Measuring E-government Efficiency: The Opinions of Public Administrators and Other Stakeholders

298 Pages·2014·4.47 MB·English

by  Manuel Pedro Rodríguez-Bolívar (eds.)

Public Administration and Information Technology 5
Manuel Pedro Rodríguez-Bolívar Editor
Measuring
E-government
Effi ciency
The Opinions of Public Administrators
and Other Stakeholders
Public Administration and Information
Technology
Volume 5
Series Editor
Christopher G. Reddick, San Antonio, TX, USA
For further volumes:
http://www.springer.com/series/10796

Manuel Pedro Rodríguez-Bolívar
Editor
Measuring E-government
Effi ciency
The Opinions of Public Administrators
and Other Stakeholders
Editor
Manuel Pedro Rodríguez-Bolívar
Department of Accounting and Finance
University of Granada
Granada , Spain
ISBN 978-1-4614-9981-7 ISBN 978-1-4614-9982-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-9982-4
Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London
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Foreword
Twenty Years and Keep Going: Can e-Government
Effi ciency Be Questioned?
e-Government development has been traditionally based on government strategies,
which have been realized by respective program and project planning and manage-
ment. The overall process is being performed under the responsibility of the govern-
ments, which have specifi ed quite similar targets for public sector’s modernization:
cost and time savings from public transactions; the development of an effective and
effi cient, friendly, and accountable public administration. Although these common
targets have been updated since the fi rst e-Government defi nition (i.e., open and
personalized government have been introduced quite recently), public sector’s
effectiveness and effi ciency were grounded from the beginning and are still two of
the most important objectives in e-Government strategies.
A ccording to the World Bank (2012), government effectiveness refl ects percep-
tions of the quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree
of its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and
implementation, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such poli-
cies. Findings from this World Bank report illustrate unexpectedly low values even
recently in many of the examined cases. On the other hand, government effi ciency
concerns public sector performance or productivity rates and it is mainly associated
with public spending effects to socioeconomic indicators, such as education enrol-
ment ratios or infant mortality (Hauner and Kyobe 2008). This International
Monetary Fund (IMF) study returns that the higher the public spending relative to
gross domestic product (GDP), the lower the public sector’s effi ciency. To this end,
e-Government effi ciency can be considered the performance of e-Government proj-
ects or deliverables, as well as public sector’s performance improvement from
e-Government implementation.
v
vi Foreword
The retaining of effi ciency’s challenge generates various questions to
e-G overnment scholars: H asn’t public sector achieved in becoming effi cient enough
in the digital era ? What do we expect from public sector effi ciency ? And i s effi ciency
a dynamic factor, such as “satisfaction” or “adoption,” which can either evolve or
decline ? To this end, this book collection questioned various scholars and profes-
sionals, and various prestigious outcomes have been delivered, which among others
illustrate that:
(cid:129) Effi ciency is a complex factor, which affects e-Government project’s success and
stakeholders’ expectations.
(cid:129) Various effi ciency measurement methods can address project and stakeholders’
demands.
(cid:129) Effi ciency’s increment improves stakeholders’ relationships.
T aking into account this book’s fi ndings, it remains extremely important to real-
ize that despite the abovementioned ambitious and heavy-funded planning, even
recently less than an average of 10 % of public services are being offered online at
an international level (Anthopoulos et al. 2007; World Bank 2012); European states
have not achieved delivering their common 20 e-services nor cross-border public
services (European Commission 2013); less than 45 % of the existing public ser-
vices can be offered online, while citizens still appear reluctant against e-G overnment
services mainly compared to e-banking services (European Commission 2013).
However, low e-service delivery and respective adoption is only one dimension of
e-Government and respective government effi ciency. Some other crucial fi ndings
concern bureaucracy’s elimination: Bovens and Zouridis (2002) identifi ed the
screen-level bureaucracy as information-based decision-making routines, which
enables bureaucratic procedures even in the digital era. These bureaucratic processes
can defi nitely affect public sector effi ciency and decline e-Government efforts.
Moreover, Bekkers and Homburg (2007) depict four e-Government myths, one
of which addresses the expected rapid government transition to an information revo-
lution. This myth can be related to a mistaken stakeholders’ understating and, in this
context, rational planning and strong management can enable quicker migration
as this book’s section 3 presents. However, rational planning is considered to be a
second myth (Bekkers and Homburg 2007), which appears when standardization
and interoperability in the public sector are not enhanced. To this end, this book’s
section 2 illustrates exemplars that meet these public sector’s prerequisites while
they enable tracking of stakeholders’ needs.
All the above text documents the signifi cant contribution of this book: public sec-
tor’s effi ciency and effectiveness are still far behind the expected values despite
e-Government projects’ implementation for more than 20 years. To this end, this book
views effi ciency from the lens of e-Government projects’ performance, while chap-
ters’ contributors defi ne methods to measure effi ciency from this perspective. These
methods can address the reasons that obstruct administration’s productivity growth.
Foreword vii
Moreover, existing myths regarding e-Government low contribution to public sector’s
effi ciency are addressed by chapters’ contributors both via meeting end users’ expec-
tations and via exemplars, which deliver important experiences to e-Government
domain.
Thessaly , Greece Leonidas Anthopoulos
References
Anthopoulos L, Siozos P, Tsoukalas IA (2007) Applying participatory design and collaboration in
digital public services for discovering and re-designing e- Government services. Govern Inform
Q 22(2):353–376
Bekkers V, Homburg V (2007) The myths of e-Government: looking beyond the assumptions of a
new and better government. Inform Soc 23(5):373–382. doi:10.1080/01972240701572913
B ovens M, Zouridis S (2002) From street level to system level bureaucracies: how information and
communication technology is transforming administrative discretion and constitutional con-
trol. Public Adm Rev 62(2):174–184. doi:10.1111/0033-3352.00168
European Commission (2013) Public services online: ‘digital by default or by detour?’ http://
ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda . Accessed Dec 2013
Hauner D, Kyobe A (2008) Determinants of government effi ciency: International Monetary Fund
(IMF) Working Paper. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2008/wp08228.pdf . Accessed
Dec 2013
The World Bank (2012) The worldwide governance indicators (WGI) [online]. http://info.world-
bank.org/governance/wgi/index.aspx#home . Accessed Dec 2012

