E-Government : services, needs and user satisfaction

Within the e-government process, needs are identified and people try to come up with ideas for the public sector that will increase the effectiveness as well as lead to cost savings. Consequently, many new electronic services are being developed. As a result, Quality of Service (QoS) becomes an even more critical issue in the domain of electronic services. This paper starts by a general discussion of e-government and its services in general. Thereafter it explains different QoS factors that have been identified within the field of electronic services. The identification has been carried out by studying several researchers’ work and by experience from e-government projects. The result shows that service design, security aspects, network performance issues, as well as the users’ perspective, such as user requirements, are all factors of the QoS model. A new electronic service that does not take these factors into consideration might fail and therefore be rejected by its intended users.