72 | P age Challenges and Obstacles of e-Government Streamlining: A Case Study Anupam K. Nath 1 , Debjani Kanjilal 2 ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Available Online May 2014 E-Government streamlining has been a challenge since its inception in the domain of e-business. Business organizations face challenges while trying to collaborate with partners through the use of information technology in order to ensure efficient delivery of services. One of the major reasons for these inefficient services has been political bureaucracies among government organizations. To meet this challenge, a transparent and networked environment is required where government organizations can effectively partner with other relevant organizations. Using a case study analysis, we intend to identify the challenges in government organizations while providing services which require collaborative effort, and the obstacles in adopting new technology for collaboration. We believe that the outcome of our research could provide a generalized guideline for government agencies where there is need for digital collaboration. Our findings will thus help government organizations to address the challenges in digital collaboration, and also help them implement new technology successfully to ensure efficient delivery of services. Key words: e-Government; Information Technology; Collaborative Effort; Efficient Service Delivery. 1. Introduction The concept of e-Government evolved from the domain of e-business where organizations have to collaborate electronically through internet and related technologies with customers, suppliers, and other partner organizations for effective delivery of services. The implementation of e-Governmentcould imply different objectives and different levels of transformation. For instance, in USA, the main objective is to automate and integrate different islands of information to simplify and maximize the benefits of technology (Navarra & Cornford, 2003). On the other hand, in Europe, the emphasis is to modernize public services and offer better services to citizens (Cuddy,2003). Regardless of the primary goal, the effective delivery of e- services requires integration of process and information systems (IS), and coordinationof processes between disparate organizations and stakeholders. Historically, bureaucracies associated within government organizations prevent them from delivering effective services (Wilson, 1989). Even after the emergence of e-Government, most bureaucratic processes still involve manual work and have abundant (and redundant) checkpoints. When the stakeholders in a process work as separate entities, each managing or dealing with disconnected silos of knowledge and information, it becomes difficult to render efficient delivery of services. Hence, the first step towards efficient delivery of services is to facilitate a transparent networked environment where governments can truly partner with other government organizations, businesses, citizens, and additional stakeholders (Fan, 2013; GAO, 2003). However, due to political, organizational, and technical reasons there exist challenges in creating such a transparent, collaborative environment in a government organization. In our research we intend to identify such challenges. Consequently, our first research question is: What are the challenges in the currentgovernment organizations in providing serviceswhich require collaborative effort? Collaborative, transparent environment is a challenge for business organizations as well (Nath et al., 2009). IT industry leaders have successfully implemented different collaborative technology such as Wiki to address these challenges (Nath, 2012). However, due to the presence of internal obstacles, adopting a new technology and/or tool in a government organization is not easy (Janita and Chong, 2013; Robey et al., 2013). In our research, we intend to identify these obstacles. This leads us to propose our second research question: 1 Assistant Professor, School of Business & Economics, Elizabeth City State University, United States, Email: aknath@ecsu.edu 2 Assistant Professor, School of Business & Economics, Elizabeth City State University, United States, Email:dkanjilal@ecsu.edu