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The United Nations (2018) E-Governance Development Index survey has acknowledged that there is a persistent positive global trend towards the higher level of E-Governance development. However, the complexity of government in ensuring the delivery of transparent, accountable, effective, inclusive and trustworthy public centric outcomes is growing. Although, technology has full potential to transform the traditional way of management across all levels of government, but the government sector in many countries is not yet prepared for such transformations (United Nations, 2018).
E-Governance practices are making use of reengineering techniques to ensure valuable services to the citizens. But reengineering in the government sector is incremental in nature (rather than radical in nature). It mainly focuses on the digitization of processes. The manual processes are being automated and comprehensive changes needed in government organisations are not targeted (Dzhusupova, Janowski, Ojo, & Estevez, 2011; Hooda & Singla, 2019; Weerakkody, Janssen, & Dwivedi, 2011).
Literature suggests that if E-Governance has to ensure the delivery of services that holds value not only for the present citizens but also for future citizens then the transformations should not be limited to process automation. Processes should be radically redesigned using technology along with the creation of conducive culture in an organisation, effective leadership, and employee engagement (Bhatt & Grover, 2005; Davenport & Short, 1990; Fathi, Ayman, Abdallah, & Dahiyat, 2017; Hammer, 2007; Hooda & Singla, 2019). This requires introducing the strategic process reforms to make E-Governance projects successful.
The Theory of Strategic Intent proposed by Hamel and Prahalad (1989, 2005) suggested that organisations should focus on development of core-competencies if they wish to achieve sustainability and future-orientation. In the private sector, such core-competencies will keep the organisation ahead in competition. In the government sector, where being competitive means showing higher and efficient performance, and delivering high-quality and modernised service to the citizens, such core-competencies will make E-Governance productive. Currently, E-Governance is implemented as an ordered act for government employees. However, if the practitioners focus on utilizing the potential of reengineering to build core-competencies, then every stakeholder of E-Governance would eagerly adopt it (Weerakkody et al., 2011). Therefore, to implement the sustainable and future-oriented E-Governance, it is important to exploit the potential of reengineering to build core-competencies that is cited as a major research gap in the literature (Weerakkody et al., 2011).
Anthopoulos and Reddick (2015) revealed that developing countries have witnessed very low success rate of E-Governance projects. The main reason for low success rate is lack of effective planning of E-Governance keeping in sight the future-orientation and sustainability factors (Gyamfi, Gyan, Ayebea, Nortey, & Baidoo, 2019). Though, it is important to focus on the E-Governance implementation practices in terms of future-orientation that will ultimately impact its sustainability, but the existing literature misses on such studies (Anand, Medhavi, Soni, Malhotra, & Banwet, 2017; Larsson & Grönlund, 2014, 2016a; Lessa, Anteneh, Klischewski, & Belachew, 2015). The majority of E-Governance research focuses on its adoption (Hung, Chang, & Kuo, 2013) or development of technology (Weerakkody et al., 2011). A search on literature related to E-Governance sustainability was conducted in the Digital Government Reference Library (DGRL) version 12.5, published on 5 March, 2017; version 14 published on 15 June, 2018; and version 16, published on 15 June, 2020. DGRL is a reference library consisting of 13,532 peer-reviewed research papers in the field of E-Governance as on 15 June, 2020 (Scholl, 2020). This library covers the period from 1981 until May, 2020 and contains all the relevant E-Governance publications from core E-Governance journals and conferences as well as relevant publications from other Information Systems journals. Additionally, searches were made in online databases, namely, Emerald, Elsevier, Scopus and Web of Science, with the aim of not missing any relevant publications. Searches were made in reference to keywords “E-Governance sustainability”, “sustainable E-Governance”, “E-Governance core-competencies”, “reengineering and sustainable/ strategic E-Governance”. However, only five publications relevant to sustainable E-Governance were available, no publication in reference to core-competencies and E-Governance, and only one publication mentioning reengineering as an aid to develop core-competencies, were found.