eGovernment measurement for policy makers

The eGovernment policy focus has moved over the last five years from being mainly concerned with efficiency to being concerned both with efficiency and effectiveness. This paper examines the current and future development of eGovernment policy making, and the critical role that measurement and impact analysis has in it. From an almost exclusive focus on the efficiency impacts of eGovernment over government itself, there is a clear movement towards an increased attention on effectiveness impacts, as well as to wider governance impacts. This is going hand-in-hand with a change away from measuring only the inputs and outputs of eGovernment initiatives towards a much greater emphasis on analysing and measuring the outcomes for constituents and the impacts on society as a whole, for example through increased public value. In addition, the article considers likely future eGovernment measurement trends which involve moving both policy target setting and measurement from central government to local government, from the back-office to the front-office, and to front-line professional staff, whether care or medical professionals, police, community workers, teachers, etc. Taking this further, it also seems likely that in the future, constituents themselves will also be involved in policy target setting and measurement when directly related to their own use of public sector services and facilities. The new approach will be to measure local and specific targets through, for example, constituent (user) surveys, for which mass collaboration Web 2.0 tools could probably be used. One of the benefits of such a local, small scale approach is that it is also more immediate and real time, and reduces the need to ‘wait forever for the decisive evidence’.