Managing Novelty and Cross-Agency Cooperation in Digital Government

Introduction This study examines the management challenges of managing digital government. In particular, we highlight two extraordinary (but not unique) managerial challenges that digital government poses: novelty and cross-agency cooperation. Digital government is novel because it offers some fundamentally new possibilities for how government does business. The management of digital government is, in significant part, the management of ideas, creativity, and knowledge. Digital government requires crossagency cooperation because of functional needs for scale, consistency, and integration. We argue, therefore, that a hierarchical, silo-based model of management would be doomed to failure with respect to managing digital government. In this study, we examine how four governments that have adopted a project-based approach have coped with the challenges of novelty and cross-agency collaboration. In each of these four projects, we interviewed all of the members of the core project team, focusing on how these individuals shared knowledge and organized their efforts, how they dealt with the multiple types of expertise engaged in the project, and how they engaged the multitude of agencies affiliated with the project. In examining these four projects we find certain common struggles with novelty and cross-agency cooperation. Each involved a substantial effort at pulling in a loose array of agencies during the conceptual period, and then struggled to get buy in at implementation. We derive seven lessons from their experiences as to how to manage first, a conceptual process which pulls in the visions and knowledge of the many actors that need to be involved in digital government, and second, an implementation process that successfully garners the necessary participation of relevant state and local agencies.