Kamalia Azma Kamaruddin, Ariza Nordin and Nor Laila Md Noor
While most of IT and e‐commerce models focused on private sector, none attempted to explain the investment evolution in an e‐Government context. Questions such as,‘ what kind of e‐Government initiatives have public sector agencies implemented?’ and‘ how do we move from deploying transactional to strategic applications?’ are difficult to answer as there is no consolidation of data and lack of model to represent e‐ Government growth holistically. In this research, we proposed a model for e‐Government investment using supply‐side view to understand the classification of different e‐Government initiatives which consists of five evolutionary phases:( 1) Infrastructure,( 2) Infostructure,( 3) Transactional,( 4) Informational and( 5) Strategic. We believe the proposed model will fill in the gap for e‐Government research, thus promotes integration and consolidation of initiatives especially for Malaysian context.
2. Literature review
While the topics of information technology management and e‐Government are widely discussed in their own domains there is a paucity of studies that address these constructs in a joint context. In this section, we discuss information technology management and e‐Government and their relationship as a foundation for the development of proposed model.
2.1 IT demand and supply perspectives
As e‐Government is a prominent concept of how IT diffusion into the government services, the definition of supply‐side and demand‐side perspective of e‐Government is very much influenced by the information technology management domain, which can be broken down into IT demand and supply. Basically, the demand unit is the party requesting IT service and the supply unit is the party providing it. IT demand organization mirror the business structure and drive process improvement and project design while IT supply organization focus on delivery and are organized by capability, not business line( Mark and Rau 2006). Figure 1 lists typical responsibilities of a demand unit and supply unit.
Figure 1: Typical responsibilities of IT demand and supply organizations( Adapted from Mark and Rau 2006)
To achieve agility and efficiency in application development, companies are splitting the supply units from the demand units( Mark and Rau 2006). This approach is suitable to view the public services where its demand unit resides within IT department of the organization and liaise with the operational teams to coordinate requests from them, and the supply unit, which can be an internal application‐development team or outsourced to third‐party vendors, develops and maintains applications for the organization.
In 2009, Hackett Group’ s research showed demand for IT services will surpass its supply throughout the year 2011, which means business transformation will be growing strongly while organic growth will be declining( All 2009). Thus, there is an obvious need for more IT efficiency in the supply sector. A Malaysian Public Sector ICT Study conducted in 2010 shows findings from the perspectives of IT supply and demand, which include aspects of IT management, organization and infrastructure( MAMPU, 2011). It is concluded that agencies are aware that comprehensive IT planning is essential in achieving sound management practices. In this research,
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