NSS paper to be presented at WEBIST 2013 in Aachen
published on Friday, February 22nd 2013

The paper "Local E-Government Transformation - An International Comparison" has been accepted for presentation at the 9th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - WEBIST 2013. The paper presents results from an international survey on local e-Government strategies in New Zealand, Australia, and Germany which we have conducted jointly in the NSS project. For the study, representatives of all local governments in New Zealand, Queensland, and Northrhine-Westfalia have been surveyed, drawing a fairly accurate picture on what motives are behind local e-Government strategies. The paper will be presented by Stuart Dillon (Waikato Management School, Hamilton, New Zealand).

Abstract:
National and local governments have invested vast amounts of time, public money and effort into technologising and transforming public sector relationships, with the goal of achieving optimised government service delivery, governance, and constituency participation. To discover the extent that structural transformation has actually been achieved by local government organisations in Australia, Germany, and New Zealand this article provides a cross-national comparison of local e-government effectiveness from the perspective of the internal stakeholders. Rather than being transformative, only incremental improvements to internal procedures and service quality were reported. It appears that e-government is viewed by the policymakers charged with developing it as something that supplements, rather than displaces, traditional government services.