Abstract
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1. Background
Practically everyone has some dealings with government during his/her life. Some people more the other less, depending on their life events or situations. Most of them use traditional or classic ways of interacting with government: personal visits, regular post, telephoning, but those who are adequately IT skilled have also possibility to obtain particular information and services over the internet. According to more and more sophisticated and comprehensive supply of government information and services online and higher levels of internet penetration among people and businesses, the number of such users has also increasing. But, the question is, to what extent the existing e-government supply meets the demand of its users (existing and potential)? The answer could be interesting from several points of view. Every efforts and financial resources that are made on developing e-services are of no sense if their users are not satisfied with them. On the other side, also taxpayers are more and more interested in the return on investment in e-government. And last but not least, it has been known for some time, that the development of e-government could not be measured and evaluated only on the basis of supply (as has been mostly the case), but only in conjunction with the knowledge and consideration of demand. Only then the real value of supply could be assessed and future guidelines of e government development defined.
Consequently the majority of studies which deal with measuring, evaluating and benchmarking of e-government development are refocusing from researching the supply of government information and services online to researching also the demand side of e-government. If we have been studying the web presence, the contents and sophistication of government web sites until recently, today we are also interested in the real value this supply has for its users. We are witness of more and more studies aiming at to investigate to what extent are citizens and businesses aware of e-government information and services online, do they prefer to use them, are they really using them, are they satisfied with them, what are the reasons of not using them and how do they see the future development of e-government.
2. Objectives
The main objective of the research presented in the paper is to find out, how well the existing supply of e-government in Slovenia meets the demand of its users, e.g. citizens as well as businesses. Can citizens and businesses on government web sites obtain all information and services that are needed in their dealings with government, how accessible and useful are they, what is the level of their satisfaction and what are the reasons for not using information and services available online? Hence, the paper deals with the interdependence between the range and quality of supply on one side and the level of usage, satisfaction and demand on the other.
3. Research methods
The research is based on the data gathered through several empirical studies, recently performed by the research group at the Institute of informatisation of public administration at Faculty of Administration (University of Ljubljana). Up to this year these studies have been focused mainly on supply side of e-government, when we performed also the first comprehensive study on e-government user satisfaction, which now enables us to make comparisons between supply and demand. For supply side studies the web sites survey were used, while for demand side studies the citizens and businesses telephone opinion polls were performed.
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