Fiscal transparency and citizen participation in budgeting processes are widely promoted as means toward the ends of democratic accountability and responsiveness in the allocation and use of public funds. In the past decade, academics and practitioners enthusiastic about e-government have emphasized the potential for using information technology to enhance democratic governance. Putting these two streams of public administration theory and practice together, the authors developed criteria for assessing e-budgeting efforts and applied them to a sample of Web sites operated by state and local governments. Although practitioners are ahead of academics in exploring the potential of e-government for improving fiscal accountability and responsiveness, practice lags behind the relevant basic recommendations of the Government Finance Officers Association. This finding leads to research and practice agendas aimed at enhancing the use of egovernment to enhance fiscal transparency and participation.

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This article illustrates the competing and complementary value orientations inherent in states' information technology (IT) strategic planning. It develops a two-dimensional value framework and applies the framework to a sample of 10 state IT plans using content analysis. The results show that the linear multistage approach of e-government is questionable. Governments make deliberate strategic choices among four strategic value centers defined by internal/ external and effectiveness/efficiency orientations. The results show that states place greater emphasis on internal and efficiency values in the plans.The importance of strategic information systems and technology planning (SISP) cannot be overstated in government (Andersen, the environment that government faces in the twenty-first century.As the e-government paradigm evolves and draws significant investments (Ho, 2002), it is vital for governments to have strategic plans to guide the fundamental e-transformation that will embrace or enhance values and norms such as transparency, citizen participation, responsiveness, and business reengineering. Although many states have formulated new information technology (IT) strategic plans that attempt to incorporate the goals of e-government initiatives, we do not know the extent to which they reflect various value orientations. What are the values embodied by the strategic plans, and what is their relative importance?

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