Assessing E-Government Success Strategies using Internet Search Data

Evaluating e-government programs can be a challenging task. While determining program features and capacity are relatively straightforward processes, exploring the more dynamic nature of citizen response to e-government is difficult. Fortunately, recent advances in Internet search technology offer researchers new opportunities to address these research questions. Innovations, such as Google Trends and Google Insights for Search, have made longitudinal data on Internet searches accessible to scholars. The availability of this data opens a number of possible research avenues regarding e-government.

Method and Lessons from Evaluating the Impact of E-Participation Projects in MOMENTUM

Decreasing election turnouts and citizens’ disinterest in democracy galvanized the European Commission (EC) to co-fund a set of e-participation pilot projects. During the runtime of the program, and in particular after the last projects ended in 2010, policy makers at European level were keen to know how well this funding program performed. Hence, the EC also initiated a project called MOMENTUM with the aim to monitor and evaluate the progress and impact of the projects. MOMENTUM designed and performed a systematic comparative analysis of the projects. This chapter presents the impact evaluation framework, which is based on methods of evaluation from empirical research, thereby also reflecting programmatic contexts of the projects. The evaluation framework grounds the interplay of elements of a holistic e-participation solution: the participation process, the topics to discuss, the policy supported, and the technology and tools deployed. The authors present results of the evaluation and demonstrate how attention on the interrelations of these issues affect users’ perception and motivation to participate in an e-participation endeavor. Insights show that the method developed can lead to useful and usable impact analysis and evaluation results. The survey results provide valuable clues to the behavioral intention of the civil society to use e-participation tools and applications. These findings provide not only information on whether and how far the monitored projects are successful but also why they succeeded or failed and how they can be improved.

Sustainability of E-Government Success

The long-term success of e-government initiatives is of paramount importance, especially for developing countries, which face challenges such as limited budget, donor dependence, transfer of technology, short-term involvement of non-local agents, and relatively unstable political and economic environment. Although e-government success and sustainability are both relevant concepts to assess IT-enabled administrative processes in practice, e-government research has not yet elaborated the two concepts in an integrated fashion. Depending on review of the extant literature, this chapter (1) clarifies the concepts of e-government success and sustainability, (2) provides a conceptualization, which unfolds for both concepts the most used sub-concepts and constructs in terms of enablers and evaluation criteria, and (3) proposes an integrated research agenda for studying the interrelation of both concepts in detail.

E-Government Success

E-government is a complex undertaking, which encompasses technological, organizational, and institutional elements. Much research in the field has looked at ICT as a valid solution to make public administration more successful. This chapter offers a richer account of the role played by ICT in transforming public sector organizations, discussing the effects ICTs have in the rationalization of administrative procedures and public sector institutional transformations. The notion of techno-institutional assemblages is introduced to offer a new theoretical ground to frame the notion of success in e-government projects. It is argued here that successful e-government policies are the one that deliver the outcomes, which have led their initiation. Accordingly, the need for new indicators of success is identified.

Criteria for Assessing the Success of E-Government Projects

In this chapter, the authors examine the criteria to use in assessing the success of e-government projects. Through an empirical enquiry based on case studies of e-government projects by Tunisian government agencies, they found that the interviewees distinguish between the project management success and the success of the deliverable. This empirical enquiry also revealed that the interviewees have made an emphasis on the success of the products delivered while the success of the project management process was relegated to a second order. The findings are used to propose a grid of the metrics to assess the success of e-government projects.

