Measuring the Provision of Public Services by Digital Means
Juan Carlos Barahona and Andrey Elizondo INCAE Business School, Costa Rica juan. barahona @ alum. mit. edu andrey. elizondo @ consultor. incae. edu
Abstract: Assessing the advancement of e‐Government has been used to promote its development. However, over the past decade, debate on models and ways to understand and monitor this advancement has centered on the use of a“ maturity model,” that states that governments evolve through a sequential set of phases or stages. The effectiveness of these models on estimating or describing e‐Government advancement has been questioned, but more importantly, the information they provide has been of little use for policy‐makers and public officials, especially for leaders and project managers at the institutional level, where e‐Government actually occurs. Literature also discusses other models that evolved to focus on the provision of e‐services through government portals but their design makes self‐evaluation and peer‐comparison difficult, if not impossible. Other models, have recognized appropriately the complexity of implementation at the micro‐level, but have failed to propose an appraisal method that allows for scaling at a national or regional level while still being feasible in terms of time, costs and opportunity. We consider that it is possible to use the quality of information as a proxy to measure both progress and overall quality of e‐Government. Because of the nature of how most government services are delivered through a two‐way information exchange between citizens and one, or several, government agencies, the level of the quality of that exchange should be a good way to measure the government’ s ability to provide its services electronically. We propose three main components to describe the quality of this exchange: the quality of the interaction; the content quality and media quality. We borrow from literature on the quality of information to build an e‐Government index based on informational attributes that are constructed using a proposed methodology to observe and measure variables directly from site interaction. By revising other indices and relevant literature, we have defined a set of design criteria for an improved e‐Government index. We describe the framework and methodology and discuss its strengths and weaknesses. We also report the result of six years of research using this framework and methodology; the last three years include a national‐scale trial conducted in Costa Rica, a country that has adopted our proposal as its official e‐Government index. We discuss these results and their theoretical and practical implications for IT use in government operations, public administration and the future of e‐Government assessments. Using the resulting panel data from this study, this paper reviews the index and its implementation, validates its claims, explores lessons learned and discusses real and potential challenges.
Keywords: networked society, disruptive innovation, e‐government, e‐government assessment, it management
1. Introduction
As digitalization of society advances, citizens expect more and better services from their governments. More frequently, their perceptions about the quality and timeliness of how these services are provided imply the intelligent and intensive use of digital means. Supranational, national and local governments have greater presence on the Web, and this has created new ways of influencing services( Henman 2013). In a broader sense, the role of governments and their digital agendas are decisive in the transition to an interconnected society, since a country’ s overall digitalization is also linked to the digitalization and sophistication of its public services( Henman 2013)( Margetts 2009)( OECD 2003)( Dutton and Jeffreys 2010)( Tobias and Hellen 2007).
Transformations associated with e‐Government are more complex than just the mechanization of public office functions, which has characterized the evolution of service provision over the past few decades( Aman and Kasimin 2011). Today’ s technological realities and possibilities facilitate and encourage skills for public service provision and design that could lead not only to improved services, but also to totally new and revolutionary methods of organizing public offices; disruptive business models capable of challenging the dominant concepts on national organization and public service provision. This dynamic is not often fully understood in the public sector, and many times no strategy even exists for dealing with it( Dodgson, David and Ammon 2008)( Ambali 2010).
Public services are designed to meet the needs of citizens, and governments are organized to offer those services at some level. Historically, however, public services have been demanded at the level that citizens are capable of calling for them, the same way they have been supplied based on the governments’ capacity. The difference between supply and demand results in stability and trust( Tolbert and Mossberger 2006). The problem we are facing is that the pace of hyper‐connectivity is accelerating, making it easier for citizens’ needs to evolve; meanwhile, governments, by their very nature, are seriously limited in their ability to keep up and
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