E-government Stages and the Romanian Public Sector - The Pension System Case

Abstract

E-government has been, for the past 20 years, one of the main fields of study for researchers following transformation in the public administration systems, the most important and visible one after the New Public Management. Since 2001, many papers have tried to establish o list of stages one should follow in order to observe the process a public organization goes through in its journey to digitalizing public services. This paper will review four of the most important and universally accepted models, from the Layne and Lee (2001) complex model, to the Gartner (Baum & DiMaio, 2000) specific one, in order to decide which one best applies in practice and can actually be used to analyse a public organization and its process towards digitalization, and which ones apply better to the general public system, like the one proposed by Moon (2002). In order to have a specific example and apply the theoretical models in practice, this paper will be presenting the case of the public pension system in Romania, through its local Houses of Public Pensions and their level of digitalization, when it comes to public services and public interaction with people who benefit from their services. I will begin by presenting the context in which e-government appeared and why is it so important in the development of any public administration of the 21st century, the main differences between the stage models mentioned above, and the arguments presented for applying one of them in our current study, followed by the methodology used to observe the characteristics of the digitalization process in the Public House of Pension of Brasov city, Romania. The results of the study will be applied on the stages mentioned above in order to determine which stage are we currently talking about and how well the model can be applied in practice.