Knowledge Management is Why E-Government Exists

Introduction

This chapter explains why Knowledge Management (KM) is the reason government agencies implement e-government services. The aim of this chapter is not to invalidate other factors that impede the implementation of e-government services as identified in e-government literature. Rather this chapter indicates that the challenges identified in e-government literature exist because the government agency in question does not see the KM value in implementing the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). In other words, the government agency perceives the technology as a disruption to the current process of delivering government services – resulting in their reluctance to implement e-government agencies.

Government agencies rely on information and knowledge in order to govern. As is the case with any organization, information and knowledge can be described as the life wire of government agencies. The information and knowledge input into government agencies are derived either from the interaction within and between government agencies or the interaction between government agencies (Kraemer & King, 1977), businesses and citizens (Nixon & Koutrakou, 2007). Knowledge can be derived from the information received via either various forms of explicit or implicit KM extraction techniques. In other words knowledge derived from data within the information received can be externalized (codified) or internalized, (Nonaka, Ikujiro & von Krogh, 2009). The captured Knowledge can be stored, shared, transferred and used (Gyamfi & Williams, 2018), to support government activities and policies.

The advent of ICTs revealed the possibility towards facilitating KM digitally. ICTs enabled Information and Knowledge societies. The growth of the information and knowledge societies also revealed the value in the use ICT to enable and support KM processes. Furthermore, it revealed the value in ICT as an enabler of KM processes in the delivery of government services as well. However, government agencies in countries and regions that did identify the value enabled by ICT on their KM processes made the decision to mobilize resources in order to develop ICTs that can enable KM processes in government service delivery. In other words these government agencies implemented because the ICT supported KM processes in their agencies. Once such agencies identify the “KM value of the ICT”, they always found a way to mobilize resources to implement e-government. However, government agencies that could not perceive such value were either reluctant or refused to implement an e-government services.

Europe is a region where most countries have, over the centuries, mobilized resources to develop e-government services using different ICTs (UN DESA, 2020). This has resulted in their very high E-Government Development Index (EGDI). See figure 1. “The EGDI is a composite measure of three important dimensions of e-government, namely: provision of online services, telecommunication connectivity and human capacity” (UN DESA, 2020). The EGDI scale consist of very high EGDI (0.75 -1.0), High EGDI (0.5- 0.7499), Middle EGDI (0.25 - 0.4999) and low EGDI (0.0 - 0.2499) (ibid). Countries in Europe rank between the high and Very high EGDI. In other regions there are countries that rank from either low to very High EGDIs, medium to very high EGDI or low to High EGDI. More on this will be discussed in section 2. Nevertheless based on the analogy made so far, one could say that the countries in Europe, and countries with high EGDI in other regions, perceived the value of KM in the delivery of their government services. Hence, they made the decision to mobilize resources to implement e-government services. To explain this point further, the Mobilization-Decision theory (Williams, 2021) is used to analyses different initiatives and settings that led to e-government development in Europe. The focus will be examples extracted from national initiatives spanning a little over two centuries. These examples will be pointers to the decision to mobilize resources to implement e-government services.

This chapter builds on previous research by the researcher on e-government and telecom infrastructure development. The chapter is divided into 7 sections. Section 1: introduction; second 2: explains the rational for choosing Europe as a case; Section 3: describes the level of e-government infrastructure development in Europe using the EGDI index; Section 4: explains the theory used for analysis; section 5: is the analysis; Sections 6 & 7 sixth: are the discussion and conclusion.