Infrastructures for Public Service Delivery: Aligning IT governance and architecture in infrastructure development

Abstract

Governments are developing infrastructures to accelerate online service delivery. Service infrastructures are shared facilities that can be used and configured in such a way that different public organizations are able to create their own online services. This paper investigates the governance and architecture of these infrastructure developments by conducting a cross-country analysis. We developed a comparative framework for analyzing two countries that share many institutional similarities: Norway and the Netherlands. Furthermore, the typical complexities of infrastructure development are analyzed and trade-offs are identified. We found many similarities between the service infrastructure development and architecture in the two countries, but as a result of the governance being different, differences in e-services development could be observed. While Norway enables integration of building blocks into e-government initiatives of individual government organizations by developing a Business Process Management building block on the national level, in the Netherlands local governments integrate the building blocks with implementation support from the national level. The differences in governance between the two countries lead to different ways of e-government infrastructure development and, ultimately, to different ways of e-services delivery. Governance is thus an important contingency influencing infrastructure development. A key element for advancing infrastructure development is to ensure the complementarity of IT architecture and governance.