Citizen Centered e‐Government Services Assessment Framework
Ibrahim Alfadli and Malcolm Munro School of Engineering and Computing Sciences, Durham University, Durham, UK ibrahim. alfadli @ durham. ac. uk malcolm. munro @ durham. ac. uk
Abstract: Introduction: Electronic Government( e‐Government) is attracting the interest of governments around the globe due to its great importance in facilitating and providing services to its citizens. Although most of the countries place massive budgets and provide latest technologies, they face many obstacles, including the notable absence in the assessment of e‐Government services. Therefore it becomes important to find ways of assessing e‐Government services to determine if it reaches desired goals of their citizens. Aim: This research concentrates on assessment of e‐Government services provided to citizens through the development, evaluation and analysis of a new framework. This framework is citizen centric and will help e‐Government organizations to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their services. One of the main aspects of developing an assessment framework is to consider the citizens. The citizen is one of the reasons that drive such governments to put their services online as they are the targeted consumers. Therefore, finding ways of assessing their services is very crucial to achieve better results and citizens satisfaction. The IMGov Model is based around the concepts of four attributes( Input, Processing, Quality Control and Output). Each of those consists of set of factors that will be evaluated using a set of evaluation questions. As an example the quality control attribute includes factor that an organization has website content and a system that provide the services to the citizens. The new framework will be compared with existing frameworks. As this research concentrates on services assessment this comparison may be difficult because existing frameworks focus more on the process of how government achieve better e‐Government from other perspectives such as technological, political, social and cultural. Method: Different methods will be adopted such as interviews, surveys( Quantitative, Qualitative) for garnering appropriate information and data by reviewing existing e‐ Government initiatives in different countries, reviewing wide collections on the existing research on the field and reviewing international standards and categorize them based on citizen centered approach. The actual evaluation can be through a carefully weighted average scheme or alternatively the results can be presented in term of Parallel Coordinates or Star Plots to allow as more in depth examination of the results. Result: This research will develop a conceptual framework to enable assessment of e‐Government initiatives by evaluating services provided to citizens. This framework will then be evaluated using case study in Saudi Arabia. Conclusion: This research will produce adequate e‐Government assessment measures for the services provided to citizens.
Keywords: e‐government, citizens, e‐government services, assessment, citizen centered
1. Introduction
The general definition of e‐Government according to( Sakowicz 2003) is:“ The use of information and communication technologies( ICT) to transform government by making it more accessible, effective and accountable”. According to The World Bank organization e‐Government“ refers to the use by government agencies of information technologies that have the ability to transform relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government. These technologies can serve a variety of different ends: better delivery of government services to citizens, improved interactions with business and industry, citizen empowerment through access to information, or more efficient government management. The resulting benefits can be less corruption, increased transparency, greater convenience, revenue growth, and / or cost reductions”( WorldBank 2011). e‐Government becomes a necessity in this era because of its great impact to citizens by providing services. In order to achieve better services, governments should address citizen’ s satisfaction by using citizen‐centered approaches( Bertot, Jaeger and McClure 2008). A number of frameworks have been proposed for the assessment of e‐Government and the changes needed in the field of information systems for better e‐Government adoption. However, there is a lack of models concerning the assessment of e‐ Government adoption( Gupta and Jana 2003). Where models do exist they have combined the evaluation of process and service. This research highlights the importance of e‐Government services assessment by assessing them as a citizen centered e‐Government services approach.
2. Related work
The purpose of the literature review is to consider prior investigations concerning e‐Government and ways of assessing it and its effect on delivering a service to citizens.( Sakowicz 2003) identified different approaches to measure the development of e‐Government by looking at it from three areas: how e‐Government should be understood, what are the e‐Government evaluation methods in leading countries, and whether some criteria can be applied in different countries. The paper defines the four stages of the e‐Government development as:
573