New challenges for e-government: Value realization among independent actors

Sweden is currently ranked as the leading country in e-government readiness, i.e. how ready the country is to take advantage of the opportunities provided by advances in information technology for delivering e-government services to the citizens. However, the level of e-government development is still far from satisfactory, and further investments are constrained by limited government budgets. One reason for the slow pace of e-government development is the complex mix of actors involved in the public sector, and the lack of understanding how e-government investments are increasing value for the network of actors as a whole. Therefore, there is a need for new approaches estimating values of e-government initiatives in a network of public actors and citizens. This will facilitate prioritization among e-government initiatives, in order to choose initiatives that are the most beneficial for a society as a whole. In this paper, we present such an approach in which we combine two established methods for value analysis, Peng and Value modeling. The combined approach is applied on a Swedish e-government initiative on municipal level including several e-services. The result from the case study shows that the benefits of the e-government initiative are unevenly distributed among involved actors, it is unevenly distributed between different e-services, and investment costs are primarily carried by one of the actors. We believe that such situation can slow down the future development of e-government, but the knowledge given by the value analysis approach is important for managing a successful e-government strategy.