The role of ICT in building trust in governance

November 2005 - Final report published
The Role of Information and Communication Technology in Building Trust in Governance: Toward Effectiveness and Results (PDF) - Chrisanthi Avgerou, Claudio Ciborra, Antonio Cordella, Jannis Kallinikos and Matthew Smith

The Information Systems Group (IS) has formed a partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) to measure the contribution of information and communication technology (ICT) to building trust in governance. The research is financed through an Italian government trust fund.

Building trust between governments and their constituents is an important intended outcome of the transformation and modernisation of the public administration through ICT. This trust would enable an effective cooperation and mobilisation of resources between public, private and civil society organisations. Having recognised this situation, the bank is seeking to establish benchmarks for outcomes, outputs and indicators for increasing the contribution of ICT to building trust in governance.

IS department staff are studying this relationship through case studies of Chilean tax-online and e-procurement systems, and of Brazilian e-voting and e-procurement systems. The department has been awarded $150,000 to carry out this work. The project runs for nine months, from June 2004 to February 2005.

Four members of the department are involved in the project:

• Professor Claudio Ciborra: Project Director
• Professor Chrisanthi Avgerou, PhD: Senior Researcher
• Jannis Kallinikos, PhD: Senior Researcher
• Antonio Cordella, PhD: Managing Director and Researcher

Matthew Smith, a PhD student in the department, has been employed as the project research officer.

Dr Andrea Ganzaroli of Milan University is an external researcher on the project.

For more information contact Antonio Cordella, Lecturer, Department of Information Systems, LSE, tel: +44 (0)20 7955 6031 or a.cordella@lse.ac.uk.

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