Opening the Black Box of Leadership in the Successful Development of Local E-Government Initiative in a Developing Country

Abstract

Leadership has been identified as one of the critical factors in the successful development of e-governmentmore fundamental problems that include the lack of appropriate technological infrastructure, limited financial and human resources, and the incompatibility to their political, social and cultural environments (Nguyen & Schauder, 2007;Imran & Gregor;. These might explain why 85% of e-government initiative in developing countries failed (Heeks, 2003 suggested instead to spend money for "bread" rather than for "broad-band."However, there are some reports of successful e-government initiatives in developing countries. Gudea (2007) reported a successful cooperative approach and innovative strategy to develop home grown internet in Romania. In Ecuador, Karanasios (2007) gave evidence how small tourism enterprise successfully copes with digital divide. In Asia, two studies were documented. In India, Misra (2007) described how a self-reliance approach contributed to successful e-government implementation, while in Indonesia the success of e-government project at municipal level was reported by Furuholt and Wahid (2008).Because of the differences in technological readiness and other factors, the implementation and development of e-government in developing countries need to adapt the strategies and approaches that have been applied in developed countries, or even develop totally new ones (Chen et al., 2006). Some researchers (Stanforth, 2006; Akhter et al., 2007;Imran & Gregor, 2007) proposed that focus should be given more to the social and political factors surrounding the e-government projects (rather than the technological factors) as these are not only dominant but are also quite diverse. Amongst these, leadership seems to be very important and crucial as reported in several occasions. Accenture (2001) reported that leadership was the more important factor (such as political will, commitment, and accountability) than others. Studies supporting such stand were also reported by Ebrahim and Irani (2005), as they found that strong government leadership to support the organizational and procedural changes during the development of e-government was needed. Torres et al. (2005) and Kim et al. (2009) also found that strong leadership was considered as the most outstanding drivers to e-government success. Imran and Gregor (2007) further observed that leaders' vision and their willingness to initiate changes within the government sector as significant strategies to succeed in implementing an e-government project.Although it has been convinced that leadership does play important roles in egovernment development but the number of empirical studies are rather limited (Prybutok et al., 2008). Moreover, the few that could be traced focused only on outlining some important features of an effective leadership that are related to the vision, commitment assurance or political will. They failed to describe how such features were exercised in government work setting that was much influenced by political negotiation and con...