Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 21st NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview e-Government Author(s) Mimoza Bogdanoska Jovanovska University "St. Kliment Ohridski" Bitola Republic of North Macedonia Todorovski Ljupco, Nuša Erman, Faculty of Administration, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia Title Evaluating the maturity level of e-government back-office with social network analysis File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Mimoza Bogdanoska Jovanovska Abstract More effective public administration tailored to the citizen needs is a ‘guiding star’ of governments in the process of introducing and implementation of e-Government. Benchmark studies are widely used way to assess the achieved maturity level of e-Government implementation. In the relatively short history of e-Government, a number of benchmarks have been created with front-office in the focus. Many researchers refer to back-office as a crucial milestone for e-Government development, so the back-office benchmarks can give very relevant results for maturity level of e-Government. However, current situation of back-office benchmarking research is relatively poor due to the minor number of studies, realization in limited number of countries; no repetition over the time, no comparative analysis; and no clear, easy to use indicators. This paper addresses the issue outlined above, by proposing a novel methodology for e-Government evaluation with back-office in the focus. The new methodology focuses on the networks of flow of documents between different public administration bodies in the process of realization of public services. We study the topology and properties of the document-flow networks using standard methods of Social Network Analysis. We hypothesize that the network properties are related to the back-office maturity level, and can be used as indicators for benchmarking e-government back-office. The paper illustrates the use of the proposed methodology on a real test case of the Central Register in Macedonia. We selected this case study, because it offers an opportunity to compare situations ‘before’ and ‘after’ changes in the back-office have been introduced. The comparison will provide a clear picture of how the change of network properties is related to the process of back-office reorganization.
