Managing E-Government Projects: A Comparative Case Study of Two Inter- Organizational E-Service Development Initiatives

E-government initiatives have large potentials in developing better services for citizens and a potential to transform government structures. However e-government initiatives face a number of challenges of complexity and risk – it is not an easy matter to realize its potentials. A key research issue for the e-government field, as well as the information systems field in general, is to understand why some projects progress to success while others end in failure. The main objective in this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the progress and the success vs. failure in e-government development based on case studies of two inter-organizational e-service projects. The analysis in the paper is made from a) an e-government systems development life cycle perspective and b) a challenge and success factors perspective. The main result in this paper is that crucial success factors of an inter-organizational e-government project include project manager skills and position in the agency organization as well as when and how systems maintenance issues are introduced in the project. Criticism is presented concerning the life cycle model used in the analysis regarding this last matter.