European Electronic Service Infrastructure Building - Drifting into the Future?

Abstract

Delivery of electronic services requires a service infrastructure including organisational solutions for logistics and client-organisation interactions. We report a study covering three years of efforts by nine cities in eight European countries in developing such solutions. We found twelve distinct “crises,” situations where goals, environment, and actors changed, and the process was found in a stage of improvisation. The overall process was largely unstructured and improvised. Stabilising factors were central government policies (national, EU), the general technical development, and market demands. The Web was in practice a “cuckoo in the nest,” intruding in ever more activities and introducing unexpected new demands. Web projects were seen as technical projects; more important success factors pertaining to users and organisation were largely neglected. There was typically an infrastructure link missing, a body competent of managing the whole process of bundling services from different service providers.