Dimitris Christodoulakis et al.
Another major issue of e‐Government systems is related to factors group C. Media, civil society organizations and private sector are key shareholders of the society today. We consider that the failure of many e‐ Government applications is due to the fact that they have been developed in absence if the factors of group C. The role of each factor in group C is unique in the reinforcement loops they participate. For example, an application dedicated to control the consumer prices index cannot be designed without the participation of consumer organizations. In addition it is advisable to seek the involvement of the media as to mobilize the citizens and ensure the dissemination of the objectives.
Considering figure 2 it is easy to understand that e‐Government applications are affected by factors that are endogenous or exogenous to the e‐Government system( see also Ghaffarzadegan at al 2011). For example, a taxation application is mainly influenced by exogenous factors( e. g. the collection of taxes), and less by the endogenous ones( e. g. content and structure of the e‐Government application). As politicians and managers tend to upgrade the exogenous factors and downgrade the endogenous ones, e‐Government systems often fail in assessment processes.
In the frame of her Master Thesis at the University of Patras, Eleni Zampou( Zampou 2012) assessed the internet sites of five Greek Ministries that provide e‐Government services to citizens. Based on the current literature, the assessment has been carefully prepared and incorporated the following factors: Structure, Content, Reliability, Accessibility and Visibility. For the assessment of each factor a specific weighted formula has been developed that incorporate a set of quality characteristic. For each factor the corresponding characteristics are as follows:
Structure: % of pages that( 1) are linked to the home page,( 2) fulfill the three clicks rule,( 3) have a fixed navigation menu,( 4) are reachable by multiple paths and( 5) contain less that 100 links.
Content: readability, multilingualism, spelling errors and layout. Reliability: Page size, loading time, deadened internal and external links, HTML errors and error 404. Accessibility: Number of accessibility errors / warnings as described in WCAG2‐AAA( W3C 2008).
Visibility: Alexa pagerank, Google page rank, external links to the web site, % of pages with title, % of pages with title related to content, % of pages with unique title, % of pages with meta labels, % of pages with keywords that are related to content and % of links associated to the keywords.
The overall outcome of the assessment of the five Ministries is represented in figure 3. Considering figure 3 it is easy to see that only the factor accessibility is rated excellent. Very good is the rate for Reliability and Structure. Content and Visibility scored relatively low.
Figure 3: Overall outcome of the assessment of the five Ministries
One of the five assessed ministries( see figure 4) scored below average in Content due to the facts that:( 1) The content of the e‐Government application is not available in more than one language,( 2) the written texts
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