Enacting Electronic Government Success

Many countries around the world are investing a great amount of resources in government IT initiatives. However, few of these projects achieve their stated goals and some of them are complete failures. Therefore, understanding e-government success has become very important and urgent in recent years. In order to develop relevant knowledge about this complex phenomenon, researchers and practitioners need to identify and assess what are the main conditions, variables, or factors that have an impact on e-government success. However, before being able to evaluate these impacts, it is necessary to define what e-government success is and what some e-government success measures are. This book presents a review of both e-government success measures and e-government success factors. It also provides empirical evidence from quantitative analysis and two in-depth case studies. Although based on sound theory and rigorous empirical analysis, the book not only significantly contributes to academic knowledge, but also includes some practical recommendations for government officials and public managers.

Theoretically, the book proposes a way to quantitatively operationalize Fountain's enactment framework. Based on the institutional tradition, the technology enactment framework attempts to explain the effects of organizational forms and institutional arrangements on the information technology used by government agencies. According to Fountain (1995; 2001) the technology enactment framework pays attention to the relationships among information technology, organizations, embeddedness, and institutions. This framework is very well known in the e-government field, but is normally used for qualitative analysis and there is no previous proposal of how to use it with quantitative data. The book proposes variables to measure each of the different constructs in this framework and also tests the relationships hypothesized by Fountain's theory. Finally, using the advantages of the