Special  Interest  Group  on  Electronic  Government

Purpose
 Electronic government is an area currently entering into the research agenda, having so far been mainly practitioner-oriented. Research in the area is scattered across several disciplines.

While some thirty years of studies of information systems have produced many theories concerning IT use in organizations, eGov studies require going beyond the border of the organization as government/nance cannot be reduced to individual organizations, not even if inter-organizational cooperation is included.

While there are many theories of government, there is a lack of appropriate theories in the so called electronic government and the broader area of electronic governance (both henceforth called eGov). Such theories would be useful as there is a need for discussing the role of IT use, more informatively termed “informatization”, in eGov beyond the information processing aspects. The literature on various aspects of government tends to underestimate the role of IT while IT studies tend to overestimate it. IT and information systems are not much studied in political science. In IT-related fields of study, on the other hand, there are hosts of speculations – usually extrapolating extensively from limited studies of IT use in government or assuming simple transfer of e-commerce ideas and solutions – about how government will change as IT use become the norm not only in internal operations but also in inter-organizational and client-organizational relations.  

To discuss eGov theoretically, there is a need for a model of government that goes beyond the individual organization. Most eGov discussions and theories do not do that. They typically focus on the operations of one single organization or one or a few processes that stretch over two or more organizations but without changing the rationale of any of the organizations. In addition, eGov projects typically apply an information processing view of government activities and do not consider other aspects of government. This narrow an approach leads to a risk for suboptimization in two respects, technically (information processing regarded too narrowly in terms of coverage of the whole government) and functionally (a too narrow view of what government is all about).It has been argued that this approach to eGov will lead to solidification of a certain distribution of power, transformation of citizenship into consumership, and rationalization of legal and policy processes into administrative-technical ones.
Mission
The Special Interest Group on eGovernment intends to bring together like-minded researchers, teachers, and practitioners to:

• provide a focal point for the debate of research issues involved in e-government , that is, issues that draw on theoretical foundations of the concerned disciplines,  such as  IS,  informatics, political science, and organizational science,  that currently is dispersed over many disciplines, conference proceedings and journals.
• strengthen the exchange of ideas and community ties with other disciplines, especially the political (the primary novelty in terms of disciplines) and social sciences, that seek to improve research and the application of research results by drawing on the theoretical and empirical literature from the various fields involved.

Introduction to eGovernment
Åke Grönlund: Electronic Government – Design, Applications, and Management. Idea Group.