Developing an interdisciplinary approach to the evaluation of e-Government implementation

Can we assess the results of an e-government program in terms of its capacity to provide solutions to problems of public import? While interest in the evaluation of public IT investments is growing worldwide, there is also a widespread perception of the inadequacy of the knowledge that informs concrete practices. This chapter adopts an e-government evaluation perspective that centers mainly on conceptual arguments; it considers the evaluation as a social research field requiring interdisciplinary inputs capable of shedding light not only on the results, but also on the implementation process of the public services. The proposed interpretive key, which draws on contributions from Organization Theory, assigns e-government evaluation with a dual role: valuable cognitive resource and accountability tool for the policymakers. The reflections offered here have the goal of both providing further insights for the academic e-government community as a whole and helping to better inform public management praxis