Modes of collaboration and expected benefits of inter-organizational E-government initiatives: A multi-case study

Collaboration among governmental organizations has been regarded as essential for realizing benefits of e-government investments. Inter-organizational collaboration on e-government can appear in several forms and can aim at varying types of benefits. However, few if any studies have delved deeper into analysis of how chosen forms of collaboration might relate to targeted e-government benefits. This article studies five cases of how contemporary acquisitions and implementations of digital archiving systems have been launched through five modes of collaboration (autonomous, standardization, framework agreement, consortium, and central service organization) among organizations in the Swedish public sector. Our analysis reveals that whereas the target system, digital archive in our case, stays similar, expected benefits vary. The article contributes by elaborating the concept of mode of collaboration that identifies typical benefits justifying a choice of a particular collaboration form on e-government development and describing the five modes in more detail based on a multi-case study. The article also outlines fourteen related propositions of the correlation between the collaboration modes and expected benefits to be verified by further research.