Transformational Government - A Conceptual Foundation for Innovation in Public Administrations

Structural changes and increasing dynamics in the public sector intensify the administrations' need for cost-savings and process optimisation. To address actual drawbacks the adoption of e-Government is currently seen as opportunity to improve not only effectiveness and efficiency but also quality of public service delivery. For doing so, knowledge about internal structures and the external environment is indispensable. As transformation projects of public administrations (PA) in comparison with other industries strongly depend on the perception of responsible individuals and affected stakeholders, theories and artefacts are needed that help to depict the organisational reality of the PA. Current industry-independent models do not sufficiently account for the characteristics of PAs, hence it is the aim of this contribution to provide a design-oriented approach in order to assist this transformation. For this purpose a conceptual model with 42 design elements is presented. Two different perspectives are identified for the analysis of the domain. An inter-organisational view defines all elements needed to depict the boundaries and environment of PAs. An intra-organisational view enables analysis of the internal reality of an organisation. As not only technical but mainly inter- and intra-organisational issues are actually restricting the adoption of e-Government, the presented conceptual model therefore provides a holistic framework for the improvement of requirements analysis of transformation projects.