The public sector uses electronic data interchange (EDI) in areas such as the health sector, procurement, meat inspection, taxation, transportation, and the courts. Also, government encourages private sector to enhance their use of electronic communication to secure faster and more reliable exchange of data, to save manpower, and to enable organizational transformation to the information society. In EDI and Data Networking in the Public Sector authors from eight countries report on the modes of governmental intervention to stimulate the usage of EDI and the challenges facing government as they try to smoothen their own units via organizational management. With cases (a total of 14 chapters) from Singapore, Denmark, USA, Sweden, England, Australia, and the Netherlands, this book finds that government in some countries is ahead of the private sector in utilization of EDI and that government at both supranational, central and local levels are active players on the field. Local levels of government and the quasi-governmental organizations provide an important supplement to the efforts by central government to increase the overall usage of EDI. EDI and Data Networking in the Public Sector also indicates that the payoff from investments in EDI are slow to evolve. Dreams of quick return are not likely to emerge. Also, return of investments are highly linked to the organizations' ability to change their work processes along with the investments in EDI.

The authors indicate that many public sector organizations lack the steam and vision necessarily to transform the government to a more technological based organization, where public procurement, taxation, medicine ordering etc. takes advantage of the potentials in EDI and data networking. EDI and Data Networking in the Public Sector will be of interest to all researchers and practitioners in MIS, Computer Science and International Trade working on the adoption of new technology.