Organizational and Institutional Arrangements for e-Government: A Preliminary Report on Contemporary IT Management Approaches in US State Governments

The success of e-government is believed to depend in part on the organizational and institutional arrangements that governments enact for the management of their IT resources. This paper develops the conceptualization of IT management arrangements by considering possible interactions between two dimensions — 1) the organization of IT activities and 2) control over decisions about IT activities (also known as governance) — for each of two categories of IT activities — 1) IT projects (such as website development) and 2) IT services (such as the operation of networks). In addition, the paper provides preliminary empirical evidence obtained from applying this expanded conceptualization in the context of American state governments. Many states appear to employ centralization of IT activities to offset decentralization of IT control and vice versa. Consequently, neither dimension alone provides a good characterization of governmental IT management arrangements. These findings have the potential to enhance our understanding of the barriers to, and enablers of, e-government success.