Enacting Collaborative Electronic Government: Empirical Evidence and Lessons for Developing Countries

It now seems clear that achieving the promises of e-government is a difficult task and this is even more challenging when working across organizational boundaries. A growing body of literature argues for the need of integrative frameworks in order to understand the complex socio-technical nature of electronic government initiatives. Based on the technology enactment concept, this paper contributes to the field by testing relationships often cited in the literature, but with little empirical quantitative exploration. In addition to the relationships originally proposed by Fountain, this paper tests additional direct effects and whether an inter-organizational construct is relevant, particularly when the e-government initiatives are collaborative in nature. Empirical evidence supports the original enactment framework and identifies a few additional direct effects, specifically from organizational forms to results and from institutional arrangements to the enacted technology.