Realising T-Government: A UK Local Authority Perspective

Having successfully e-enabled customer facing processes, the UK government is now working towards reengineering and e-enabling back office processes and information systems to facilitate more joined-up and citizen centric e-government services; these efforts are referred to as the transformational stage of e-government or T-Government. This paper seeks to explore what T-Government means to local authorities in the UK and what process related challenges have to be overcome to successfully implement transformational change in local government. While a number of broader issues of strategic, organisational, socio-cultural and technical origin are identified in the literature as presenting a considerable challenge for this goal, using a case study of a key local government service this paper shows that more obvious, but often ignored process and information systems related issues pose an even more significant challenge in practice.