IT Penetration in the Government Workforce: A Resource-based Analysis Comparing the Fifty U.S. State Governments

Information technology (IT) penetration in the workforce is an important measure of the extent of IT or e-Government adoption in government organizations. Different state governments in the United States (U.S.) have achieved different levels of workforce IT penetration. This paper seeks to examine whether these differences may be explained as a result of disparities amongst state governments in the distribution of certain resources that enable workforce IT penetration. This research finds that disparities in the distribution and deployment of two key enabling resources, namely IT management capability and IT budget size, do not account for differences in workforce IT penetration. Some secondary contributions of this study are: it categorizes the fifty U.S. state governments according to 1) their relative positions along two dimensions of workforce IT penetration, and 2) relative levels of the two enabling resources mentioned above.