E-Government and organizational IT adoption: The case of the barcelona city council

Literature and practice show that the relationship between information technology and public organizations is a twoway trip. On one hand, the adoption of new technologies is conditioned by political and managerial factors that predict the 'readiness' for the implementation of major technology changes. On the other hand, information technologies have thepotential to transform business processes, organizational structures and human resources management styles. In the public sector, these changes are particularly significant since information and communication challenge the hierarchical, rigid structures, procedures and rules of the administrations and set the promise of a new type of bureaucracy. These two interrelating dynamics (technology conditioning organizational issues and organization, in a broad sense, conditioning the adoption of technology) seem to provide a basis to understand most of the transformation of public administrations nowadays. In this sense, the case of the Barcelona City Council (Catalonia, Spain), for the sake of its continuity and evolution over the last decades, the extent and complexity of its achievements, the will to publish and open its strategies and results to public scrutiny and the attention of researchers and practitioners, provides a very interesting empiricaland theoretical field to challenge the outcomes of the research in other parts of the world and the hypothesis of the existing explanatory models of adoption of IT among the public and within the organizations. This paper is indeed the result of an empirical research that was conducted during the first semester of 2007 in the Barcelona City Council and that was intended to be an exploratory study aimed at finding evidence of the internal transformations occurred around the adoption of information and communication technologies. In particular, great emphasis was placed on procedures and workflows, organizational structures and information systems. Two specific research questions were explored: 1) what factors have conditioned the internal adoption of technology in the Barcelona City Council? and 2) how have the implemented electronic government projects impacted the internal organization and structure of the City Council?