E-Government and Private-Public Partnerships: Relational Challenges and Strategic Directions

Abstract

E-government creates both new pressures and new opportunities for partnering — within governments, between governments and across sectors and the citizenry. In particular, new relational mechanisms are required to shape effective ties between governments and the vendors of IT systems and solutions that are more pervasive, fluid and demanding in terms of the level of collaboration and trust required between private sector vendors and public sector clients. The complexity and sophistication of such solutions produce many strategic choices for governments about how to deploy IT and the degree to which in-house capacities should be balanced and complemented with externalized skills and solutions. Thus, partnerships are now central to public management: In a digital world, effectively dealing with more relational organizational architectures becomes the core competency of a continually renewed and enabled public service. This chapter first explores the main challenges facing governments in such an environment, followed by a sketching of the main strategic directions required to address them.