IT Mangement for Transforming Local Government - a Danish Collaborative Practice Research Project

The aim of this paper is to present the methodology and preliminary findings from an on-going Danish collaborative practice research project concerning IT-Management in Transformational e-Government - DISIMIT. The ambition of the DISIMIT project is to improve IT management in local governments (municipalities) and to contribute with knowledge about IT-Management to the IS literature in general and to the e-government literature in particular. The paper reports on the process of conducting collaborative practice research and the selected findings from the empirical research activities. Up till now different empirical research activities have been conducted; a quantitative survey in all 98 Danish municipalities, qualitative case-studies in 12 municipalities in spring 2009, and 3 longitudinal theme tracks. Overall, the quantitative survey and the qualitative case-studies in 2009 identified the stage of eGovernment maturity and diagnosed the six main challenges faced by local governments in their efforts of realizing transformational e-Government. From these challenges, the project chose three challenges to investigate further according to the principles from Collaborative Practice Research, the challenges were categorized into 3 longitudinale theme tracks from 2010 – 2012). These challenges were – 1) Value Creation and Benefit Realization, 2) Strategy Execution and Project Portfolio Management and 3) Social Alignment and Communication.