IT Mediated Customer Services in E-Government: A Citizen's Perspective

Despite the vast amount of research conducted and knowledge accumulated to explain the adoption of electronic public services, the issue of how to design high quality e-government Web sites remains an unresolved and relatively understudied topic. This study aims to address this theoretical and pragmatic gap by differentiating service content from service delivery in prescribing technological solutions for enriching the service quality of e-government Web sites. Grounded in Ives and Learmonth's [1984] Customer Service Lifecycle, this article explicates a series of functional specifications that may be superimposed onto basic government transactions to enhance the overall functionality of e-government Web sites. It also articulates six interface design principles that are pertinent to addressing citizens' expectations associated with the delivery of public services via the Internet channel. Together, the resultant dimensions depict a comprehensive set of IT-enabled content functionalities and interface design principles that may direct future research into fully interactive and executable e-government services. Practitioners could also benefit from the utilization of these content and delivery dimensions both as a reflective mirror to isolate inadequacies in e-government Web site designs, and as a benchmarking mechanism to assess the level of maturity of existing public e-services as compared to other leading exemplars.