E-Government - Just a Matter of Technology?

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of technology in the reorganizing of public agencies. The empirical basis is the automation of the admission to higher education in Norway. This long development process has included many steps of technical developments, combined with changes in legislation and radical administrative reforms. Our analysis aims at identifying the factors that have driven these complex development processes. We ask to what ex-tent we may claim that advances in new ICTs have been a decisive factor in these reform processes? Or, has the development by and large been impelled in-stead by management interests? Our findings indicate that neither of these hypotheses can fully explain these processes. It is indisputable that political and central management priorities have been crucially important in this reform. At the same time, we cannot neglect the dynamics related to the visions that technological developments have created.