Arthur Riel, Denisa Popescu and Luisita Guanlao
benefit from cleaner data sources and e‐Government services. The coalition then works very similar to a virtual centralized structure in defining prioritized list of services with common underlying data models. One key difference is that services are typically restricted to those that can be developed on data available within the coalition. For this reason, data rich ministries such as the Interior( for citizen facing services) or Trade / Commerce( for business services) tend to be popular choices for the coalition. The coalition defines the e‐Government program, cleanses the required data and implements the services. Early success is critical for attracting the recalcitrant ministries to join the effort. A belief that“ success breeds success” is of great importance for this strategy. When the remaining elements of government see the success of the coalition, it becomes much easier to recruit them for their own successes as well as to receive staff and budget to support the ongoing efforts. This bootstrapping approach is not near as efficient as a centralized model, but is often the only way to execute a successful e‐Government program in many countries.
The Romanian Government has established the Ministry of Communication and Information Society to set e‐ Government strategy. While some progress has been made in that area, several of the larger Ministries are planning for a“ coalition of the willing” variant to the decentralized strategy(‘ Romania Ministry CIO Workshop’, 2012). In Romania, each ministry is autonomous with its own IT strategy, leadership, data models, technology stack, etc. The government recognizes the need for some homogeneity if e‐Government services are to be deployed to the citizenry and businesses within the country. The data required for interesting e‐ Government services spans multiple ministries and is often indexed in very different ways. The goal is to start with several powerful ministries together with several looking to benefit from a common e‐Government strategy, picking up the less motivated sectors once a number of successful services can be deployed(‘ Romania Foreign Investors Council Workshop’, 2012).
Portugal is another country where decentralization is the rule. Individual ministries carry out their own projects. A loosely defined coalition of the willing is collected around the Secretary of State for Administrative Modernization which is authorized under the Minister for the Presidency( Reddict, 2010). France divides responsibilities to various government departments. Political responsibility for eGovernment is with the Minister for the Budget, the State Secretary for Advanced Planning of the Digital Agenda, and the Council for Modernization of Public Policies controls the use of public funds used to improve the quality of public policies( Reddict, 2010)
4. Decentralized management / centralized funding
The third management strategy is to accept the fact that within most governments there is a natural decentralization of authority and control. That, however, does not mean that budgets cannot be effectively centralized and used as a pseudo management force where IT strategy( in general) and e‐Government( specifically) can be normalized. In this alternative method, each ministry starts with its own IT department, leader, data model and technology strategy. The government creates a third party group, typically outside of any ministry, chartered to develop an IT strategy including an e‐Government program. Ideally this strategy is created with major participation from the IT departments of each ministry. The third party group is given a large budget where five to twenty percent is an administration budget for the third party group and the remainder must be given to the other government departments.
In this model, the centralized budget becomes a proxy for centralized management where the third party group can essentially fund activities that it deems part of a central plan, and not provide funds to ministries that do not participate in central planning. It is far easier to sell a strategy where you can tell a group what needs to be done, and then actually pay for them to execute that strategy.
This model has been effectively deployed in Belgium where a third party group named Fedict was formed from resources within the various ministries along with additional personnel in 2001(‘ Belgium: a pragmatic approach to eGovernment’, 2012). This group worked with the ministry IT departments to construct an overall IT strategy and e‐Government program. The group was given a budget of tens of millions of Euros of which more than 90 % needed to be distributed to other ministries for the execution of the common strategy(‘ Moldova government workshop on cloud’, 2012). Through this distribution mechanism, ministries were given a large incentive to participate in the common strategy, and starved of adequate budget if they were attempting to execute projects outside of the national strategy.
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