Formulation of an e-Government Strategic Plan Based on a Hybrid Approach: The Case of Turkey

This paper presents a hybrid approach in strategic planning that bridges top-down and bottom-up formulations of e-government policy. Main discussion of the paper is that to what extent deductive and inductive approaches could be the driver of the development of the e-government strategic plan. There are different top-down approaches being used as a strategic framework. After comparing the sample set of requirements with several approaches, it is decided that service-cycle oriented framework is the most suitable and continuous model in terms of Turkey's national condition. In order to have a framework, we firstly built up a generic requirement tree of e-government policies with respect to policy cycles, generic issues on e-government, transforming perspectives: people, process and technology, and the international e-government benchmark studies. Driving motivation for commencing requirement analysis with development a generic requirement tree is to establish a rational correlation of national scope and priorities with e-government issues in general. Following the customization of generic requirement tree based upon national requirements and priorities, hybrid approach is used to develop the solution tree. This approach represents composition of strategic framework and actions into two separate tracks whilst ensuring extensive collaboration. Through the case study we showed that successful formulation requires iterations and feedbacks for the development of strategic framework and sound traceability in order to ensure sufficiency in solution set. Our study suggests that involvement of all levels of stakeholders in strategy formulation and decision making process should be regarded at full extent in order to compensate requirements and lead to real impact of strategic planning. Furthermore, having requirements tree is a key facilitator to separate problem and solution sets in the big picture.