E-Government among American Local Governments: Adoption, Impacts, Barriers and Lessons Learned

For at least the past 15 years, national, state (or sub-national) and local governments around the world have adopted and implemented official sites on the World Wide Web through which they deliver information and services, provide transactions and enable interactions between the governed and their governments. These web sites and the information, services, transactions and interactions that they provide collectively have become known as electronic or e-government. Today, e-government is ubiquitous. Initially, the mere existence of e-government was a cause for great optimism about its potential impacts, and many early writings about e-government suggested nothing but incredibly positive outcomes from e-government. For example, the principal e-government models, written early in the e-government era, predicted that e-government would evolve in a linear, step-wise fashion with each step producing more and better e-government, leading eventually to e-democracy and governmental transformation. In this paper, I discuss these models of e-government and their predictions. Then, using survey and focus group data from studies of e-government among American local governments, I empirically examine how e-government has developed in practice and contrast this with the predictions of the models. The results show that e-government at the American grassroots has not developed according to the models. It is mainly informational, provides a few services, fewer transactions and interactions and has not evolved into e-democracy or e-transformation. I discuss how certain barriers to e-government may be overcome to enable local governments to achieve better results from e-government. I conclude by presenting lessons learned from the e-government experience at the American local government level that may be valuable to governments elsewhere. Since the mid-1990s national, state (or sub-national) and local governments around the world have been implementing and expanding official sites on the World Wide Web through which they deliver information and services, provide transactions, and enable interactions between the governed and their governments. These web sites and the information, services, transactions and interactions that they provide have collectively become known as electronic government or e-government. Today, e-government is ubiquitous. Initially, the mere existence of e-government was a cause for great optimism about its potential impacts and many of the early writings about e-government (some with a high degree of hyperbole) suggested that e-government would produce nothing but fabulously positive outcomes. As an example, each of the principal models of e-government, written in 2000 and 2001, just a few years after e-government began, predicted that the " normal " …