Information Sharing in E-Government Projects: Managing Novelty and
Cross-Agency Cooperation

Abstract

This report examines the management challenges of managing e-government projects. In particular, we highlight two critical managerial challenges that e-government poses: novelty and cross-agency cooperation. E-government is novel because it offers some fundamentally new possibilities for how government does business. The management of e-government is, in significant part, the management of ideas, creativity, and knowledge. E-government requires cross-agency cooperation because of functional needs for scale, consistency, and integration.
The conservative, hierarchical, silo-based human systems that dominate the organization of government thus pose an obstacle for the effective integration of technological systems that require innovation and inter-agency coordination. In this report, we examine how eight projects at the state and federal level have coped with these obstacles. In each of these projects, we interviewed members of the core project team, focusing on how these individuals shared knowledge and organized their efforts, how they dealt with the multiple types of expertise engaged in the project, and how they engaged the multitude of agencies affiliated with the project. We extract from these cases eight recommendations as to how manage the two phases of e-government, conception and implementation.