A framework for evaluating web sites of public authorities

IGI Global eBooks, 2011

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2005

Electronic government allows a broad range of citizens to access governamental information and services, as well as to participate in the government decision-making process. On the other hand, it imposes a higher challenge on a web designer to avoid digital exclusion. Before proposing guidelines to design e-gov sites, it is important to have objective methods to evaluate their quality. Traditional inspection methods do not cover the specificities of e-gov sites. This work proposes an extension of Nielsen's heuristic evaluating method, applied to the information, services and citizens' participation categories. Broad accessibility, interoperability, security and privacy, information truth and precision, service agility, and transparency are added. The g-Quality method was instrumental as an objective evaluation form. It was applied to 127 Brazilian e-gov sites. The extended method found more problems, resulting in more negative ratings than the Nielsen's original method. The Brazilian public sites quality level was determined by using the g-Quality method, producing positive results.

2004

Several governments across the world have embraced the digital revolution and continue to take advantage of the information and communication facilities offered by the Internet to offer public services. Conversely, citizens’ awareness and expectations of Internet based online-public-services have also increased in recent times. Although the numbers of the different national e-Government web portals have rapidly increased in the last three years, the success of these portals will largely depend on their accessibility, quality and privacy. This paper reports the results of an evaluative study of a cross-section of e-Government portals from these three perspectives, using a common set of performance metrics and Web diagnostic engines. Results show that not only are there wide variations in the spectrum of information and services provided by these portals, but that significant work still needs to be undertaken in order to make the portals examples of ‘best practice’ e-Government services.

The main objective of every government is to provide efficient and effective services to citizens. Recently the Greek Government has devoted significant effort to streamlining business processes using ICT to better manage public administration resources. To this end, public sector services are designed so that they are accessed through single points, while increasing transparency and reducing cycle time for executing processes and disseminating information to civil and other agencies. To control the services provided by state agencies and to improve them continuously, it seems essential that they are continuously evaluated by users. E-government needs to be grounded on in-depth understanding of user needs, perceptions and other factors influencing its uptake. This paper focuses on the field of e-government and more precisely describes an evaluation method for investigating the success of an e-government project. Specifically, a technology adoption model is proposed and developed, wh...

Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems, 2014

The transition from a government to e-government poses continuous challenges in employing increasingly sophisticated web portals as the gateway to government units, their information and services. The high quality of those portals is needed for the successful adoption of e-government. Therefore, the aim of this study is to assess quality of selected Polish e-government portals based on a proposed framework. This framework employs the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) standard. Firstly, the paper presents various definitions of quality and different theories/models for assessing the quality of e-government portals. Secondly, the framework for assessing the quality of e-gov portals is presented. Thirdly, the assessment of Polish e-government portals based on the proposed framework is shown. The paper concludes with a discussion of research findings and recommendations for studies on e-gov portals' evaluation. Finally, the future works are submitted. The obtained research findings will prove to be helpful for researchers in developing studies on e-government, especially in the research issue of egov portals. Moreover, they can be useful while undertaking empirical activities aimed at the e-government adoption.

The proliferation of government involvement in e-initiatives has gained significant recognition across the globe. Evidence from previous studies suggests that e-government programs are beneficial to participating countries. Specifically, researchers have suggested that e-government programs enhance the delivery of cost effective service to stakeholders of governmental institutions. Based on established principles of Web design and e-government practices, this study proposes a framework for assessing e-government websites that are made for a global audience.

Electronic Government, an International Journal, 2009

This paper investigates the state of municipalities' websites in fifty major Greek cities. First, it presents GovQual, a comprehensive evaluation framework which consists of 140 criteria organized into 13 evaluation categories. Then, fifteen trained students evaluated fifty Greek municipalities' sites using GovQual. The results identified significant shortages related to the sites' Interactivity & Feedback, as well as E-Services & Applications. Differences among the various Greek geographical regions were also identified. Regions that are economically poor and faraway from the capital came behind. Suggestions for improvement and directions for future research are given. municipalities' sites 1 Thessaloniki, Greece. He is the director of CONTA (COmputer Networks and Telematics Applications) Laboratory. He has published over one hundred fifty peerreviewed papers. He has been the plenary speaker in two International Conferences.

