Agility and managing change in a networked environment

E-democracy is the common denominator for the application of ICT used in the context of political policy-making. In such policy-making processes different stakeholders, including politicians, citizens, civil servants, e.g. legislation drafters, and other experts are involved. Due to limitations to the capacity to handle the variety of possible inputs e-democracy is usually associated with issues such as e-petition, e-voting and other rather restricted forms of supporting the social interaction between the government and its citizens. Often e-democracy is aimed at bringing about changes in the way governments work and how network arrangements between citizens and public bodies, and between public bodies, are shaped. Managing change is a big challenge to large governmental organizations. Propagation of changes and redefining network arrangements are complex processes. Choosing between the possible options requires balancing interest of the involved stakeholders and can be quite difficult. These changes usually include sources of law, and the changes impact both citizens and civil servants who are expected to have knowledge of these legal sources. But these changes are not limited to sources of law and the rules presented in them; changes in the organization’s environment can also cause the need to redesign business processes, reallocate roles and responsibilities, and reorder tasks. In this paper we will explain how an approach that is being developed for supporting organizations - administrative and otherwise - to orchestrate their legal information services in a networked environment, supports legal planning and reasoning about the consequences of policy and implementation choices, which in our opinion is essential to e-democracy.