Abstract
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Aspiration of every government, from the past to present, is to be more effective. Currently, many governments relate increased effectiveness to the objective of customer orientation, which identifies effective and efficient supply of quality services as a crucial element of public administration. Achieving that objective requires different kind of measures and actions in the public administration area. One of them includes implementation of information and communication technologies (ICT), which opens new pages in those efforts, referred to as e-government.
In order to assess the success of the process of e-government implementation, researchers have established a number of indicators as well as various benchmarks that integrate different sets of indicators. However, since the focus of early e-government efforts was mainly on rapid achievement of visible results, the evaluation also concentrated on the supply (most visible) side of e-government. Most of the indicators and benchmarks had a narrow focus on measuring e-government output, i.e., front-office implementations of G2C and G2B services. This narrow focus of evaluation has led to a significant slowdown of development in many countries. For this reason, many researchers point out the importance of back-office processes improvement (hidden G2G e-government aspects) for the further development of e-government. Therefore, there is a need to establish new indicators that, instead of focusing on the G2C and G2B results, will capture the development of behind-the-scene G2G information systems supporting the management and administrative functions of public institutions. These involve support for data and information management, electronic records maintenance, and cross-departmental flow of information.
Assessing the development of G2G aspect of e-government the main challenge to be addressed in the paper. A possible approach, to be presented here, is to analyze the role of networks in the organizational structure of public administration. One aspect of these networks, closely related to e-government, is the information flow between different public administration bodies. Being able to quantify (measure and observe) these information-flow networks would be an important step towards quantifying the effects of e-government and other public administration reforms on e-government and its G2G aspect in particular. Namely, establishing these networks would allow us to use standard methods for social network analysis and apply them for assessing the development of e-government, which will be a very relevant contribution to the field and the process of formal e-government evaluation. More specifically, we will explore the possibilities to use the properties of the information-flow networks in public administration, as measured using social network analysis, as indicators of G2G aspects of e-government development.
The appropriate assessment of G2G development is even more important in the context of Macedonia as a developing country with poorly developed front-office services, where government back-office process integration and re-engineering is becoming an important objective. Understanding the role of networking in the diffusion of e-government and in other public administration reforms seems to be a crucial milestone for moving up from the first stages of e-government development (e-readings or emerging and enhanced) to the more complex stages of interaction, transactions or connection.
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