Benchmarking E-Government Quality - Whose Quality Are We Measuring?

Abstract

This paper analyses the results of several years of benchmarking of public online services in Norway. We compare these data, which are showing significant differences in measured quality between small and larger municipalities, with results from a comprehensive survey measuring citizens' satisfaction with public services. Finding that these observed differences are not supported by the user survey, we have to ask: whose quality are we really measuring? Many evaluation systems rely on similar heuristic methods, e.g. the EU's eGovernment benchmark 2012 framework, while the Danish benchmarking system has a different approach. The paper argues for a multi-dimensional approach to evaluation of public websites and gives some suggestions for this.