The purpose of this paper is to offer a critical discussion of information system adoption in the public sector (often referred to as e-government) and to contribute to the debate by offering a public value perspective. The paper points to the public value paradigm as an alternative approach to studying ICT-enabled public sector reforms. This paradigm, we argue, proposes an alternative way of framing the nature of the problems faced when ICT enabled public sector reforms are initiated and studied. The public value perspective proposes a new and richer context in which to study and research these phenomena. It also calls for the redefinition of the ways we assess e-government in the context of public sector reforms. It is therefore seen as vital to evaluate the socio-political impact of ICT adoption in the public sector.

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Bureaucratic institutions not only provide mechanisms to coordinate work activities in the public sector, but also serve to enforce the democratic values of equality and impartiality. This paper explores how recent approaches to e-government neglect these important dimensions of bureaucracy and proposes an alternative approach to e-government. This paper sets the wider new public management reform context to help explain some of the difficulties the NHS IT Projects are running into by 2007. The e-bureaucratic form is proposed as an e-government solution, which, while taking advantages of the information and communication technology as means of coordination, also help to enforce the values of equality and impartiality underpinned through the actions emanating from bureaucratic structures.

Original citation:Cordella, Antonio and Tempini, Niccolò (2015) E-government and organizational change: reappraising the role of ICT and bureaucracy in public service delivery.

Public value theory offers innovative ways to plan, design, and implement digital government initiatives. The theory has gained the attention of researchers due to its powerful proposition that shifts the focus of public sector management from internal efficiency to value creation processes that occur outside the organization. While public value creation has become the expectation that digital government initiatives have to fulfil, there is lack of theoretical clarity on what public value means and on how digital technologies can contribute to its creation. The special issue presents a collection of six papers that provide new insights on how digital technologies support public value creation. Building on their contributions, the editorial note conceptualizes the realm of public value creation by highlighting: (1) the integrated nature of public value creation supported by digital government implementations rather than enhancing the values provided by individual technologies or innovations, (2) how the outcome of public value creation is reflected in the combined consumption of the various services enabled by technologies and (3) how public value creation is enabled by organizational capabilities and configurations.