Investigating Outcomes of T-Government Using a Public Value Management Approach

A main objective of transformational government (t-government) is to realize public sector reform. Initiatives of public sector reform, commonly referred to as New Public Management (NPM), often failed to achieve the desired results and led to undesired outcomes. Hence, a new reform approach, referred to as Public Value Management (PVM), emerged to overcome these negative effects and to which the use of information technology (IT) is central. This paper investigates a t-government effort in the Netherlands to find whether it realizes the objectives of PVM. The findings of the case study show that tgovernment does not achieve these objectives. Instead of realizing a transformed organizational structure, t-government is found to be concerned with setting up governance among the different parties in a in network to allow for collaboration. Furthermore, the case study results show that to realize the outcomes of PVM, t-government needs to be accompanied by a professionalization of the work force and by making government processes more transparent to ensure public accountability.