Guest Editorial

t-Government has been hailed as the last stage of e-Government development, until the next! Many popular stage models of e-Government have predicted a move of e-government toward the transformational government as it matures towards its end stage (Layne & Lee, 2001; World Bank, 2003; UN, 2005). For instance, the UN (2005) stage five of e-government development, following transactional government, is the seamless level where there is full integration of e-services across administrative boundaries. Similarly, the Layne & Lee's (2001) model emphasizes in its integration phase, intra-governmental data integration relayed to customers through a Web front-end. The idea that emerges from this last stage of e-government or t-Government is that of a seamless government operation wherein government is joined up, and businesses and citizens are integrated within the government value chain (Sahraoui et al., 2008). However, the evolution of e-government may not always follow a true linear progression as governments may initiate an advanced stage (e.g. political participation) without full practice of a previous one (e.g. integration). It is also possible to pursue various paths of e-government practice simultaneously (Torres et al., 2005a, 2005b) or to have a shift in approach motivated by an emergence of new performance measures.

The concept of t-government was put in center stage by the U.K. Government strategic plan for t-government, centered on a citizen-centric delivery of public services or e-inclusion; a shared services culture to maximize value added to clients; and the effective delivery and management of resources and skills within government or professionalism (Cabinet Office, 2005). However, and on closer scrutiny, the discourse on t-Government is not new and was by no means brought about by the U.K. government or any other public or academic initiative. It is almost as old as e-government itself for the transformational nature of e-government was envisioned since the beginning albeit not pursued vigorously. The t-government discourse is in a way maturation and convergence of several earlier discourses on e-inclusion, e-citizen, e-governance, etc. For instance, Saxena (2005) urges e-governance as an enabler to steer the socio-cultural transformations inherent to e-government implementation. Chadwick & May (2003) envisage a process of convergence between e-government and e-democracy towards the maturation stage of the former, hence enacting the social transformational potential of e-government.

While in practice, t-government could be construed as the natural evolution of e-government towards a transformation stage, this has been rather suggested as a linear development process driven by the inevitable infusion and diffusion of IT within government, culminating in a widespread offering of e-services thereby implying its increased uptake by a variety of government clients (Andersen & Henriksen, 2006). t-Government is thus being largely considered within the confines of government as it reaches to its stakeholders; either citizens, businesses, or other government entities. This has been referred to as the techno-centric focus of e-government initiatives as opposed to the governance-centric focus (Saxena, 2005). This has caused t-government projects to be ‘still careering headlong into the same problems as previous ICT-enabled government’ (Jones & Williams, 2006). On the research front, the e-government literature has remained superficial in its treatment of the transformational potential of e-government as most inquiries on e-government focused on services available, technical capacities, and usage information (Jaeger, 2006; Sharif et al., 2010).

The theoretical foundations for such a linear transition remain indeed doubtful, except when restricted to the operational aspect of e-service development. This has led many to argue that t-government is still well within the historical and linear IT growth trajectory and does not really hold any promise of true transformation, if ever necessary (Cordella, 2007). Cordella & Barca (2006) note the startling resemblance of developments in e-government with those of e-commerce during its peak at the end of the last century implying that it might encounter the same fate of ‘conceptual dissolution’ within more focused applications like what happened with e-commerce, which was gradually overtaken by more focused solutions like CRM and SCM for instance. Such dissolution would inevitably weaken the t-government claim for the status of an alternative paradigm beyond mere e-government provision. A paradigmatic approach to the study of t-government hence requires moving beyond the dominant notion (paradigm) of IT as an enabling role or technological determinism (Lines, 2005), and unto the transformational drive of the t-government process. This special issue has therefore sought to sample the main domains of manifestation of the t-government construct. We have indeed attempted to consider different levels of transformations that tap into the core of the t-government construct.

Such an approach necessitates departing from the limited and positivistic perspective on the t-government axis, one that is akin to government re-engineering and considering a larger ambit for transformation. Two ‘transformating threads’ have been identified to cover the theoretical domain of t-government; namely the (1) facilitating (transformating) environment; and (2) transformation models. These threads are mirrored into the main transformation themes that are covered in this issue; which are (1) the digital divide and t-government uptake, and (2) innovation as the foundation for t-government business models. We have further reviewed the existing literature on t-government and attempted to fit it within a two-theme classification. The results of our review are shown in Table 1 with an indication of the surrogate themes that were used to describe transformation. It was not always obvious to do so, because not only did some papers transcend any single category, but more often they related only superficially to t-government research despite their claim to the contrary (although others would argue that this is mealy a matter of opinion). A key indicator of such a state of affairs is when ‘transformating’ is used as an adjective of e-services rather than being an inherent characteristic to the above two themes. This is not to suggest that ICT cannot have a ‘transformating potential’, but this can be enacted when applied to appropriate and specific governance goals (Saxena, 2005). Needless to say, we make no claim that this is the only way to classify t-government literature.

