Web services and value generation in the public sector

Two basic questions are investigated in this contribution: 1) How can we explain the value generation process in the public sector? 2) What is the potential role of Web services technology in this process? Our approach has been to make use of the process theory on business value generation developed by Soh and Markus (1993), adapting the original framework of analysis to the public sector. According to these authors, IT can generate business value through a three-phase process: conversion, use and competitive deployment. We focus on the first stage of the model, where IT expenditures are converted into IT assets. The role of Web services technology in this conversion process is then depicted, evidencing some implications connected to its adoption in e-Government (e- Gov) projects. The analysis is intentionally limited to the intra-organizational level (i. e. we do not consider inter-agency systems) and to the first phase of the value generation process. In the future it may be possible to delineate a more complete picture of the e-Gov value generation process and the potential role of the Web services technology.