ICT Spending and Governance in Brazilian Public Administration

This paper reports on an exploratory study based on publicly available accounts of ICT expenditures of the Secretaries of the State of São Paulo, Brazil and relates these data to their stages of ICT development and governance. E-Government has been a priority for Administrations, with expectations of gains in services to citizens and performance of government processes as strong drivers for significant investments, focused managerial and political actions, leading to new services for corporations and citizens’ live-events. These highly visible front-end interfaces require the support of effective and integrated back-office processes and informed management. Therefore e-government management has to be considered in the context of the agency’s global ICT (Information and Communications Technology) activities. Effective ICT governance contributes to performance and e-value generation, but requires political will and determination to be implemented and enacted. The relationship between ICT use, growth stages and governance and ICT budget participation and growth, demonstrated in this paper, can be used both as indirect and robust measures for the effectiveness of ICT governance and as indications to managers of governance pre-condition for e-value generation in Government