Table 1 Electronic government – towards a transformational Agenda

Theme	Literature review	Surrogate concepts
Transformational environment	Margetts & Dunleavy (2002)	Cultural barriers
	Irani et al. (2008)	Transformational Enablers
	Torres et al. (2005a, 2005b)	e-democracy
	Soete & Weehuizen (2003)	Public sector efficiency
	Jaeger (2006)	Deliberative democracy
	Helbig et al. (2008)	Digital divide
	Sahraoui (2007)	e-inclusion
	Komito (2005)	e-Participation
	Bekkers & Homburg (2005)	Information ecology
Transformational model	Cordella & Barca (2006)	e-procurement
	Sahraoui et al. (2008)	Strategic governance
	Bretschneider (2003)	Transformational Leadership
	Beynon-Davies (2007)	Process integration
	Millard (2003)	Government supply chain management
	Griffin & Halpin (2005)	Accountability
	Irani & Elliman (2008)	Social Entrepreneurship

Transformational environment

Norman (2006) in his critique of the t-government strategy of the U.K. government pointed that government could not consider users as real partners but always as recipients of its e-services. Its culture of one-way delivery has not changed enough to accommodate a revolutionary concept of pull rather than push government (Irani et al., 2004). Jaeger (2006) reports that ‘the White House Web site in the United States and the site of the Prime Minister in the United Kingdom both use text, symbols, and structures that convey a one-sided message and promotes the values, ideologies, and agendas of the parties in power through form and content’ (p.708). Soete & Weehuizen (2003) describe public sector organizations as being autistic, in that they are oriented more internally than externally, and are governed more by internal guidelines than external signals.

This inward focus of the government sector does not sit well with the dynamism of the external environment, which can create limitations on the feasibility of two-way and fluid government processes. t-Government is more often constrained by the demand side of e-services, namely the client environment of e-government such as the country, social culture, professional culture, and individual profiles of users than by the requirements of e-service deployment, which carry their own constraining factors including interoperability, management of change, process reengineering, etc. One major constraining factor that has been emphasized in the literature is social exclusion, which is generally depicted as the biggest cultural barrier to e-government from the demand side (Dunleavy & Margetts, 2002). Indeed, Ferro et al. (2011) depict digital divide as a ‘complex phenomenon’ surpassing basic information access hurdles. Margetts & Dunleavy (2002) identified a number of additional barriers to e-government uptake other than social exclusion including domestication, expectancy, solemnity, exclusionary culture of government, citizen benefits, and transaction costs. Helbig et al. (2008) argue that e-government and the digital divide are intertwined and should be studied as complementary social phenomena.

A major emphasis was put on this first theme or first level of analysis due to its criticality in delimiting the realm of transformation and its facilitating factors. Indeed, to go beyond the supply of e-services as an operational transformation of government, one has to consider primarily the necessary transformation in the e-government environment that will give t-government its full justification as an area of study, and a practical impetus for its realization. Adoption, use, and diffusion among users and countries provide a wider understanding of the dynamics within which t-government is being deployed. This would justify the argument of some that t-government is not a historical imperative that derives from the evolution of e-government towards its last maturity stage (Heeks, 2003), but rather such development should depend on whether the environment is conducive and receptive to transformation or not. Accepted papers under this first category looked at a variety of critical facilitators of transformation, namely the digital divide within countries, adoption and use in the general society, cultural factors underpinning usage in different environments, and uptake in professional cultures.

The three papers complement one another as they cover the individual, group, country, and cross-cultural environments for t-government deployment. They attempt to draw a wider configuration of transformation beyond the boundaries of government operations and out of the box marked ‘e-government’ (Jones & Williams, 2006). Sipior et al. used the technology acceptance model (TAM) to explore the digital divide and the transformational government in the United States. Their results show that t-government will remain wishful thinking unless access and use of such services is enhanced for the have-nots, which constitute a sizeable segment of the US population; a country that has been parading in the top spots of e-government in the World. Brown and Thompson project the same type of analysis to a developing country context, Jamaica, to illustrate the importance of macro factors in creating a ripe environment for the t-government. They even claim that government automation in itself is secondary compared to the imperatives of economic development, which is the true determinant of transformation. e-government would thus be indivisible from economic development, and a conventional organizational micro-approach would be truncated and even irrelevant. The transformation debate is rather centered on the model of governance in a specific country and transcends any single administration or e-service. Thomas F. Stafford and Aykut Hamit Turan refine the adoption perspective on transformation by examining a micro cultural professional environment, that of Certified Public Accountants in Turkey, and their use and acceptance of electronic tax filing systems. The TAM model is yet again found to be relevant to gauging the degree of preparedness of different constituents to transformational services (Shareef et al., 2010). They recommend ‘interventions to strengthen the usage and adoption resolve inherent in the Behavior Intention construct’ to facilitate transformation that is in line with the premise of this theme; namely that the transformational environment is situated outside of government as a supplier of e-services. ‘The mere provision of systems solutions may not in every case be sufficient to achieve the transformational vision of governments’. Thus, to become a meaningful agent of transformation for public service delivery and modern governance, t-government providers must abandon their technological bias and focus on socio-cultural transformations yielding genuine t-government (Sahraoui, 2007).

