Barriers to IT-driven Governmental Transformation

A number of separate studies have concluded that governmental organizations could greatly improve their efficiency as well as their quality of service by embracing state of the art IT. However, in reality few of the potential benefits are actually leveraged. Even those organizations that have succeeded in establishing online service delivery often fail in transformational aspects such as service orientation and a networked organizational structure. This paper adds to the theoretical body of Transformational Government by a longitudinal study of barriers to IT-driven change in a European Customs organization. In a first workshop we identified sixty-two potential barriers, which were later assessed to understand their impact on the transformation process. Our findings show that some of the barriers could not be controlled within the project, thereby framing the ‘window of opportunity’ and determining the outcome of the transformation process. We also found differences in the importance of overcoming the barriers and in the mechanisms that influenced organizational transformation.