Lessons on Measuring e-Government Satisfaction

Abstract

This paper summarises lessons learned in relation to an ongoing study to collect feedback on e-government systems that have been implemented to e-enable several core administrative functions in the UK as part of the I-MEET project. Previous work summarises findings from surveys of users of such systems and this paper reports on the experience of surveying providers. An extensive survey was designed and administered to explore provider perspectives on the e-government application in general, system aspects, cost, implementation, prerequisites (e.g. policy support), various dimensions of effects, and the respondent's overall opinion of the system. The survey found a complex mix of internal and external contacted service providers and commissioners, each of whom has a different set of success measures for a service, and shared services (such as common web site providers) that were not obvious but could result in correlated observations. These findings provide signposts for future researchers to potential pitfalls. Nevertheless, when complete, the integration by the I-MEET project of user and provider perspectives will give policy makers the opportunity to balance the scale, complexity and expense of electronically delivered transactions on the government side with the usability and satisfaction from the user perspective, revealing linkages between aspects of both.