Measurement of e-Government Impact : Existing practices and shortcomings

Public administrations of all over the world invest an enormous amount of resources in e-government. How the success of egovernment can be measured is often not clear. E-government involves many aspects of public administration ranging from introducing new technology to business process (re-)engineering. The measurement of the effectiveness of e-government is a complicated endeavor. In this paper current practices of e-government measurement are evaluated. A number of limitations of current measurement instruments are identified. Measurement focuses predominantly on the front (primarily counting the number of services offered) and not on the back-office processes. Interpretation of measures is difficult as all existing measurement instruments lack a framework depicting the relationships between the indicators and the use of resources. The different measures may fit the aim of the owners of the e-governmental services, however, due to conflicting aims and priorities little agreement exists on a uniform set of measures, needed for comparison of e-government development. Traditional methods of measuring e-government impact and resource usage fall short of the richness of data required for the effective evaluation of e-government strategies.

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