Providing government e-services: An extension of applicability check for practitioners

Abstract

Since the 1980's, researchers have raised concerns about the importance, the relevance, and the rigor of information systems research for both the academic realm and for real-world practitioners. Indeed, research should either challenge assumptions or extend knowledge based on these assumptions, as part of a formal theory or as represented in the way practitioners behave in the real world. Accordingly, a strategy to enhance relevance is to involve practitioners in the research process. By doing so, we can generate research that is deemed interesting, applicable, and useful for practitioners. In other words, interaction with practitioners can help researchers fill gaps between phenomena as they exist in practice and in the current state of academic knowledge. Adopting this research perspective, this article proposes an extension to Rosemann and Vessey's (2008) applicability check approach by offering an example of research focused on problems faced by practitioners who provide e-government services. Given that communities are grappling with unanswered questions regarding how to best manage and deliver e-services both within City Hall and with their citizenclients, this study seeks to understand the external and internal concerns that result from municipal governments offering online services. In this respect, we crafted a participatory research process involving relevant practitioners at the outset. We worked with the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), a non-profit think tank based in New York City (USA), and conducted semi-structured interviews with a purposeful sample of elected officials and city administrators from 13 communities from North America, Europe, and Australia. The goal of the interviews was to ask subject-matter experts (SME) to discuss 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, 4) the resulting external impacts on their communities. Data that resulted from interviews were recorded, 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). Results show a wide scope of concerns that range from a focus on the citizen-client along with changes with the strategic positioning of IT department as a business unit. Moreover, external concerns include citizens having improved access to information and to convenient e-services. In sum, knowledge that results from this study is twofold. First, results offer a wide view of the managerial problems faced by municipal governments offering online services. Second, it shows that the scope of the Rosemann and Vessey's (2008) research lifecycle can be shortened by moving applicability check upstream simultaneously as part of the research problem identification. In so doing, this paper paves the way for academic research in an area that is relevant to practice.