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Ljupco Todorovski, Faculty of Public Administration, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
E-mail: Ljupco.Todorovski@fu.uni-lj.si
Ignace Snellen, Faculty of Social Sciences, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Email: snellen@fsw.eur.nl

NISPAcee Project Manager:

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Juraj Sklenar, Email: sklenar@nispa.org

Working Program 2008: Success Factors of e-Government

The workgroup's focus in the last three years was mainly on getting an overview of the e-government development and documenting good e-government practices in Central and Eastern Europe. Studies performed and presented within the workgroup show a remarkable improvement of e-government readiness in these countries. The presentations show the increase of e-government readiness accompanied by many useful e-services for citizens (G2C) and business (G2B) made available. Both these observations indicate the success of e-government approaches and strategies.

However, improving the supply of e-government services is only one indicator of success. The improved supply should be followed by increasing demand of citizens for e-government services as well as improved citizen satisfaction with them and with the overall public administration. Namely, the vision of successful e-government is that it would cause transformation n the public administrations of Central and Eastern European countries, not only in their external but also in their internal relations. The ambitions and expectations are:

1. transformation of the traditional bureaucratic governance approaches and practices to more efficient ones;

2. increased interest of citizens to use the developed (G2C and G2B) e-government services and public administrators to plan and develop new ones;

3. intensified internal (G2G) collaboration of public administration bodies as well as inter-organizational collaboration, such as public-private-partnerships, policy chains, governance with inputs from civil society, etc.

One would expect that e-government development have already contributed to a positive impact on governance practices, citizens satisfaction with the availability of public services, and their readiness to adopt and use them. Also, facilitating new technologies should have improved the collaboration and transformation of traditional governance practices. However, initial survey studies that measured the impact of the e-government development do not confirm these expectations. On the contrary, the results show that, despite improved supply of services, citizens are not very enthusiastic about using them. Also, e-government impact on transforming (or reforming) traditional governance approaches and practices is minor or negligible.

No matter what indicators of success have been measured, initial studies in different countries also show significant differences in e-government success. Although it is believed that more developed countries tend to have more successful e-government, examples such as Estonia, show that the overall country development is not a crucial success factor. Thus, the set of factors that significantly influence success of e-government projects, approaches, and strategies remains an open issue.

The summary above reveals three important topics for e-government research in Central and Eastern Europe that the workgroup likes to emphasize. The first is establishing the differences in the acceptance of the stages of e-government development, from 1) presence and information on the net, to 2) communication between government and citizens and businesses with the help of templates, and 3) transactions in which reciprocal obligations are created between government, citizens, civil organizations, and business. The second is identifying and measuring an extended set of indicators of e-government success that would go beyond traditional readiness or supply indicators, i.e., number of available G2C and G2B services. The third is revealing the factors that significantly influence the success of e-government in a particular country. However, the workgroup is also open to presentations of other aspects of e-government research including also research in neighbouring fields of m-government, e-participation, and e-democracy.

The non-exhaustive list of research topics includes:

• Identification and measurement of indicators of e-government success;
• Surveys of citizens’ and policy makers’ perspectives on e-government success;
• Identification of crucial factors for e-government success;
• Analysis of the influence of traditional governance practices on e-government success;
• Analysis of the impact of e-government on change and improvement of governance practices;
• Analysis of citizens’ readiness to use/adopt existing or new e-government services;
• Case-studies and presentations of public-private-partnerships in providing e-government services or enabled by introducing e-government;
• Case-studies and presentations of innovative e-government approaches, including presentations of novel e-government, m-government services;
• Case-studies and presentations of e-participation and e-democracy projects.

A rich source of descriptions, comparisons, and analyses of e-government successes is to be found in the applications of the governmental organizations, which participate(d) in competitions such as the European Public Sector Awards (EPSA) and other national or international competitive award programs in which CEE countries participate. Therefore it is advised to take up contact with the organizations in your country – or in the case of comparisons with organizations also in other countries – to analyse the success factors, which are presented in the applications, and which are claimed to be successful.