• Challenge of sharing results
Ibrahim Alfadli and Malcolm Munro
One major criticism of this work is that customization to the Arab countries may be difficult because of the culture surrounding of the area. A relationship exists between an e‐Government evaluation from one side, and challenges and issues it might face during the process of evaluation from the other side. According to( Gupta 2007) there are three areas to be considered and assessed. First is the environment, second is the performance of an e‐Government project, and third is the impact of e‐Government on the government itself. The overall impact will be assessed against e‐Government functions, economic and citizen servicing. In order for e‐Government evaluation to be a success challenges and issues need to be understood. Gupta focused on stakeholders of an e‐Government from different dimensions and points of view such as customers, government and agency. Gupta describes the constraints on the e‐Government evaluation process. The study would have been much more convincing if the author had adopted a case study to examine the proposed model to evaluate an e‐Government organization.
The e‐Government for Development Information Exchange project is coordinated by the University of Manchester and addresses a series of topics of potential interest to e‐Government and suggests solutions to issues in relation to e‐Government( egov4dev 2008). Egov4dev uses the Design‐Reality Gap Model which defines where the e‐Government is now and where it will be in the future. It focuses on the following dimensions: information, technology, processes, objectives and values, staffing and skills, management systems and structures and other resources such as time and money. One major criticism of the egov4dev project is that it is only concerned about e‐Government in developing and transitional countries. In our opinion, an elaboration could be added on top of this project to include the developed countries as well.( Bertot, Jaeger and McClure 2008) identified the issues related to citizen‐centered e‐Government research areas such as needs, abilities, expectations, literacy, community engagement, partnerships usability, functionality and accessibility. The research also suggested strategies in order to achieve successful citizen centered e‐Government. However, the research effort was exploratory and limited and does not include further details of these areas.( Bartels 2002) suggested that governments should prioritizing which services to put online, improve internal government efficiencies, acquiring citizens interest and satisfaction. One of the limitations of this paper it does not explain why and how to undertake these issues as the research only point to e‐Government as a whole transformation. In conclusion, the literature review has shown that there are existing frameworks for assessment of e‐Government but they have combined process and service. This research is concerned with the assessment of an e‐Government service provided to citizens.
3. IMGov model
The related work showed that there were existing evaluation models but each had its drawbacks. As a result a new model was developed( IMGov) to address the identified short comings. The IMGov model consists of four attributes( Input, Processing, Quality Control and Output) each attribute consists of set of factors contributes to the assessment from a citizen perspective and / or government perspective. A high level view of this model is shown in Figure 1.
In the model each attribute is expanded into a set of factors, each of which comes into a set of evaluation questions. For example, the input attribute has the following factors:
• Information
• Order experience
• Flexibility
• Accessibility
• Security
• Cost
• Usability
All the above aspects will be examined and evaluated and the result will be related and classified to the Citizen / Service point of view.
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