This book offers a new perspective on the future of government digitization. The Dutch version, entitled iOverheid, was presented to the Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, Piet Hein Donner, on 15 March 2011. In it, the Scientific Council for Government Policy (Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid – WRR), an advisory body to the Dutch Government, makes recommendations on this important issue. The WRR's task is to make proposals, based on broad analysis and scientific insights, for the strategic direction of Dutch policy. To this end, the WRR submits advisory reports to the government on issues which merit special attention. The current English version of the iOverheid report draws mainly on material relating to the Dutch situation and developments – in their EU context – but the analysis and the policy perspective provided should prove valuable in other national contexts as well. After all, the Netherlands is by no means unique, neither in the high stakes involved with the success or failure of ICT in government, nor in the sometimes feeble grasp that public authorities seem to have on developments in this field, especially in assessing the wider societal consequences of digitization. The central message that this book puts forward is that political attention needs to be shifted towards the intricacies of the web of information flows that is taking shape, instead of the intricacies of the individual technologies and applications that make these information flows technologically possible. The message that governments should see and act like an iGoverment instead of an eGovernment is a message that is worth testing in different national contexts.

This book was drawn up by a project team headed by Corien Prins, a member of the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR). The project team further consisted of the following members: Dennis Broeders (project coordinator), Colette Cuijpers, Henk Griffioen, Anne-Greet Keizer and Esther Keymolen. Mark van Loon, Annemarth Idenburg and Tamara Snijders, and Astrid Souren contributed to the preparatory work.

The book is based on a detailed analysis of the extensive Dutch and international academic literature, research commissioned by the WRR, and meetings and interviews with external experts from varying levels of government, politics and academia.