Informatization in public administration acts primarily on business processes at the operative level of administrative action, and not on governance structures and institutions. To understand the momentous ongoing process of “e-transformation” of the public sector, administrative action has to be investigated at the level of basic ingredients of human and technological agency. Such a focus on the operative level of administrative work allows to fathom the enabling and transformative potential of information technology with a view to improving the design of processes and institutions of a renewed public sector. This approach, developed by German “Verwaltungsinformatik” over a long time, is characterized by taking information, not technology, as focal concept, and by using a socio-technical lens, taking into account the various features which information technology introduces into what already now are inextricable socio-technical activity systems.