Abstract
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E-government has been one of the most significant development areas for public sector modernization in the last decade. However, several studies have pointed out that enormous investments have failed to achieve the expected results. User acceptance of e-government services is far below government anticipations, the expected effects in terms of reducing costs and increasing the effectiveness of public administration are missing, while the organizational changes estimated to bring greater efficiency and reduce administrative barriers are still in their infancy. All these facts suggest that decision-making on e-government policies and projects should be based on measurable and verifiable indicators of their short and long-term effects. Key research challenges in this area are associated with the development of indicator models as well as metrics and tools, which could provide applicable support to government decision makers and facilitate more qualified and quantified preparation, implementation and evaluation of e-government policies (ex-ante or ex-post).
Research is based on the hypothesis that existing models and tools for evaluation of e-government policies do not provide enough valuable information to government policy makers in conducting quality decision-making. According to the available basic and applied research, the current indicators and measurement models utilizing the quantitative and/or qualitative indicators, facilitate the extraction of five potential key decision-making levels, namely: the infrastructure level, project level, organizational level, political/sociological level and national level. These groups of indicators are now appearing in dozens of different, completely inconsistent models and approaches. The main weakness of current approaches and indicator models comprises the fact that they have been developed in different environments, originating from different starting-points, while based on different indicators, their results cannot be compared. Great number of existing approaches tends to be too extensive on one hand, while on the other, they do not cover public value of e-government concept sufficiently, in addition their transposition into other environments is almost impossible. Despite the great number of measurement, indicator and benchmarking models, today we are still lacking comprehensive, expert tool-supported and easy to use evaluation models for decision support on all political or professional levels. Thus, the main goal of the proposed paper is to examine the state of the art in the field of e-government evaluation and analyse existing approaches as well as indicator models for e-government evaluation, conduct identification and systemization of relevant indicators for each level of decision making and develop an integrated model of indicators for evaluation of e-government policies and projects.
The research framework consists of three phases: state of the art, abstraction of relevant indicators for each level of decision making and development of an integrated model of indicators for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of e-government policies. The first phase of research comprises an analysis and synthesis of theoretical research and existing indicator models, which will provide a basis for the second phase, namely the extraction and classification of relevant indicators, while the following third phase will present the development of an integrated model of indicators for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of e-government policies.
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