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Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how to analyse the possibilities for e-government transformations in public sector organisations and how these possibilities can be improved.


Design/methodology/approach
The research constructs a model based on a literature review that focusses on the pressure that drives transformations, on the challenges transformations face and on the abilities needed for overcoming these challenges. The resulting model is subsequently used to analyse a successful case and to identify the keys to success in terms of the strategies used to transform.


Findings
The possibilities for transformation depend on the organisational and contextual configuration (a public sector organisation and the context it operates in) which is more or less supportive of transformations. The configuration can be characterized by the pressure to transform, the challenges that must be overcome and the abilities to do so. There are some basic conditions that impact the possibilities for making the configuration more supportive of transformations: the interest of powerful stakeholders, the degree of publicness, the possibilities for changing the configuration are path dependent and the factors that matter for the possibilities for transformation are interrelated and might be governed by different authorities which make it difficult to manage and change them. When improving the possibilities for transformation in a configuration, the pressure can be increased, transformations can be made easier to accomplish by reducing challenges and by providing more support and abilities might be developed to better overcome the challenges. Transformation is accomplished through an interplay between actions that improve and exploit the configuration.


Research limitations/implications
The findings are based on a single case.


Practical implications
The public sector should find the balance between making transformations easier and increasing capabilities. The lessons from this research suggest that a more balanced strategy focussing more on eliminating the contextual and organisational challenges that make these projects so complex and providing more support might be a better investment than just aiming to increase project level capabilities.


Social implications
Just as practice might benefit from changing the balance between increasing project level capabilities and making transformation easier, e-government research might improve its relevance by changing the balance between suggesting new approaches and researching the basic conditions for the exploitation of IT in public sector organisations. While the essence of public sector organisations in some cases makes transformations very challenging, there are still factors that might be improved upon through research.


Originality/value
Previous research has established knowledge about transformational challenges and solutions. Based on this knowledge this research constructs a model that can be used to systematically analyse the possibilities for success, and strategies for dealing with these challenges are suggested.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to increase our understanding of the requirements for public sector organizations to implement benefits realization practices. The research compares benefits realization practices as suggested by the literature with actual practice with the goal of identifying both insufficiencies in the current literature and challenges in practice that must be overcome to improve the current situation.

Design/methodology/approach
The case study approach is used to study benefits realization across national and local government organizations.

Findings
Five major challenges that are not dealt with by existing literature were identified: benefits realization requires not just organizational capabilities, but also inter-organizational capabilities; coordination of benefits realization across organizational units, local and central government and across internal organizational levels is both essential and very challenging; managing benefits realization includes much more than integrating benefits realization practices in IT projects; different benefits realization practices are needed at central government level, local management level and case worker level; and different uses of technology require different levels of benefits realization capabilities and different practices. The case also illustrates that under certain conditions, organization can actually realize significant improvements with limited benefits realization capabilities: When IT is used not to change but to fully automate processes, the reliance on formal benefits realization practices is decreased.

Research limitations/implications
The findings are based on a single case.

Originality/value
There is only little empirical research studying benefits realization in a public sector context. Furthermore, the research studies benefits realization from an organizational process perspective, and not from the perspective of IT projects.

Selecting the right IT projects is increasingly important for many organizations. Project portfolio managers play a key role during project selection, but even though they have a great impact on the selection process, we have little knowledge about how they decide which projects to recommend for initiation. Most of the research on project selection is normative, suggesting new methods, but available empirical studies indicate that many methods are seldom used in practice. This paper addresses the issue by providing increased understanding of IT project selection practice, thereby facilitating the development of methods that better fit current practice. The study is based on naturalistic decision-making theory and interviews with experienced project portfolio managers who, when selecting projects, primarily rely on political skills, experience and personal networks rather than on formal IT project-selection methods, and these findings point to new areas for developing new methodological support for IT project selection.

Public sector organizations are supposed to increase productivity by large-scale investments in IT. This research analyzes municipalities' ability to benefit from IT investments and identifies problems that reduce productivity gains. These problems persist even though they might seem trivial and easily remedied. They are however symptoms of a more general challenge: Difficulties achieving a proper alignment between IT and organizational processes. This alignment gap is related to the way service production is regulated and organized and the way IT is developed and acquired, the lack of local technology and task control that emerges and the resulting lack of managed coordination between task and technology design. ; Public sector organizations are supposed to increase productivity by large-scale investments in IT. This research investigates the municipalities' capabilities to increase productivity through IT investments, and what major challenges must be overcome to do so. The research identifies several problems that reduce productivity gains. These problems persist even though they might seem trivial and easily remedied. They are however symptoms of a more general challenge: Difficulties achieving a proper alignment between IT and organizational processes. This alignment gap is related to the way service production is regulated and organized and the way IT is developed and acquired, the lack of local technology and task control that emerges and the resulting lack of managed coordination between task and technology design.

