Special Theme Issue: E-Governemnt

i The Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organizations (JECO) always energetically searches the new issues to find and deliver to you the most innovative thinking on electronic commerce in organizations. We continue to focus on strategy, innovation, leadership, technology, and organizational change, while widening our coverage to include e-commerce, entrepreneurship, marketing, and finance. This special issue of the JECO presents selected papers from growing interests about e-Government in recent years. New developments and implementations in e-government challenge even the most experienced managers and strategists to successfully position their e-government projects in the changing environment. Grove (1996) wrote a book entitled Only the Paranoid Survive. He wrote it before the onslaught about the Internet revolution and e-government. But his thesis is still fresh and appropriate for anyone thinking about e-commerce and e-government. We are in the midst of major shifts: Traditional logic, so fundamental to the industrial revolution, is challenged every day by the possibilities of the e-commerce world. Well-understood sources of value creation through tangible, physical assets are being replaced by newfound sources through digital assets and networks of relationships. New entrants are crafting powerful new business models and rewriting the rules of competition. Established companies need to embrace the e-commerce agenda; failing this, they will be left behind. Government needs to blend traditional and Web-based operations while confronting the challenges of e-government. Clearly, research in the domain of e-government seems fragmented. A number of management and IS/IT concepts have enriched our centered attention on how to design and manage e-government applications. However, the growing literature on e-government should continue to draw from rich theoretical perspectives, but also investigate with the 'how " questions of e-Government applications. From a research perspective, many e-government projects adopt a process perspective and/or a context perspective. The processes themselves can be studied by, for example, design, codification, integration, collaboration, and transfer phases. The process framework can also be studied for e-government development processes occurring between individuals, groups, and organizations. Some e-government development processes exist in duality with the context, that is, they can be influenced by and influence the context. Of course, strategy, structure, culture, and technology can be the focus of research in both process and context frameworks. An alternate approach to study e