Barriers for transformation: Impediments for transforming the public sector through e-government

In the past decades many e-government initiatives have been introduced. Currently, attention is shifting towards enhancing the effectiveness of these initiatives by improving service delivery through organizational transformation. This is called Transformational Government and is often regarded as the next step in the development of electronic government, in which unique cross-organizational processes for customer service request are created. However, the creation of such service processes is cumbersome and even those organizations that have realized successful online service delivery are often hindered in their efforts to achieve transformational aspects such as service orientation and a networked organizational structure. As there is little insight in the barriers that organizations encounter on their path to Transformational Government, this research investigates those barriers by looking at two case studies that have made efforts to transform. The barriers we found include a lack of knowledge about necessary changes, a lack of change in the organization structure and the absence of a transformational mindset.