Realizing e-government benefits with minimal capabilities

Abstract
Purpose — The purpose is to increase our understanding of the requirements for public sector
organizations to implement benefits realization practices. The research compares benefits
realization practices as suggested by the literature with actual practice with the goal of identifying
both insufficiencies in the current literature and challenges in practice that must be overcome to
improve the current situation.
Design/methodology/approach — The case study approach is used to study benefits realization
across national and local government organizations.
Findings — Five major challenges that are not dealt with by existing literature were identified:
1) Benefits realization requires not just organizational capabilities, but also inter-organizational
capabilities, 2) Coordination of benefits realization across organizational units, local and central
government and across internal organizational levels is both essential and very challenging, 3)
Managing benefits realization include much more than integrating benefits realization practices in
IT projects, 4) Different benefits realization practices are needed at central government level,
local management level and case worker level, 5) Different uses of technology require different
levels of benefits realization capabilities and different practices.
The case also illustrates that under certain conditions organization can actually realize significant
improvements with limited benefits realization capabilities: When IT is used not to change but to
fully automate processes the reliance on formal benefits realization practices is decreased.
Research limitations/implications — The findings are based on single case.
Originality/value — There is only little empirical research studying benefits realization in a
public sector context. Furthermore the research studies benefits realization from an organizational
process perspective, and not from the perspective of IT projects.
Keywords — Benefits realization, E-government, Local government, Challenges.
Paper type — Research paper.