3. Measurement of e‐Government
Ninoslava Savić and Zoran Radojičić
One comprehensive measuring tool for monitoring of e‐Government development should consist of the same elements as e‐Government itself. In this way, it could reflect the e‐Government main structure and its changes. This means that a successful measurement model of e‐Government must have sensitivity to the developmental stages at which the activities and stakeholders of e‐Government currently are( Holland et al., 2002).
Measurement and benchmarking of e‐Government are important for policy makers as long as their results can provide basic information about public spending, significant for EU policy cycle. However, there is still a problem with the lack of data for measurement process that implies a need for capacity building at all levels. The EU benchmarking of e‐Government services should be improved by:
• updating the list of basic services,
• focusing on services with the most potential to increase usage and
• measuring the provision of reusable and transparent public information and data( Undheim and Codagnone, 2008).
For development of e‐Government in certain entity( country, region, population, economy etc.) it is important to find and regularly apply a methodology for measuring and evaluating the development and penetration of ICT in the public sector in a given country. An appropriate tool for measuring e‐Government status needs to be:
• flexible, which means that it allows an easy way of changing and / or adding new concepts, in accordance with the changes of technology and services,
• comparable, which means independent of the local administrative structure and procedures,
• internationally applicable, which means that the information provided by that tool could be used for international benchmarks( Holland at al., 2002).
According to Heeks( 2006), there are at least five potential levels of e‐Government:
• local, state / provincial, regional, national and international.
The same levels can be viewed as a framework for measuring and benchmarking of e‐Government. One comprehensive measurement tool for monitoring and evaluation of e‐Government is expected to include the appropriate measurement of three main parts of this process( Figure 1):
• the supply of services as the precondition of electronic government,
• the intensity of use and the effectiveness of electronic services and
• the organization of the back‐office.( Holland at al., 2002).
Figure 1: Main aspects of e‐Government measurement tool
European Commission gives the following recommendations for successful organization of monitoring e‐ Government development( eGovernment Economics Project [ eGEP ], 2006a):
• establishing a working group on e‐Government measurement standards, in order to establish common lists of variables, their weights and data collection rules( including EU experts, representatives of institutions from Member States and statisticians from Eurostat and national statistics offices),
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