Pref ace
In recent decades, governments around the world have been faced with rapidly
growing challenges on how to make public service and administration transparent,
effective, and effi cient. Increasingly connected citizens and stakeholders are
demanding that governments be more transparent and deliver services more rapidly
and effi ciently. The implementation of the Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT) in public administrations, which has been called widely as
“e-Government,” has become a central part of the process of the modernization
of public administration, allowing a strategic and intensive use of ICT, both in
the internal relations of public administrations and in terms of the relationship with
citizens and with companies in the private sector.
A lthough there is a large amount of research on e-Government, these studies
have sought to highlight the possibilities of e-Government implementations and to
show different experiences about e-Government projects. Nonetheless, these
e-G overnment implementations are usually not justifi ed from an effi cient analysis
point of view by both governments and researchers, and it is diffi cult to know if
these implementations are meeting stakeholders’ demands regarding information
transparency, rendering of online public services, or citizens’ participation in public
sector management.
The edited volume M easuring e-Government Effi ciency. The Opinions of Public
Administrators and Other Stakeholders enhances our understanding of how
e- Government implementations are impacting on the effi ciency of government in
improving their transparency and in providing public services. By focusing on
e-Government effi ciency, this edited volume fi lls the knowledge gap in the effi -
ciency of e-Government projects, analyzing if public managers, policy-makers, and
other stakeholders think that e-Government policies have improved their manage-
ment and decision-making process through the engagement of the citizenry or else
they are only a procedural improvement through the introduction of new ways of
delivering public services or disclosing public sector information.
ix