The Importance of Technical Capabilities in E-Governance: Development and Validation of a Framework
Abstract
Most prior research and frameworks of e-government have paid only cursory attention to the technology artifact which is at the core of e-governance. The stress has primarily been on analysis of government web-portals as a measure of e-governance efficacy. In this research we show how a new technology – the smart card was used to innovatively conceive and deliver public e-services predominantly in the non-web portal domain and how they contributed to better e-governance. We combine the resource-based view, dynamic capability theory, coordination theory, prior research on technology management (TM) and business/IT alignment to develop a framework of capabilities that shows the importance of technical and other complementary capabilities in identification and exploitation of new technology and delivery of e-services that contribute to effective e-governance. We validate the framework with a case study.