Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 15th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview VI. Working Group on E-government Author(s) Rimantas Gatautis Kaunas University of Technology Kaunas Lithuania Takis Damaskopoulos Title Public services quality assessment: Lithuania case File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract The rapid growth of households' and enterprises' computerization leads to the increased level of information and open new business opportunities. Public and private organizations used to move to the virtual environment with their everyday operations. The tendency of the mentioned transformation processes is particularly obvious in the development of service sector. The services in the virtual environment or electronic services contain a wide spectrum of operations starting from pure sales via internet to the pure services - free or as the part of service agreement. The share of public institutions' services provided using virtual environment is constantly increasing worldwide and consequential in Lithuania as well. The Public institutions and organizations as well as the private ones are highly interested in the quality level of the particular electronic services. The expressed need for the estimation of the quality of the electronic services strongly substantiates about the urgency and adequacy of the particular matter. Research problem. Electronics services are relatively new kind of activities from theoretical and practical point of view. In that context arise a question what methods should be applied in estimation of public electronic services' quality and what dimensions should be treated as critical. The context of this issue defines why the particular problem is researched in this master thesis. Object: evaluation of the quality of public electronic services Goal - to compose and test empirically the conceptual model of quality estimation in public electronic services based on the analysis and generalization of theoretical issues (solutions). The study was carried using scientific systemic and comparative literature analysis, statistical data analysis and qualitative study (mean -questionnaire) methods. According to the findings of research carried in year 2005 the index of public service movement into internet reach 59 percent. Taking in account this index Lithuania greatly excels the neighboring (Latvia and Poland) and Middle European countries (Check, Hungary, Slovakia). Though according to the basic IT usage indicators Lithuania is still failing to keep in place with the average of the EU states, the growth of rate of household PC acquisition and the increasing number of internet access points as well as the growing number of citizens using public administration institutions web portals for the form filling and handling other procedures let us assume that in the nearest future the number of the particular service users will be increasing. The theoretical framework for public services assessment was developed taking into consideration such theoretical models as SERVQUAL and SERVPERF. The basic for public services quality assessment served M. Frassnacht ir I. Koese (2006) proposed hierarchical model. Unless functional quality and choice attractiveness dimensions was eliminates as not suitable for the public services. The empirical survey was carried out evaluating 3 public services quality in Lithuania. The survey allowed determining users are more tend to give priority to clearness (but not graphical environment), easiness of use, quality of information and technical quality. Others factors had no significant influence on public services quality.