Purpose – Our paper aims at analyzing how different European countries cope with the European Energy Policy, which proposes a set of measures (free energy market, smart meters, energy certificates) to improve energy utilization and management in Europe. Design/methodology/approach – The paper first reports the general vision, regulations and goals set up by Europe to implement the European Energy Policy. Later on, it performs an analysis of how some European countries are coping with the goals, with legal, economical and regulatory measures. Finally, the paper draws a comparison between the countries to present a view on how Europe is responding to the emerging energy emergency of the modern world. Findings – Our analysis on different use cases (countries) showed that European countries are converging to a common energy policy, even though some countries appear to be later than others. In particular, Southern European countries were slowed down by the world financial and economical crisis. Still, it appears that contingency plans were put into action, and Europe as a whole is proceeding steadily towards the common vision. Research limitations/implications – European countries are applying yet more cuts to financing green technologies, and it is not possible to predict clearly how each country will evolve its support to the European energy policy. Moreover, we only analyzed a small number of countries. On the other hand, we selected countries belonging to different areas of Europe, and we consider that the countries that we selected as placeholders for the groups cover the whole normative spectrum that can be found in Europe. Practical implications – Different countries applied different measures to attain the targets set by the European Union. The implementation of the European energy policy has to cope with the resulting plethora of regulations, and a company proposing enhancement regarding energy management still has to possess robust knowledge of the single country, before being able to export experience and know-how between European countries. Originality/Value – Even though a few surveys on energy measures in Europe are already part of the state-of-the-art, organic analysis diagonal to the different topics of the European Energy Policy is missing. Moreover, this paper highlights how European countries are converging on a common view, and provides some details on the differences between the countries, thus facilitating parties interesting into cross-country export of experience and technology for energy management.

Purpose – Our paper aims at analyzing how different European countries cope with the European Energy Policy, which proposes a set of measures (free energy market, smart meters, energy certificates) to improve energy utilization and management in Europe. Design/methodology/approach – The paper first reports the general vision, regulations and goals set up by Europe to implement the European Energy Policy. Later on, it performs an analysis of how some European countries are coping with the goals, with financial, legal, economical and regulatory measures. Finally, the paper draws a comparison between the countries to present a view on how Europe is responding to the emerging energy emergency of the modern world. Findings – Our analysis on different use cases (countries) showed that European countries are converging to a common energy policy, even though some countries appear to be later than others In particular, Southern European countries were slowed down by the world financial and economical crisis. Still, it appears that contingency plans were put into action, and Europe as a whole is proceeding steadily towards the common vision. Research limitations/implications – European countries are applying yet more cuts to financing green technologies, and it is not possible to predict clearly how each country will evolve its support to the European energy policy. Practical implications – Different countries applied the concepts and measures in different ways. The implementation of the European energy policy has to cope with the resulting plethora of regulations, and a company proposing enhancement regarding energy management still has to possess robust knowledge of the single country, before being able to export experience and know-how between European countries. Originality/Value – Even though a few surveys on energy measures in Europe are already part of the state-of-the-art, organic analysis diagonal to the different topics of the European Energy Policy is missing. Moreover, this paper highlights how European countries are converging on a common view, and provides some details on the differences between the countries, thus facilitating parties interesting into cross-country export of experience and technology for energy management.

Purpose – our paper aims at analysing how different European countries cope with the European Energy Policy, which proposes a set of measures (free energy market, smart meters, energy certificates) to improve energy utilization and management in Europe. Design/methodology/approach – The paper first reports the general vision, regulations and goals set up by Europe to implement the European Energy Policy. Later on, it performs an analysis of how some European countries are coping with the goals, legal, economical and regulatory measures. Finally, the paper draws a comparison between the countries to present a view on how Europe is responding to the emerging energy emergency of the modern world. Findings – our analysis on the cases of different use (countries) has shown that European countries are converging to a common energy policy, even though some countries appear to be later than others. In particular, Southern European countries were slowed down by the global financial and economical crisis. Still, it appears that contingency plans were put into action, and Europe as a whole is proceeding steadily towards the common vision. Research limitations/implications – European countries are applying yet more cuts to financing green technologies, and it is not possible to predict clearly how each country will evolve its support to the European energy policy. Moreover, we have only analysed a small number of countries. At the same time, we have selected countries belonging to different areas of Europe, and we consider that the countries selected as placeholders for the groups cover the whole normative spectrum that can be found in Europe. Practical implications – Different countries applied different measures to attain the targets set by the European Union. The implementation of the European energy policy has to cope with the resulting plethora of regulations, and a company proposing enhancement regarding energy management still has to possess robust knowledge of the single country, before being able to export experience and know-how between European countries. Originality/Value – Even though a few surveys on energy measures in Europe are already part of the state-of-the-art, organic analysis diagonal to the different topics of the European Energy Policy is missing. Moreover, this paper highlights how European countries are converging on a common view, and provides some details on the differences between the countries, thus facilitating parties interesting into cross-country export of experience and technology for energy management.