Walter Castelnovo
for the complexities of the public sector. Indeed, traditional efficiency based approaches to e‐Government, typical of the New Public Management( NPM) paradigm, did not succeed in accounting for the overall impacts of e‐Government on society( Kelly, Mulgan and Muers 2002; Bonina & Cordella 2009). As observed by Hellang and Flak( 2012, p. 247):
The public sector is characterized by a more complex value structure than the private sector. Where private sector organizations are primarily occupied with ensuring and increasing profitability, public sector organizations need to balance their focus between e. g. transparency and accountability, equal treatment of all service recipients, promoting democratic participation – all in a cost efficient and legal manner.
This leads to consider a different approach to the evaluation of the benefits possibly deriving from e‐ Government initiatives based on the concept of public value that, as argued by Kelly, Mulgan and Muers( 2002, p. 3),“ provides a broader measure than is conventionally used within the NPM literature, covering outcomes, the means used to deliver them as well as trust and legitimacy”.
In this paper I will discuss a public value approach to the evaluation of e‐Government initiatives( a project, a programme, a policy) based on their capacity of generating value for citizens as they play different stakeholder roles. The paper is organized as follows. In the next section I will discuss the concept of public value and the relationship between public value and e‐Government. In section 3 a taxonomy of stakeholders will be considered that can be used to evaluate an e – government initiative based on its capacity to create public value. Finally, in section 4 I will show how the public value based approach can be applied in the evaluation of a specific e‐Government initiative.
2. Public value and e‐Government
The concept of public value, originally developed in the public administration literature( Moore 1995; Benington & Moore 2011; Williams & Shearer 2011), is continuously gaining popularity also within the e‐ Government community, even outside the limits of the academic debate( Castelnovo & Simonetta 2008; Codagnone & Undheim 2008; Misuraca, Alfano and Viscusi 2011; Karunasena & Deng 2012; Yu 2008). The concept of pubic value is central for government agencies: as the goal of private managers is to create private( economic) value, the goal of government agencies is to create public( social) value( Moore & Khagram 2004). Despite its apparent simplicity, the concept of public value is difficult to define, and there is not an exact and universally accepted definition of what“ public value” means. As a consequence, it is also not clear how exactly e‐Government could impact public value. However, since e‐Government aims at improving / transforming government through the use of ICT, it is reasonable to expect that e‐Government should improve the government capacity of producing public value through public sector innovation.
By reformulating Moore ' s original definition of public value as“ what the public most values”( Moore 1995), Benington( 2011) defines it in terms of“ what adds value to the public sphere”. According to Grimsley, Meehan and Gupta( 2006), public value is the value that citizens and their representatives seek in relation to strategic outcomes and experiences of public services. Harrison, Pardo, Cresswell and Cook( 2011) argue that public value focuses attention on the collective and societal interests that are served by particular institutional arrangements and actions of government.
Public value is a multidimensional concept that includes the sense of economic value, but does not reduce to it; public value includes also a variety of dimensions of value that cannot be measured in strictly monetary terms. Harrison, Pardo, Cresswell and Cook( 2011, p. 3) define the set of basic value types reported in Table 1 and the value generating mechanisms reported in Table 2
According to Harrison, Pardo, Cresswell and Cook, government actions impact on the value generating mechanisms that, in turn, create public value. The use of ICT by government organizations can magnify the value generating mechanisms capability of creating value. Thus, by rephrasing the example considered by Harrison, Pardo, Cresswell and Cook( 2011, p. 4), the online release( and renewal) of licenses( a typical e‐ Government service) may increase efficiency or effectiveness and yield strategic or financial public value for citizens that use such licenses. From this point of view, the impact of e‐Government initiatives on public value creation can be represented as in Figure 1
95