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Excerpted from the infoDev publication, Information and Communication Technologies, Poverty and Development: Learning from Experience.

The experience of recent years in a number of countries leads to a number of caveats in designing an approach to e-government. First, ICTs do not, of themselves, change organizational cultures and practices. This is a lesson that should already have been learned

from widespread efforts in the past few decades to automate government ministries, but the lessons from these past efforts are not widely known. The social organization of work, particularly in tradition-bound and highly hierarchical institutions such as government ministries, can significantly impede the takeup and effective use of ICTs. In many bureaucratic cultures, including those in some OECD countries, using a computer is viewed as a clerical function, “typing,” to be done by secretaries and clerks. In rich-country private sector firms, the widespread penetration of desktop computers in white-collar jobs coincided with, and was related to, the flattening of management hierarchies, the thinning of secretarial and clerical ranks, and the shifting of those lower end functions to a combination of “smarter” software and the expectation that workers further up the ladder would do their own typing. ICTs create the conditions for this shift in the culture and structure of organizations, but in government bureaucracies (and particularly in hierachical cultures) resistance to this change can be substantial and long-standing. Nor, more generally, do ICTs of themselves create broader institutional reform and the redesign of government processes and procedures. An added source of resistance to this restructuring, and the shrinkage of government payrolls which it often entails, is that the civil service is often a considerable source of employment, and patronage, in many developing countries.

Even when there is widespread commitment to bureaucratic reform, the task can be monumental and expensive. Converting handwritten records, reskilling staff, installing computers and networks, and retooling procedures can require enormous commitments of money and manpower. And since the costs are more immediate and visible than the benefits, resistance can easily mount given other pressures and priorities.

The ability of ICTs to make governments “smarter” both in the formation and implementation of policy is limited, of course, by the fact that policy making and implementation are complex and often highly political processes where, even if there is a “best” solution, it is not always the one that prevails. This is not to deny the importance of increasing the information and knowledge available to policy makers and civil servants, and the benefits of ICTs in this regard. It is simply to insert a note of caution that few government decisions, in any country, are made by purely disinterested parties on the basis of the best information available to them. Furthermore, there is often a significant disparity between a general policy and the various instances of its implementation.

This, however, is where the third type of “e-Government” can be useful: increasing the transparency and accountability of government officials by increasing public information and voice. The ability of government officials at all levels to exercise undue discretion or profit personally in the making and implementation of policies and the provision of government services can be diminished if more citizens know what services they are entitled to, what procedures are normal, and what resources government has committed to spend on public services in their community. It can also enable citizens to band together to seek redress of grievances, push for the removal of corrupt or incompetent officials, and work for equal rights for minorities and disadvantaged groups.

Here again, of course, ICTs by themselves do not create change. If broader structures of power and privilege are resistant, if community social capital is weak and trust among citizens is weak, the empowering potential of ICTs is not likely to be realized. It is also important to recognize that those who most urgently need government services and who are most likely to be discriminated against in the provision of those services — the poor, minority groups — are also those least likely to be able to use ICTs effectively unless the ICTs are specifically designed for their needs or unless there are strong intermediary organizations helping to press their interests.