Decision Making and Value Realization in Multi-Actor e-Government Contexts

Abstract

In the last two decades, governments around the world have been implementing electronic services in order to create a range of public values and meet new demands from a variety of stakeholders. Such activities fall within the scope of the e-Government research field. Developing large-scale information systems has proven to be a challenging task and many initiatives have ended in failure. This paper explores uncertainty in the e-Government context. How is it related to the various actors in the public sector, and how can decision making be adapted here to improve value realization? Using actor-network theory as an analytical lens, the collaboration of five Swedish municipalities in creating common e-services is examined as a case study. The results indicate that factors beyond decision makers' control, such as relations outside of a project, create a high degree of uncertainty. This uncertainty can be reduced by creating durable relations between local and global socio-technical actors. Inscribing values into generic software that has a high grade of interoperability should help to strengthen these networks beyond projects and regional borders.