Shaping e-government through process thinking

The paper’s primary goal is to criticize the dominant analytical frameworks thus showing the room given by each of these to organisational reflection. Paradoxically, the two approaches that treat e-government as a “technological imperative” and as a “strategic or organisational imperative” isolate the technological change from the core organisational thinking. The second goal of the paper is to illustrate a process approach that harbours an alternative view of e-government to that of the mainstream. Indeed, the article proposes a processual perspective where organisation is understood as “the activity of organising”, as an ongoing process flowing through actions and decisions. In viewing the organisation as a process, e-government finds a coherent fit that implies time is a fundamental variable. We argue that e-government implies the transformation of an activity or a practice; however, it is also a continuous production and re-creation of the features and methods of regulating an organisational system. The explanatory potential of a theory that adopts a processual perspective is put to the test through the concrete case of a web portal developed by an Italian local authority. The portal provides various services to citizens as well as to internal departments. Applying the above theoretical framework to the empirical case has enabled us to adequately interpret the outcome of implementing the new artefact, and not only on the basis of ‘subjective’ factors, regarding the personality of the actors, or ‘objective’ factors, such as the technical features of the software solution. The case suggests that the dialectic relation between the formal and informal rules of regulation can lead to diverse courses of action: cooperation or, vice versa, tensions or conflicts. The whole of which fits into a framework of possibilities that are neither optimal nor predictable.