Socio-Technical Transitions and Organizational Responses: Insights from E-Governance Case Studies

ABSTRACT E-Governance involves government, internet and communication technologies (ICT), organizations, and society. It has expanded to include domains such as agriculture, services, knowledge management and so forth. The domains with their inherent social, cultural, and political factors influence adaptation and selection of the latest ICT innovations by E-Governance. Innovation scholars studied adaptation and selection in socio-technical systems and for effective transitions suggested the need for innovations to cumulate as stable designs; E-Governance systems are no different. In this paper, by examining the interoperations (i.e. interactions with rulesets) during development and deployment (situations) of E-Governance systems we can get insights into stable designs and transitions. The relationships that organizations exhibit among themselves and the coordination of their internal components can provide insights into interoperations (phenomena). We need to observe the phenomena in situations where it occurs; therefore, selected a case study method. To capture diverse analytic and heuristic situations, a multi-case study method is selected. The findings show that a technology-based solution achieves only transactional effectiveness and service delivery efficiency. For a successful transition, stabilization of designs is necessary which in turn requires interoperations that bring alignment of organizational internal components to the relationships and coevolution of other entities such as society.