed that private sector organizations will be more responsive than public sector agencies, but an experiment conducted by West found that public sector organizations responded more quickly to a request for information than businesses (112).

Governments rarely develop their own major applications, instead making maximum use of commercial off-the-shelf software to save money and to minimize technical problems. The reliance on vendors for major applications and the outsourcing of many complex tasks mean that much of the job of governmental IT managers (and likewise, generalist managers in the same organizations) emphasizes managing projects rather than technological tasks. Thus, a major task in public sector jobs is project management. Mayor Barnes and Chief Information Officer Gail Roper of Kansas City, Missouri, state that one-third of their IT employees' jobs are "nontechnical in nature" (Blackstone, Bognanno, and Hakim 2005, 68). Mark Forman, previously administrator of the U.S. Office of E-Government and Information Technology, notes that 80 percent of the federal IT workforce comes from private vendors and that he wants the public sector to focus on project management (Blackstone, Bognanno, and Hakim 2005, 24). Recent controversies over whether local governments should provide broadband or wireless services reflect the fact that the relationship between the public and private sector roles in IT applications deserves more research.

E-government researchers have focused much attention on the online aspects of e-government, such as the presence of features on government Web sites and the existence of opportunities for greater participation in e-democracy. The success stories that populate Blackstone, Bognanno, and Hakim's book are based on case studies by those heading the efforts. Heeks and Garson draw on existing research, as well as their own substantial experiences. Relatively little recent research has focused on internally focused developments-a problem because, as Norris (2005) has pointed out, public sector IT officials believe the biggest "bang for the buck" in e-government will come from the improvement of internal workflows, and they believe that Web site developments are less important. Future e-government research needs a more balanced approach in which these internally focused efforts receive greater attention.

The volume edited by Hernon, Cullen, and Relyea begins with several overviews of major e-government developments in the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. These chapters focus on laws and administrative developments, and the most notable conclusion, from my perspective, is the strikingly similar IT implementation objectives and tactics of these five countries. I found few surprises here, although some of the later chapters provide interesting insights and empirical findings that focus on "audience" and evaluation issues.

Empirical research often contradicts the assumptions made by practitioners and researchers. For example, Cullen's chapter on governmental portals discusses whether Web sites should have a customization feature. Some designers see the ability to customize a Web site as highly desirable, but one of the gurus of Web site design, Jakob Nielsen, believes that sites should not require that anyone spend time customizing them. Another dispute concerns the number of clicks required to reach the desired information on a Web site. The federal government has instituted a three-click rule for some of its Web sites based on the assumption that any more clicks would discourage end users from obtaining information. Cullen cites one author who argues that end users are willing to click 15 times before they abandon their search. The chapter by Cullen and Hernon concerning "Citizen Perspectives on E-Government" relates the findings of a study of end users' actual behavior in using Web sites to search for information and reveals the complexity of their search methods and the importance of securing trust of citizens in digital communications and transactions.

The basic point to be derived from all of these books is that there are few solid empirical studies to support many IT prescriptions and that e-government research should focus on these gaps in research.

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