Transformational models

The search for a native paradigm in t-government research goes necessarily through the identification of key business models describing the behavior of such a construct both theoretically and empirically. This has lacked so far in the literature and was confirmed by the dearth of submissions that specifically addressed this theme. Beyond the obvious IT led trajectory of e-service development, e-government research itself veered into a ‘soul searching’ for native governance models that could justify the existence of the field beyond its IT artifacts. t-Government is in a sense the culmination of this soul-searching process. A transformational mode of governance demands that all citizens of a State have equal access to opportunity. The new imperative of development is to employ ICT applications across the board for promoting access and inclusion, and treating the citizen as a partner in the governance process rather than a consumer of public services (Richard, 1999). e-Government needs to be integrated into broader public management reform processes and broader information society activity (Torres et al., 2005a).

Rather than following a pure paradigmatic approach, we attempted within the second theme of this special issue, to ground t-government into a discourse of innovation and how this dictates a particular model for e-government operation. An open-innovation driven t-government takes the e-government process beyond its mechanistic thread of e-service development, and puts it in a wider perspective of social change.

Our selection was hence limited to a single article on open innovation driven business models of t-government. Feller, Finnegan, and Nilsson explored how open innovation strategies can transform public administration by examining how a network of municipalities in Sweden transforms value creation and service delivery by collaborating with each other, and external parties to accelerate the creation and exploitation of innovation.

Further references on the transformational models are show in Table 1 with a number of transformational ‘theories’ listed. However, this is by far the aspect of t-government that warrants the biggest attention. Moreover, and in the research gap section below, we suggest some avenues for a theoretical anchoring of transformational governance models.

Research gaps and a research agenda

On the methodological front, the selected papers represent a variety of methodological approaches to the study of t-government. This diversity in methods has been called for to guarantee a comprehensive and balanced coverage of t-government issues. We have chosen not to classify the methods used in t-government research because of the lack of an organizing framework for such research.

With regard to the first theme, almost all of the papers that tackled the transformational environment, including the ones that have been accepted, as well as those that were not, dealt with acceptance, usage, the digital divide, behavior intentions, etc. using conventional models like the TAM, for instance. This gave the editors little leeway to offer a variety of approaches on this issue, and our selection was rather based on the variety of perspectives and levels of analysis used. This warrants future research on social transformation. A thorough review of work undertaken by public administration scholars, public policy analysts, political scientists, and democracy theorists holds a large promise to infuse much needed value-added to the narrower IT rationalist perspective that has so far predominated and best represented by models like the TAM.

An embedded case study was used in the paper on the transformational model and relied on an interpretive approach. As mentioned earlier, the largest gap in the t-government research is situated at the level of models for the transformational government. In many cases, including some for the papers that have been accepted here, transformational is confused with transformation and leads to a consideration of the outcome of t-government as being transformational rather than transformation being a dynamic characteristic of e-government itself, hence the transition from e to t-government. Research is needed to identify a number of core transformational models; one of which being innovation driven t-government. Drawing from the literature on information systems, one might suggest promising research niches for developing needed transformational models. Supply-chain management, for instance, could very well be tapped into to provide both the organizational and theoretical underpinnings for t-government business models (cf. Millard, 2003). Norman (2006) in his acerb critique of the U.K. t-government strategy has strongly argued that t-government had to inevitably find its way by aligning with models that have been perfected by the private sector. Though we would not fully subscribe to his worldview, we are nonetheless in agreement that some though not all models of t-government are already in existence in the private sector and public administration should slowly move to adapt them. However, one has to keep in mind that transformation is multifaceted and that business models have to be tempered by non-business requirements deriving from the nature of t-government as a vehicle for public service. Inevitably, one has to contend with public value, social capital, and the like.

Finally, we hope you will enjoy reading this Special Issue of EJIS and will find it interesting and thought provoking.