There is an extraordinarily large financial outlay for bringing in electronically-enabled systems into governance processes. It is obvious that somebody who matters somewhere means business. But no matter how influential a person is, the kind of outlay that has been made requires a general consensus towards a broad recognition of the need. Whether e-governance is possible in its entirety with a kind of network systems that prevails is doubtful, but that should be no reason for not strengthening the pace of the journey.
There is much debate in this area, but little agreement. This is rooted in the requirement of much wider literacy on information technology and information systems than what exists today. By the same token, information technology is far too seminal a technology to be left entirely to the information technologists. A fact that is often overlooked in the projection of information technology and information systems is to realise that the basic domain where information technology and information systems unfold their logic is the domain of an organisation.
Accordingly, a fit between IT and organisation structure and processes becomes central to the successful enactment of this change. The goodness of the fit would have to be rooted in the coherence of the design of information structures being compatible to the design of organisations. After having walked through some of these issues with one of my research scholars, I became increasingly convinced that a given technology need not necessarily impose a given structure in all contexts. Indeed, whether a given technology does raise similar results in different organisational environments is a moot point.
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