Towards a Multi-measurement Platform of e-Government Projects and Services

e-Government types of experiments, practices and services currently explode in number and variety in all European countries. They fit a long-term conceived plan to build a more consistent Information Society, hopefully also, a promising Knowledge Society. In 2005, E-Europe is entering its second phase and just as best practice diffusion and policy incitation are still needed, evaluation tools and programs are urgently to be deployed and discussed. Economic benefits of e-government undertakings are of course a major concern and should be considered not only in the narrow sense (where cost reduction of administration activity can be effectively acknowledged) but also in a larger sense, taking into account counter-effects due to external cost increase as well as forgotten transaction or learning costs. However, measuring the value of e-government projects and practices should go beyond this mere cost-minded appraisal as more profound reasons support the implementation of E-Europe, i.e., overall competitiveness based on increased knowledge capabilities for a large variety of actors, increased well-being, citizen and inter-regional equity, administration user empowerment and more globally the building up of a more consistent and pervasive information society. This multi-dimensional set of goals requires an assessment toolset capable of reporting upon a quite large and also heterogeneous number of features. Based upon our various implications in past or current European projects as well as in-depth national experiments linked one way or another with e-government processes, we have conceived a methodology to evaluate, compare, monitor and steer a variety of e-government projects. This research is still under construction and this paper presents the first stage of what we have reached, notwithstanding the fact that we are still making progress in the meantime in other dimension of our evaluation concept. On our way to explain in more concrete terms what is meant by the different criteria, reasons for allocation of weight or the features targeted by any given measure, we could have taken examples throughout the list of our fieldwork references, as well as tapped in from other sources. In order to keep it simple, we will stick to a case we have covered in one of our studies (Buser, Cotti, Rossel and Finger 2003 and Finger and Rossel 2003), i.e., the pilot project eTampere in Finland, a complex and ambitious setting for which we are continuing to make observations and follow-up fieldwork (see for instance for Tampere: e-Tampere / Infocity Case Study, http://dowire.org/wiki/E-Tampere).