Measuring the Public Value of e‐Government: Trust in Measurement Processes or Processes of Building Trust?
Alberto Savoldelli 1, Gianluca Misuraca 2 and Cristiano Codagnone 3
1 Independent Researcher, Milan, Italy 2 European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological
Studies, Seville, Spain 3 Milan State University, Milan, Italy
savoldellia @ gmail. com gianluca. misuraca @ ec. europa. eu cristiano. codagnone @ unimi. it
Abstract: In the recent past several authors have addressed the issue of the ' e‐Government paradox ' which is exemplified by the contrast between the level of investments made on deploying ICT‐enabled services and the little impact produced and / or demonstrated so far. To this regard, in most maturing countries, main barriers hindering the adoption of e‐ Government services are those related to the lack of both a structured policy measurement process and an effective stakeholders ' engagement. In particular, critical success factor for e‐Government adoption seems to be a transparent and trustworthy policy decision‐making process and its key prerequisite is the definition and implementation of a well organized and fully participatory measurement framework, enhancing stakeholder trust in policy decision. Starting from these findings, the paper explores the existing relationship between measurement and trust on e‐Government decisionmaking processes, discussing which could be the possible trade‐off between high quality measurement of public e‐services and the high level of trust in policy decisions for their adoption and long term sustainability. The methodological approach underpinning the analysis is based upon a critical review of main e‐Government measurement frameworks, selected according to their effective capability to support policy decision‐making in implementing e‐Government strategies as well as their expected value to reinforce ' trust ' with citizens and stakeholders.. As a result of the analysis a new measurement model capable of measuring the public value of e‐Government services is proposed. The model has been tested in a real context of usage for the measurement of the Telematics and Informatics Policies Implementation Plan( PiTER) of the Emilia‐Romagna Region in Italy in the period 2011‐2013. The paper therefore discusses the main findings emerged from the concrete application of the proposed model in light of the feedback received from the public administration and the stakeholders participating to the measurement process. It then outlines its conditions of applicability in other policy contexts as well as new possible research directions.
Keywords: e‐government, evaluation, measurement, public value, trust, policy‐making
1. Introduction
After more than two decades of policy efforts and investments into e‐Government, not only we do not have conclusive evidence on its impact, but both the scientific and practitioners‐generated literature is ridden with conceptual and terminological inconsistencies and ambiguities around concepts such as evaluation, assessment, measurement, etc. In this paper, after clearly delimiting and defining our domain of analysis, we propose a new framework to‘ measure’ the public value of e‐Government that we call eGEP‐2.0 as it represents the evolution and improvement of the eGEP 1 measurement framework that one of the author of this paper elaborated for the European Commission( Codagnone et al 2006). We argue and show that, with respect to other available methodologies and framework, the original eGEP framework represented the most comprehensive approach but suffered from the lack of the dynamic element needed to capture the processes that in each public agency move from initial planning, though implementation, up to monitoring and measuring results( Misuraca & Rossel, 2011). Before doing this, as anticipated, we need to clearly delimit the domain and the ambitions of our proposed framework as to clear the field from conceptual and terminological ambiguities that may ingenerates incorrect expectations as to what our proposal, as well as other frameworks, can produce. This requires making a clear distinction between evaluation and measurement. We do this with the support of figure 1 below. In much of the literature addressing e‐Government the two terms‘ evaluation’ and‘ measurement’ are often used ambiguously an inconsistently, with the impression that the two may be synonyms. Both evaluation and measurement consider input, output, outcomes, and impacts, but only evaluation in strict scientific sense must also looks at covariates / confounders. Strictly defined impact evaluation, in fact, aims at demonstrating that the realisation of an outcome Y can be causally attributed to the 1
The eGEP acronym stands for eGovernment Economics Project.
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