E-Government at Work Level: Skilling or De-skilling?

Essential competences, i.e. abilities, skills, knowledge and motivation, are an aspect of e-government that is neglected in the scientific debate as well as in practice. The background is that manual operations are still carried out in an IT-based public administration. With regard to the work organization, the article investigates how the competences for employees have transformed at the operative level. Based on the results of case studies it becomes evident that neither a skilling nor de-skilling process is taking place, but rather a re-skilling process. This means that competence requirements at a workplace are increasing and decreasing at the same time. It becomes particularly apparent that the social skill requirements are growing as the socio-technical networking is expanding. Even though IT supports the interaction at the organizational interfaces, it cannot replace the social competence requirements and new meta competences. This presents a major limitation for implementing networked forms of organization which are enabled by IT.