E-government Challenges – Exploring Inter- Organizational Aspects of E-service Development

In this paper we are applying inter-organizational concepts from the industrial/business network approach on empirical findings from an e-government case, in order to describe and better understand challenges in one-stop government e-service development. We analyze our case by using concepts that characterize an inter-organizational relationship in terms of its level of continuity, complexity, symmetry, informality, and its dimensions (links, bonds, and ties). The purpose of the paper is to explore how these theoretical concepts can help us focus on certain aspects of e-service development challenges. The empirical findings are collected within an on-going action research project for e-service development in the public sector in Sweden. The aim of the project is to develop one-stop government e-services for driver’s license matters as well as a web-based portal where these e-services and information about the driver’s license process will be easily accessible. Our conclusions are that the theoretical concepts helped us reach further understanding of the empirical case. In the spirit of the network approach, we focused on the present situation and been able to give a rather detailed and fine-grained picture of the problems and challenges in this context.