Empowering Citizens

The federal government of Australia has established an innovative although uneven record in shared governance initiatives in a climate of political stability and broad social inclusion policies. The participatory reform agenda has the potential to increase citizen empowerment, improve government transparency and accountability, and develop the capacities of the administrative arm. Changes to Australian Public Service (APS) practice are now aimed at better support for citizen-centric policy formation and, in some examples, shared governance. Nevertheless, policy consultations remain at the high-risk/high gain end of citizen-government-APS relations. This chapter scopes the concept and contexts of policy co-production both as a technique of engagement and a desirable outcome in shared governance for representative democracies. It assesses policy engagement from the perspective of citizens as agents, not targets. Using a constructivist approach, the chapter assesses the impact of contextual factors, the new participatory reform agenda, and the design features on two consultations conducted in 2011: Clean Energy Legislation, and Digital Culture Public Sphere. Major factors impacting on policy coproduction are found to be context-specific and issue-specific, and outside the direct control of public service agencies. Theoretically, the constructivist approach combines the literature on modes of e-government research, on e-government success factors and participatory media, with evidence of institutional reform agendas and the evidence provided by the case studies. Methodologically, the data is drawn from public domain materials.

Open Government Success Factors in Government Websites

Open Government Websites are a different perspective for presenting government information. In the Mexican case, it is mandatory by law since 2002 to present some government data through Websites. Despite this strong impulse of transparency, there is not enough measurement for the success or the failure of this novel practice. This chapter analyses data collected from a benchmarking of three year measures of open government portals during 2007, 2009, and 2010. From this data, three success factors are identified: trust, search engine, and legal issues. The success factors for open government portals are a contribution that must be verified by further research. This chapter is organized in seven sections. In the first section is the introduction of open government and the background of the Mexican case; the second section presents a literature review about open government and success factors; the third section describes the methodology of the open government portals measurement during 2008-2010; the fourth section discusses the results of this benchmarking and identifies three success factors: trust, search engine, and legal component; the fifth section describes these three findings and provides some recommendations for practitioners; the sixth section discusses the limitations of success factors and the limitations of this kind of research; a final section of future research presents some research paths, and a final conclusion section closes the chapter with a summary of findings and discussion.

Anthropological Thinking about E-Government Evaluation

E-government evaluative practices are examined here anthropologically by questioning their theoretical and methodological assumptions. The scope of analysis focuses on the manner by which e-government evaluation is conducted, the objectivity it invokes, and the discourse around which its findings are generalized to the broader public. The intended audience of this chapter is policy workers and academic researchers who rely on online surveys to assess the citizen-experience of e-government and seek to expand their evaluative repertoire ethnographically. Practical recommendations are offered in an effort to enhance the e-government evaluator’s toolbox.

Toward a Theory of E-Government Interorganizational Collaboration

In this chapter, the authors present a series of causal maps that constitute an initial effort in the creation of a generic theory of interorganizational cross-boundary electronic government (e-Government) projects. Such causal structures are the result of a simulation-based study in which they explored the interactions and social processes associated with the development of trust and knowledge sharing in the development of an interorganizational e-Government application in New York State: the Homeless Information Management System (HIMS). The chapter includes the main theoretical and practical implications of the modeling and simulation work, as well as discussion of some paths to continue the exploration of collaboration in this specific context. The causal maps are organized around three themes that emerged during the modeling process. The first theme is related to trust development, and its recursive interactions with knowledge sharing and learning. The second theme is related to the importance of achieving stakeholder engagement by establishing a trusting environment as opposed to the use of authority or coercive mechanisms. The last theme is associated with the understanding of requirement definition as a social process of learning and knowledge transfer. The authors believe that these recursive structures constitute an alternative to the factor approach to understanding success and failure in digital government.

Delineating Three Dimensions of E-Government Success

This chapter draws upon the historical evolution of e-government and at the extant body of knowledge in order to delineate the dimensions that are critical for the success of the use of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) for purposes of governance. Evaluating the impacts of technology adoption in the public sector is an intrinsically complex process. However, given that currently governmental spending on ICT projects rivals and at times even surpasses allocations for capital developments, the need for an evaluative framework becomes rather obvious. Based on multiple scholarly accounts and practical examples, this chapter suggests that the success of e-government should be examined along three chief dimensions: security, functionality, and transformation. All three vectors are highly interdependent, and it can be argued that the success of e-government in the long run is not possible if significant shortcomings are observed along any one of the three aspects.