Implementing Successful It Projects In Thailand Public Sectors: A Case Study

Every public sector has to get involved in the IT project implementation for driving and promoting e-government development. However, implementing successful IT project is still a challenging issue as it requires participation from all stakeholders including politicians, chief executive officers in every sector, government officers, as well as citizen. However, most IT projects are being implemented because of the policies set forth by the policy makers or by the IT unit within the sector. According to our lesson learned from being IT consultants for many public sectors, we discovered that while these projects may very-well be aligned with the first two focused areas in the e-Government Roadmap, most of them fail. More specifically, some IT projects took longer than expected to implement and some were launched without users' involvement so they never get adopted by the users unless there is policy enforcement. Recently, we have observed interesting phenomenon within the public sectors. That is, the IT projects that do not get included in the IT strategic plan, which got initiated by the non-IT unit, are often successful. By carefully investigating into the project detail, we found that these projects had such a great impact on the project owners' operation, i.e., they can help reducing workload, use of paper, and time. Such projects normally attract users' engagement right from the very beginning. Hence, in this paper, we'll discuss different approaches in implementing different types of IT projects in the public sectors so that the IT development is strategically aligned with the e-Government roadmap while still meets the users' need.