Citizen Centered e-Government Services Assessment Framework

Introduction: Electronic Government (e-Government) is attracting the interest of governments around the globe due to its great importance in facilitating and providing services to its citizens. Although most of the countries place massive budgets and provide latest technologies, they face many obstacles, including the notable absence in the assessment of e-Government services. Therefore it becomes important to find ways of assessing e-Government services to determine if it reaches desired goals of their citizens. Aim: This research concentrates on assessment of e-Government services provided to citizens through the development, evaluation and analysis of a new framework. This framework is citizen centric and will help e-Government organizations to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their services. One of the main aspects of developing an assessment framework is to consider the citizens. The citizen is one of the reasons that drive such governments to put their services online as they are the targeted consumers. Therefore, finding ways of assessing their services is very crucial to achieve better results and citizens satisfaction. The IMGov Model is based around the concepts of four attributes (Input, Processing, Quality Control and Output). Each of those consists of set of factors that will be evaluated using a set of evaluation questions. As an example the quality control attribute includes factor that an organization has website content and a system that provide the services to the citizens. The new framework will be compared with existing frameworks. As this research concentrates on services assessment this comparison may be difficult because existing frameworks focus more on the process of how government achieve better e-Government from other perspectives such as technological, political, social and cultural. Method: Different methods will be adopted such as interviews, surveys (Quantitative, Qualitative) for garnering appropriate information and data by reviewing existing e-Government initiatives in different countries, reviewing wide collections on the existing research on the field and reviewing international standards and categorize them based on citizen centered approach. The actual evaluation can be through a carefully weighted average scheme or alternatively the results can be presented in term of Parallel Coordinates or Star Plots to allow as more in depth examination of the results. Result: This research will develop a conceptual framework to enable assessment of e-Government initiatives by evaluating services provided to citizens. This framework will then be evaluated using case study in Saudi Arabia. Conclusion: This research will produce adequate e-Government assessment measures for the services provided to citizens.