Pursuing Genuinely Successful e-Government Projects: Mission Impossible?

Abstract

Genuinely successful, high-yield e-government projects are still difficult to find and even more difficult to measure, even five years after Richard Heeks’ classic paper, “Most g-Government-for-Development Projects Fail” (1). Heeks claimed that 85% of e-government projects in developing countries don’t achieve promised goals, of which 35% are total failures, 50% are partial failures, and only 15% are successes. Soon thereafter, the World Bank reported that its sectoral based projects with information and communication technology (ICT) components had an “alarmingly high failure rate” with 50% suffering disputes and 80% requiring contract amendments (2). With a total ICT component portfolio estimated currently at US$7.3 billion and less than half of the projects rated “satisfactory” by the Bank’s own evaluation system, it would seem that many ICT projects can waste precious resources that could be devoted to competing development needs. Our best guess is that things have not improved for two reasons. First, today’s e-government systems are increasingly dependent upon inter-agency cooperation. “Agency-centric,” or “silo” approaches to systems reform, and “supply and install” projects seldom work. For example, vehicle licensing systems often require the interoperation and cross-agency cooperation of transport, tax, and finance systems, perhaps with links to private sector financial institutions, insurance, motor agencies and the police. Second, many projects depend on trade facilitation systems that involve interoperation between customs and traders for all government agencies and permit-issuing authorities, border control, airports etc. In some countries there may be over 20 agencies involved in permit-issuing and over 30 stakeholder systems involved in implementing an ICT-based “single window” trade facilitation initiative. Increasingly, e-government projects are bumping up against technology policy issues that need to be addressed at the national level. For instance, interoperability policies often need to be addressed in order for proprietary systems at local and national level government units to “talk to each other.” Secondly, e-government boils down to people using computer-aided business systems in ways that make government more accessible, effective and accountable. Every stakeholder eventually asks either “What’s in it for me?” or “Why should I be involved in this e-government project?” In this article we present three examples of successful e-government deployments that have succeeded because they have addressed policy issues upfront and/or can easily answer the crucial cui bono question. The three cases include: Nangi Village Wireless Outreach (Nepal), Nemmadi, (Karnataka, India), and MK Connects (Macedonia).