ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of existing scholarly thinking on government service transformation. Government service transformation, with information and communication technology (ICT) as critical enabler, has received a lot of attention since the introduction of the public Internet in the early 1990s. Particularly in the 1990s when the public Internet was introduced, many scholars theorized that rapid advances in technological capabilities would profoundly influence not only the organization and structure of government service provision, but also the democratic relationship between citizens and government. Some form of institutional transformation in public sector organizations however was seen as an inevitable outcome of the rapid technological developments happening in society. Under the automated government trend, transformational change especially happened within individual government agencies, where organizational structures in favor of centralization, the public sector workforce, and skills of public servants changed fundamentally, for example. Integrated government was the first government service transformation trend which challenged the organizational structures and institutional processes in government.
