My writings on eGovernment
Assessment is part of the
United Nations Public
Administration Network.
It is available as a
blog on eGovernment Assessment 
.
My writings on eGovernment
Assessment is part of the
United Nations Public
Administration Network.
It is available as a
blog on eGovernment Assessment .
A publication on how to facilitate collaboration between local government and vendors entitled Accessibility of eGovernment web sites: Towards a collaborative retrofitting approach (Nietzio, Olsen, Eibegger, Snaprud) has recently been published.
Changing a local government web site is often a long process which normally includes vendors, editors and specialists in local regulations and legal enforcements. Results from benchmarking studies are often a good facilitators, but the results alone are of limited use when it comes to updates in practice. This is especially true if the web site updates are relatively small such as removing accessibility barriers. Thus, the paper presents an approach for rapid accessibility updates of government web sites. The approach uses benchmarking results together with forums and online checkers.
Collaboration process between municipalities, vendors and eGovMon
The approach, visualised in the figure above, is applied to a group of Norwegian municipalities who want to improve the accessibility of their web site.
Accessibility benchmarking often fail to have an impact. This may be because of the following reasons:
The presented approach includes three areas:
This approach allows for local web site editors to use e-government benchmarking results together with an online forum to fix any accessibility issues with the web site. Furthermore, the editors gets knowledge of which issues they cannot fix themselves, but has to be carried out by updates of the CMS software or web site template. Even though this collaborative concept was applied to web accessibility barriers, it may be useful for other areas of local e-government as well.
(Full disclosure: I’m a co-author of the paper)
A very interesting study called E-government as an anti-corruption strategy showed that establishing e-Government reduces corruption. This should not be a surprise to anyone working with e-Government since it commonly believed that introduction of e-government diminishes the contact between corrupt officials and citizens, as well as increases the transparency and accountability. Unfortunately, hard evidence for these claims have been lacking (United Nations Development Programme, Fighting Corruption with e-Government Applications – APDIP e-NOTE 8, 2006).
The study is innovative as it uses a statistical approach to examine trends between e-Government and anti-corruption. Most other papers presenting quantitative data in the area do not use a statistical approach, which makes it more challenging to trust the results.
However, in this publication the author inspected, in a sound statistical way, the changes in corruption, using the control of corruption index presented by the World Bank, versus the changes in e-Government, using data from a Global e-Government Survey.
Unfortunately, for the OECD countries the author was not able to find any clear trends. This could be explained by less corruption in the OECD countries (compared to non-OECD countries), which means that the OECD countries had less to win, when it comens to anti-corruption, by introducing e-Government. Note that this is not evidence for absent of reduced corruption because of e-Government in OECD countries, just that the trends are not clearly visible in the data.
However, for the non-OECD countries, there are clear trends in the examined data. The results strongly imply that the introduction of e-Government has led to a significant reduction of corruption. Thus, supporting the view that e-Government is a very useful for reducing corruption – on a global scale.
The United Nations E-government Survey index is a weighted combination of three indices:
These three are all weighted equally contributing 1/3 to the score, which means that formally the e-readiness is as following:
E-readiness =
1/3 * Web Measure +
1/3 * Human Development +
1/3 * ICT Infrastructure
An interesting question that follows is what happens if we assign other weights to these indices For example, if we change the weights, can we also change the ranking a country gets?
Using Monaco as an example, it was ranked as member state number 112 in the UN e-readiness survey 2010. However, by adjusting weights of the three indices, we can change the ranking of Monaco from 112 up to 25, or down to 184.
In the following plot, possibile combination from 10% up to 80% of the three indicies are plotted and the corresponding ranking of Monaco.
Similarly, the following graphs how the top five member states, according to the E-readiness ranking in the 2010 survey, would rank if different weights would be used.
(Note that for reason of clarity some weightings have deliberatly been removed).
The question which naturally arises is:
Why does the current E-readiness index use equal weights, and is this any more correct than any weights?
Thanks do Deniz Susar for input on this idea.
A new version of the eAccessibility Checker has been launched by the eGovMon-project.
The tool targets checking how accessible web pages and web sites are for people with special needs. This new release focus on being understandable both for content providers and web developers. People no longer need to be web accessibility experts to find out both the accessible status of a web page and how to improve it.
The tool also includes an accurate presentation of the code ((X)HTML and CSS) which creates barriers. As well as good and bad examples of web accessibility.
