The implications of electronic government for local governance and citizens’ quality of life: social networks and inter-organizational innovation.
Introduction
The concept of electronic government is about to emerge from practitioners’ concept to one that also attracts research. However, investigation of inter-organizational innovation in context is scant. Further, there appears to be no investigation of this phenomenon within the context of UK Government and the local governments within the kingdom. Thus this research attempts to bridge the gap that exists within the academia and practitioners by investigating the network of relationships between organizations as they innovate and share best practices. Given these gaps in literature, the research problem investigated in this research is: How can the network of organizations involved in the development and dissemination of electronic governments ‘best practices’ best be co-ordinated to deliver improved quality of life?
A framework about the electronic government and the network of organizations in the extant literature would be integrated with literature about Customer Relationship Management, Knowledge Management and Innovation to arrive at the following research issues:
Research Issue 1: How do the organizations work together to deliver local government service innovation?
Research Issue 2: How best practices can be readily identified and shared and that providers know best?
Research Issue 3: What are barriers to knowledge sharing and service improvement?
To investigate these research issues, a combination of qualitative and quantitative two-staged approach would be used. The first stage would be convergent interviews to build on the extant literature and to further confi ...