Luc Lagrandeur and Denise Fortier
well as the problems and challenges they face regarding the internal and external forces associated with providing e‐services. In order to do so, questions ranged from identifying 1) Reasons for cities to undertake e‐ service initiatives, 2) Reasons for using the information highway, 3) The resulting internal impacts within their communities, and 4) The resulting external impacts on their communities.
2.1.3 Data analysis
Data that resulted from interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded and analyzed based on the guidelines of content analysis, a qualitative data reduction and sense‐making effort that takes a volume of data and attempts to identify core consistencies and meaning( Patton, 2002).
We thus proceeded by first analyzing each transcript, identifying relevant responses. We then looked for commonalities between participants’ responses. All the similar responses were grouped together. Given that we started with a blank slate, we needed to perform several such iterations in order to create categories. More specifically, data coding focused on descriptive codes that entail little interpretation, where a class of phenomena is attributed to a segment of text( Miles & Huberman 1994). In other words,“ In our IS department, we have set up an e‐services unit to provide support” is an example of this type of code. Once the list was completed, we then assigned labels to identify each category( e. g. cost reduction).
2.1.4 Results
For the participating communities, we found a wide variety of reasons for undertaking e‐service initiatives and using the information highway. Moreover, these initiatives result in several key internal and external forces.
Reasons for cities to undertake e‐service initiatives
Research participants explained that their reasons for offering e‐services to citizens cover many angles. Indeed, these range from improving customer service, to providing information, improving citizen engagement, promoting the city, improving communications with citizens, and improving transparency and accountability. Here are some of the reasons that were provided by SMEs:
“ To improve services to citizens by providing‘ at home service’ instead of having them drive down to City Hall.” – Windsor
“ To create partnerships; social media platforms allows the government to form active partnerships with business and the community in planning, priority setting and policy development.” – Ipswich
“ To provide information about the community for residents or businesses looking to relocate to the area.” – Hinton
“ To help address community expectations for government to be more transparent, accountable and to engage more frequently on key issues.” – Ipswich
Reasons for using the information highway
When asked about their reasons for joining the information highway, participants claimed that they do so to reduce costs, to improve the productivity or efficiency of the organization, to improve the quality of service to citizens, and to improve branding by managing and controlling their web presence. Here is a sample of answers:
“ E‐services reduce the high cost of service provisions to customers via manual methods.” – Ipswich
“ To increase efficiency; integration between the front and back office.” – Helmond
“ To be able to control the look and feel of their department and control access to the backend of the database” ‐ Stratford
The resulting internal forces within their communities
According to participants, the resulting internal impacts cover a variety of contexts. These range from a focus on the citizen‐client, a reallocation of human resources, changes in procedures and processes, in human
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