DEEP E-GOVERNMENT

1.Introduction – The Curse of the Benchmark Benchmarking of e-government has become a small industry. In a couple of recent papers, [23], [24], Janssen looked at this phenomenon and documented several different e-government benchmarks in use. In all 18 such exercises were examined and classified into four types: supply studies, demand studies, information society studies and (so-called) e-government indicator studies. As the title of the latter paper suggests, what emerges from this research is that the well established truism that what can be easily measured (or even measured at all) is what gets scored. Many of the benchmarks on the list use facile or superficial metrics such as the percentage of GDP spent on e-government, the number of on-line services for citizens or the percentage of citizens that have visited a government web site. Some of the measurements are a little more meaningful. Examples of the latter are the time savings accruing to citizens and businesses from using government services and changes in citizen satisfaction level with those services. But mostly the impression is of either international bodies, such as the European Commission or OECD