Benchmarking scale of e-government stage in Chinese municipalities from government chief information officers’ perspective

Abstract

Most extant e-government measurements are tailored for front-end website evaluation from the perspective of citizens and business. This paper develops a valid scale to evaluate e-government evolution from the perspective of government chief information officers, which act as an instrument for measuring back-office e-government. A survey was conducted through a questionnaire administered to 13 large cities in the Chinese context. The investigation involved 331 government information officers, who are or had been in charge of e-government construction. By conducting a series of studies like literature review, q-sorting, the EFA and CFA methods, this study establishes an instrument that measures e-government stage evolution of public agencies. Within the instrument, five dimensions are applied, namely, cataloging, transaction, vertical integration, horizontal integration, and e-participation. Each of the five identified and verified dimensions plays a significant role in overall e-government stage. The 21 evaluation criteria across the five factors can serve a useful diagnostic purpose. Furthermore, a sample consisting of 24 city agencies in Shanghai China are employed to test the benchmarking instrument. Contrary to the stage theory (Layne and Lee in Gov Inf Q 18(2):122–136, 2001), the stages of vertical integration and horizontal integration do not take place in sequence in our context. This paper develops a valid scale to assess e-government development in the perspective of back-office e-government, with an aim to diagnose, examine, and guide the growth of e-government.