Workshop: Workshop 5

The workshop gave an overview of current eGovernment indicator developments.

To ensure a positive eGovernment effect it is essential to carefully design and monitor the online services. The main challenge is to make sure that the services will respond to address the needs of the citizens, businesses, and the public sector. To assess and monitor properties of the eGovernment services a set of well designed indicators and policy support tools is needed.

We considered both online reporting and monitoring tools as well as how to combine surveys involving users and expert evaluation. Particular attention was given to the issues of accessibility of technologies in addition to (X)HTML, transparency, efficiency, and impact of the eGovernment services.

Objective:

The objectives of the workshop were :

• To present the need for new indicators as an input to improve eGovernment services.
• To explore the current status of eGovernment indicators, and elaborate on how to increase coverage, the efficiency and relevance of indicators.

Questions for the discussion included:

• How to assure comparability across different evaluations and to monitor development over time?
• Limitations of automatic evaluation of web services compared to manual evaluation.
• What are the areas where benchmarking should be developed?
• How can transparency of eGovernment services be evaluated?
• How can eProcurement be improved by benchmarking the process?
• How can eGovernment services in particular for public procurement be evaluated as a means to combat corruption?

Structure:

The workshop featured presentations:

1. Anne-Lena Straumdal, Ministry of Government Administration and Reform, Norway, Current challenges in eGovernment policies.

2. Patrick Wauters, Capgemini, Belgium, The main elements of the method for evaluating the 20 services.

3. Annika Nietzio, Forschungsinstitut Technologie- Behindertenhilfe (FTB), Accessibility indicators development: How to measure accessibility.

4. Svein Ølnes, Vestlandsforskning, Norway, Experience from indicators development with Norge.no.

5. Mikael Snaprud, Agder University College, Norway, An approach for large scale automated evaluation of eGovernment services

Discussion on experiences and ways to design new indicators and combine with existing ones.

Participants:

This workshop brought together researchers, designers, developers, practitioners and policy-makers.

All conference participants were welcome to join the workshop.

Contact information:

Patrick Wauters, + 32 (0) 2 708 11 11

Mikael Snaprud +47 918 62 892