Since planning and implementation of e-Government involves a series of complex reforms, e-Government planners would benefit from the lessons of "change management."

A reluctance or inability to manage change properly is often one of the key reasons for the failure of e-Government projects. The discipline of change management identifies and addresses the human resources and organizational factors that can drive or obstruct change. Prof. Norman Archer has developed a simple but comprehensive methodology for analyzing change management. According to Dr. Archer: "an evolving Environment creates Change Drivers that impact the Organisation. Management determines how to respond to these drivers.  A Change Strategy is selected, along with Tools and Methodologies, for implementing the proposed organisational changes. It is critical to be able to Measure and Evaluate the impact of change on the organisation, so an initial snapshot of the organisation is taken. During and after implementing changes, the organisational impact must again be evaluated to determine whether it has been successful. Continuing adjustments may be required to tune the organisation."

Key components of successful change management are:

• leadership;
• a focused and coherent strategy, including defined objectives and implementation plans;
• buy-in from stakeholders, which includes
  • consultation;
  • incentives;
  • training; and
  • monitoring and evaluation.
    

Change Management Resources

Thomas B. Riley, "Change Management , E-Governance and the Relationship to E-Government" (November 2002).
 
The Improvement and Development Agency for local government (IDeA) has created a capacity building toolkit for change management.
 
"The Change Management Toolbook."

The OECD has published a set of case studies on managing large public IT projects.


<<Previous: Motivating Workforce Support for e-Government

Back to Beginning of Chapter