STRATEGIC COLLABORATION AND E-GOVERNANCE PERFORMANCE: A STUDY OF SELECT PROJECTS IN INDIA

Abstract

Instances of usual practices of strategic collaboration are more prevalent in corporate sector as compared to public sector. It is attributable to the inherent objectives of these organizations. Corporate organizations collaborate to achieve their corporate values which are generally economy-oriented whereas, a government organization has different objectives to achieve, i.e., public values which are non-economic (social value). The need for organizations to collaborate arises due to several reasons. However, scarcity of resources and self-insufficiency are usually the key reasons. Organizations tend to collaborate with other organizations to have access to vital resources to achieve their objectives and goals. Emergent requirements also often impel organizations to collaborate to have access to divergent and precious resources for making their processes more efficient. E-governance is one of such emergent areas that requires access to multi disciplinary resources for offering flawless citizen-centric services to the masses. These resources could be in the form of people, processes, government policies, etc. E-governance aims at delivering quality and useful services to the citizens in a better and improved way at their doorsteps with little or no extra efforts applied by them. Government organizations are required to strategically collaborate within and across, not only to have access to the vital resources but also, for improving e governance performance. Studies have found that there has not been much success attained by e-governance projects in the context of developing countries. The partial success is attributed to various reasons, such as lack of access to the appropriate technology, lack of funds, lack of skilled manpower, and above all, the lack of a culture of strategic collaboration and alliance within and across government organizations. It is also learnt that government organizations generally work in silos and have different decision making, monitoring, and control mechanisms. The silo nature of working style also leads to the impediment to the path of creating a strategic collaborative environment and further affects collaborative e-governance performance. Though a fair amount of research has been conducted on e-governance in the Indian context. These researches are primarily focused on the adoption of e governance, delivery of e-governance services, e-governance performance v assessment, etc. So far, hardly any research has been conducted on analyzing strategic collaboration for improving e-governance performance. The gaps identified based on a review of literature have helped in formulating the research objectives. The research work is based on literature review, functional experience, and survey conducted on select e-governance projects of central and state government organizations of India. These organizations have actively implemented respective e-governance projects under the National eGovernance Plan (NeGP). The study is conducted with a focus on strategic collaboration in the context of four identified citizen-centric e-governance projects. Projects are considered for selection both from state government and central government to cover a wider perspective. Two projects are taken up from the central autonomous body and each one from the state and the central government. Before conducting the main study, a pilot study on “Lease-hold-to Free-hold Conversion of Properties” of the Delhi Development Authority (a central autonomous body under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India) is conducted. Other projects selected for the study are “Booking of DDA’s Park and Open Spaces”, “Driving License Project”, and “Passport Sewa Project”. These citizen-centric projects are selected due to their wider acceptability,being in operation for more than five years and reported corrupt practices in service delivery in the conventional system. The research is divided into three parts. In the first part, an extensive literature review on e-governance and strategic collaboration is conducted. To gather more insights for the research work, the literature has been reviewed in the areas of i) E governance/E-government: definitions, scopes, frameworks, importance and challenges and performance parameters, ii) Strategic collaborations, Alliances, Joint-ventures, Joined-up government: definitions, scopes, importance and challenges, iii) Strategic collaboration and e-governance, and iv) Collaborative e governance performance. A literature review on related areas of information technology and strategic management is also conducted. Literature review helped in identifying the research variables selected for the study in terms of macro and micro perspectives. Further, a conceptual research framework constituting ‘Collaborative e-governance performance’ variables is developed.