An obvious question at this point is why the empirical results from this study are so at odds with the claims of the cyber-optimists. One reason is that those claims largely were made without much, if any, basis in the prior literature (e.g., Coursey and Norris 2008). Had their authors consulted that literature, we are convinced that they would have come to conclusions similar to those of Kraemer and King (2006) and Danziger and Andersen (2002), who found no basis in the literature on IT and government for suggestions that e-government would produce government reform or transformation. With such an understanding of the literature, the authors of the normative models and other cyber-optimists would not, we believe, have made claims about the transformative potential of e-government.