Sourcing Decisions of Software Applications Hosting : What Influence has e-Government Services

• Main Authors: Johansson, Björn, Melin, Ulf
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Linköpings universitet, VITS - Laboratoriet för verksamhetsinriktad systemutveckling 2009
• Subjects: Informatics; Informatik
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-50611; http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:isbn:978-0-387-30403-8

There are a lot of reasons reported for why organisations start a sourcing decision. This chapter discusses this theme based on two questions: Does the need and/or wish to increase e-Government services influence the start of a sourcing decision process aiming at reorganising hosting of software applications and if it does, how does it influence the start of such a decision-making process? The point of departure, besides a literature review, is a sourcing decision-making process in a Swedish municipality. When analysing the sourcing decision, five suggested propositions developed from the factors, control, core competence, capability, cost, and strategy, are used. It is concluded that municipalities in Sweden has to prepare for being more of an e-Government organisation, which means that more of the services the municipalities' employees has done before citizens will do by themselves. This demands that to be able to offer future e-Government services municipalities need to have control over software applications. From this study it is suggested that centralisation of hosting can be seen as decentralisation of work tasks from an e-Government perspective.