Improving E-Government through Benefit Analysis and Value Modeling

Sweden is a precursor in e-government and development of municipal e-services. For example, the Swedish government has announced a national action plan for fast development of e-government using e-services and workflow systems for effective public administration. However, introducing e-government is a complex process including many different actors with different goals: public organizations with a complex combination of economic and non-economic goals, citizens and private organizations with different relations to the public organization, and IT vendors, offering different tools and techniques to develop and maintain e-services. In order to implement a right mix of e-services in the public sector, the benefits and costs of different e-services, and combinations of e-services, for all involved actors need to be investigated. In this paper, two established approaches for value analysis, Peng and Value modeling, are combined. Peng is a participative, bottom-up approach for identifying and estimating benefits and costs for IT-investments, while Value modeling is a top-down approach for analyzing economic viability of an entire network of actors. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the application of the combined approach using a case study from the municipality of Jaumlrfaumllla, a suburb of Stockholm. The results show that value analysis can be improved by combining these two models. The results also initiated an important discussion in the municipality of Jaumlrfaumllla on how to realize the potential values of a new e-service.