What Public Servants Really Think of E-Government

Abstract

Drawing on 240 completed web surveys from six New Zealand core government agencies, and using qualitative and quantitative measures, we investigate public servants' views on three aspects of e-government, situated within an overarching rhetoric of ‘transformation’. First, the degree to which e-government is supporting ‘joined-up’ government is assessed. Second, we canvas views as to what degree e-government measures are promoting new ways of working for public servants such as flexible work. Third, we seek public servant views on whether e-government measures are allowing greater ‘e-participation’ from the public. We find that public servants exhibit considerable nuance in their views on e-government, including some scepticism towards its role in increasing flexible work, in ‘joining-up’ government, and in increasing citizen participation in policy making. The vagueness of transformational rhetoric is highlighted. We suggest the more considered views of public servants on the costs, as well as the benefits, of e-government, provide a useful antidote to much heated rhetoric and ‘dangerous enthusiasms’ exhibited towards e-government across the world.

Key words:

• E-government
• ICT
• New Zealand
• public administration
• reform

Notes

Whole of government and joined-up government are phrases associated with what is sometimes called ‘post-NPM’. They are portrayed as an attempt to reintegrate state sectors seen as overly decentralized by agencification initiatives under NPM, which established numerous single purpose agencies, and which were seen to lead to difficulties in co-ordination and adequate central control (cf. Goldfinch and Wallis 2010). Joined-up government initiatives included reversing some policy–operations split including re-integrating agencies and reducing their number, co-ordination mechanisms between agencies and greater central control over policy co-ordination, development and some operational matters.

To enhance the number of cases utilized in the regressions with building better public relations and facilitating greater public input, the means were substituted for missing values. All other regressions utilized a pairwise deletion of cases with missing values.

Although the discursive comments enhance our qualitative understanding of the effects of technology, the limited number of open-ended responses could reduce their external validity and consequently might not be weighed as heavily as the findings from the aggregate data from the closed-ended questions.

Open-ended answers were loaded in Excel and collated and counted manually.

Overall, the results reveal seventeen statistically significant relationships between the hypothesized predictors and the ICT outcomes investigated here. Almost half (eight) of these significant relationships were unexpected. Notably, education revealed unexpected negative relationships with several different outcomes and scepticism towards some e-government measures, while age revealed unexpected positive relationships in support for flexible work practices. The nine expected significant variables failed to reveal a set of predictors or individual variables that are consistent predictors across all of the dependent variables investigated here. However, age and the total number of hours invested in the use of different technologies ‘last week’ are generally related to the support for flexible work practices, and greater email use with the public is perceived as facilitating public input into the New Zealand public agencies investigated.