Reforming government with information technology in South Korea

The South Korean government recently launched 11 major e‐government services after a long period of inter‐ and intra‐ministry politics concerning the allocation of jurisdiction over various e‐government services. This article analyses the politics of e‐government efforts in South Korea. It begins by describing the development of e‐government policy in South Korea for the past two decades, and identifies its four major features as comprehensiveness, fragmentation, the orientation toward operational efficiency and citizen services, and the inclination toward new technological solutions. The article concludes that these features can be attributed to the heavy involvement of the macro political system, its high susceptibility to inputs from experts, and the institutional design of the informatisation subsystem.