Gauging e-government: A report on implementing services among American cities

Abstract

Municipalities face a dilemma as they pursue technologically enabled modes of providing traditional services. The planning stages of e-government amount to triage: which specific municipal functions and services can a municipality afford to implement (or which services can they afford not to implement) given the costs of technology and technological capability? Little in the way of defining the leading edge of innovation among cities exists. To date, the literature on e-government “best practices” tends to stress creating standards for evaluating web-enabled services rather than for benchmarking the actual status of e-government implementation. In other words, a well-developed literature is emerging around standards by which municipal websites can be evaluated such as navigability and content standards. These standards do not give us insight, however, into the specific functions and services as they emerge on municipality websites. As a means toward addressing this lacuna, the authors created a rubric for benchmarking implementation among cities nationwide using a broad range of functional dimensions and assigning municipalities “e-scores.” In this paper, the authors describe these efforts, their approach and their findings.