Recently public sector organizations embarked on their journey to create and realize business value through their e-government initiatives. Although the business value of IT has been studied extensively in the private sector environment, I believe e-business value templates that oftentimes rely on economical justifications should not be applied indiscriminately to the public sector. This paper submits that contextual nuances in the public sector such as criticality of political value propositions (i.e. unique IT success factor) and a distinct set of risk factors warrant an investigation into how e-government and e-business initiatives are each characterized by unique business value drivers and barriers. Preliminary meta-analysis on the recent business value of IT studies reveals that e-government initiatives have a distinct set of business value sources different from those of e-business projects. Implications and applications of the findings are briefly discussed.