— Many e-Government services till date have been created based on the existing services and own understandings, rather than based on citizen's need and interests. Very little data is available about local government officials and citizen's want and need. The proposed study will analyze the use of IT and e-Governance practices, develop & document the conceptual model of e-Govt, define components, component attributes, and the component relationships for each model. The model will be based on the citizen's viewpoint which is expected to be quite different from a model based on a government agency's viewpoint. Keywords— e-Government System, use of IT, privacy and security.

jay, 2015

─Abstract ─ Electronic government (e-government) has been transforming the relationship which governments have traditionally had with the citizens and render governments' services and information to be more efficient, accountable, effective and accessible. Web sites are the key tools of e-government and the right channel for communication and service provision. Web platforms provide governments to improve their efficiency and effectiveness, strengthen democracy and public trust. This is much more important at local levels as the most basic public services are provided in the cities and citizens are most connected to government. As web content and use continues to increase, local governments monitor regularly and enhance the quality of their sites to attract and satisfy users. This study tries to evaluate the e-government development and early practices in Turkey through greater municipalities. The research analyzes the official web sites of sixteen greater municipalities in Turkey and evaluates them in terms of main e-government categories. The categories determined for this research according to the literature are; services provided, information available, security, government transparency/openness, and citizen outreach/interactivity. It is important to see the results to assess and discuss the current condition of local e-government implications in Turkey by means of government transparency, information flow and citizen participation.

2007

This paper is based on the results of an international survey of municipal web portals that evaluated the practice of e-governance in large municipalities. The survey was conducted in 2005 through a collaboration between the E-Governance Institute at Rutgers-Newark and the Global e-Policy e-Government Institute at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. This joint study ranked municipalities worldwide based on their scores in five e- governance categories of security and privacy, usability, content, services and citizen participation. In this paper, the results of that study are compared with a similar 2003 study (Melitski et. al., 2005; Holzer & Kim, 2004); trends in the development of the municipal web portal are examined over the two years. Key areas of improvement are identified and suggestions for their improvement are discussed in the conclusion.

Abstract- E-government is a subject which requires a great amount of local knowledge in order to implement successfully. An E-government model which has been successfully implemented in another country may not be directly applicable in to a Sri Lankan environment without applying the required adjustments. Since e-government efforts are leading to socio economic transformation, great resistance towards such initiatives can be seen from participants. In the Sri Lankan context locally generated knowledge on e-government field is lacking, which has resulted in slower progress in local e-government developments. In order to address the above void, this research has built a model with the help of previous researches which consists of six variables. During the research the importance of each of those variables towards the sustainable development of Sri Lankan e-government capabilities will be checked. Keywords – e-government, quality of service, accountability, user interface, executability, transparency, democracy

International Journal of Information Management, 2014

Government website evaluations do not always reflect the websites’ aims. Often, only aspects such as content and quality are considered, whereas the primary goal of these websites is to deliver public value. In this paper we introduce the public value perspective for website evaluation. A meta-analysis of website evaluation literature is presented, the findings being that there is no uniform or comprehensive set of website evaluation metrics and that the public value perspective is largely neglected in the website evaluation literature. Next, we describe how we integrated web evaluation and public value literature in order to develop a set of criteria used for evaluating the websites of sixteen Turkish local governments. The websites performed relatively well on traditional indicators, but less well on public values measures. In particular, we found that the websites are good at supporting requests, categorization and usability, but not satisfactory at providing platforms for citizen engagement, responsiveness and dialog. Finally, we argue that the public value perspective should be incorporated in the evaluations of websites and other public efforts.

In recent years, many people have devoted their efforts to the issue of quality of Web site. The concept of quality consists of many criteria like quality of service perspective, user perspective, content perspective and usability perspective. Because of its possible instant worldwide audience a Website's quality and reliability are crucial. The very special nature of the Web applications and Websites pose unique software testing challenges. Webmasters, Web applications developers, and Website quality assurance managers need tools and methods that can match up to the new need. An attempt has been made in this paper to conduct various tests on website usage which includes response time, load time, size of a website and number of items, Structural aspect which includes code and link validation and content which includes link popularity. All the above factors were studied to measure the quality of e-Government websites of J&K state via different online service. Result of this study...

Internet Research, 2009

PurposeThe internet is becoming increasingly important in the communication between local governments and citizens, which makes the usability of municipal web sites a critical factor in government‐citizen communication. The purpose of this paper is to propose and test a model for evaluating the potential of municipal web sites.Design/methodology/approachIn this work an objective investigation of the issue has been conducted by manually accessing and evaluating 84 European municipal web sites. Quality of web home pages was determined using an original Web Assessment Index, which focuses on four categories: accessibility, speed, navigability and content.FindingsA detailed report of the results arising from this investigation is presented and systematically analyzed.Originality/valueThe most valuable output from this paper is not the ability to identify the best sites, but to see how each municipal site is compared to related sites and to spot ideas and practices that can improve city ...