Electronic Government: A Revolution in Public Administration?

The potential for ‘electronic government’ or ‘e-government’ to transform public administration has been heralded at various points throughout the past half-century. Even by the 1960s and 1970s, as computers started to appear in government organizations, some public officials and commentators predicted that information technology would bring a revolution to public administration. As increasingly sophisticated information and communication technologies (ICTs) spread across all organizations during the 1980s and 1990s, politicians jostled to claim credit for ‘information age government’. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, as use of the Internet became increasingly widespread, claims for the transformative power of ICTs became correspondingly enthusiastic. Earlier ICTs were largely internal to organizations, doing little to ...