Realising transformational stage e-government: a UK local authority perspective

Abstract

Whilst the early e-government efforts focused on e-enabling front-office processes, now the e-government is emphasising the reengineering of back-office processes. These efforts are commonly branded as Transformational stage e-government (or t-government). This paper seeks to explore what the transformational stage of e-government means to local authorities in the UK and what process-related challenges have to be overcome to successfully implement transformational change in local government. Although a number of broader issues of organisational, socio-cultural and technical origin are identified in the literature as presenting a considerable challenge for this goal, using two case studies this paper shows that more obvious process and information systems related issues pose an even more significant challenge in practice. The findings and issues raised in this paper are of importance to the UK public sector and can aid to enable the identification of objectives, priorities and barriers to t-government, and options for successful implementation thereof.