Why Realization Mismatches Expectations of e-Government Project Benefits? Towards Benefit Realization Planning

摘要

The effective management of stakeholders' benefits is crucial for the success of e-government projects. This success can be expressed as the match between realized project benefits and their anticipation by stakeholders according to their expectations. Unfortunately, recent studies report that there is often a mismatch between realized and expected benefits. Hence, understanding the reason for this mismatch would be of value for theory and practice. Guided by stakeholder and resource dependency theory, we aim at explaining this mismatch. Therefore, benefit aspects to be considered during realization planning are derived from literature. Based on these aspects, we interpret four types of benefits in a study of an e-government project in a German public administration: project guiding, endangered, questioned and out-of-focus benefits. We suggest that a mismatch between realized and expected benefits results from issues concerning particular benefit types and provide conjectures for effective management in practice.