Can you make your web site accessible and get the 
-logo?
The United Nations Global E-government Survey 2010 is now available. This fifth UN E-government survey focuses on e-government at a time of financial and economic crises.
The first part of the report is a discussion on ways e-government can mitigate the effects of the financial crises on development. It sees e-government in the light of the following United Nations priorities:
The second part is the results from the global survey. As previously, this includes the e-government ranking of the United Nations member states, regions and comparisons to the previous survey. Additionally, the second part includes the e-participation ranking and a (superficial) methodology section.
Please see the official page for more details.
Recently, a very interesting and solid paper titled “Is e-government leading to more accountable and transparent local governments? An overall view“, authored by Vicenta Pina, Lourdes Torres and Sonia Royo, has been published. I recommend anyone interested in e-government assessment and transparency to read this.
The paper focuses on to what degree introducing e-government has had a positive impact of the transparency of local governments.
The transparency measurements are carried out by assessing local government web sites with a methodology that rewards the presence of services and information. The underlying assumption is that, for example, a web site having contact information is more transparent than a web site where contact information is missing.
The survey includes five local government web sites (the web site of the capital and the four subsequent largest cities) from 15 European web sites. It is easy to argue that this is not a representative sample since smaller municipalities are not at all included in the survey. We can expect substantial differences between web sites from smaller and larger municipalities.
According to the survey results, the most transparent local governments can be found in the United Kingdom, followed closely by Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. On the other hand, according to the survey, Greece had most improvement potential.
In addition to transparency the authors have performed a survey on account interoperability, usability and web site maturity.
A very interesting presentation has been made available discussing the impacts of the recent financial crisis on the eGovernment in Denmark. (Adam Grønlykke Mollerup, The economic and financial crisis: Impact on e-government in Denmark?)
The study claims, as can be expected, that more strict economy meant increased budged deficits, fall in investments, and decreased productivity.
Much more interesting is the impact it had on eGovernment in the country. According to the presentation the recent financial recession, and the measures taken accordingly, had a positive impact on the eGovernment, namely:
I have unfortunately only been able the find the presentation of this study (Adam Grønlykke Mollerup, The economic and financial crisis: Impact on e-government in Denmark?). In this presentation, the findings are not discussed in any details. More elaborate argumentations for the findings would have been very useful.
Ever wondered what the practical difference between the UN E-government measures and the UN E-participation measures?
The recently publish data from UNPAN shows us that the differences are practically absent. In the following image, I have plotted the correlation between the E-Government measurements and E-participation measurements.
Correlation between UN E-Government Measure and UN E-Participation Measure
A straight diagonal line, which is clearly visible in the plot, means that there is a strong correlation. I.e. that the E-participation measure can be extracted from (or calculated from) the E-Government measure. If the data looks chaotic, which is not the case here, it means the measures from E-participation and E-Government are independent.
This plot clearly shows a strong correlation. It even has a Pearson Correlation, which is a statistical way of showing that to data sets are correlated, is a staggering 0.66, which is extremely much in the social sciences.
The question which naturally arises is why bother with both measurements?
United Nations Public Administration Network has made the data for the 2010 e-Governemnt Survey available.
The countries which reached the highest e-Government score this year was:
Capgemini has released its 8th eGovernment Benchmark Measurement called Smarted, Faster, Better eGovernment.
International eGoverment surveys are always interesting. This is especially true when surveys include an aim at measuring user experience, as the Capgemini survey does.
In this survey, user experience is divided into six sub categories:
From the above user experience categories, there are some interesting points to take note from. The manual evaluations were limited to checking if the national portals could be viewed with various font sizes. It turns out that this was possible for almost every portal and the metric was finally dropped.
Another interesting point is that Capgemini has chosen to measure web accessibility automatically using the technology from the European Internet Accessibility Observatory (EIAO). Capgemini states that technology conducts a series of automated tests following the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology. From each national portal, 6000 pages were downloaded and about 300 pages examined. (It should be noted that EIAO is no longer being developed. The project measuring Web accessibility automatically, building on the EIAO application, is eGovMon.)
According to Capgemini, the top five countries in Europe when it comes to Web accessibility is:
This ranking list is further supported by Capgemini stating that Austria regularly proceeds with self assessment of government Web sites. Furthermore, that the Netherlands have a strict Web accessibility policy; all Web sites launched after September 1st 2006 in the Netherlands must conform to strict accessibility guidelines within the end of 2010.
