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Plugged In, Tuning Up (March 2001) What is E-Government?
The idea of electronic government (or "e-government") continues to gain currency among the American public, despite a clear definition or set of standards to follow. The notion of "e-government" in concept relies on a set of processes and services within and across branches and levels of government institutions. Electronic government in practice, however, also presents an underlying assumption that public resources support these services in order to meet public information needs; therefore e-government is itself a "public good", which should be made available and accountable to the public, with as few barriers as possible. The benefits offered in favor of e-government are attractive, including:
How can anyone disagree with users accessing information that is useful and relevant to them at their convenience, in a manner that is quicker, more intuitive, more efficient, and that allows vital government resources to be concentrated in providing a wider range of services? E-government, when and if it works, can enhance access to and delivery of information and services to citizens, partners, employees, agencies, and other entities, and can lead to simple, clearly understood, and consistently implied standards regarding government information and services.
E-government, then, can be said to raise an expectation, from the user perspective, of entities and services that are visible, accessible, usable, useful, relevant, and reliable. From a provider's standpoint, there is an expectation of systems that are scalable, sustainable, replicable, and interoperable. Both sets of expectations, once e-government is implemented, can yield a set of measurable standards and performance goals, including efficiency, cost-effectiveness, timeliness, convenience, consistency, and overall user satisfaction.
Measuring E-Government
E-government must be evaluated in a range of contexts. According to Jeremy Sharrard1, author of a Forrester Research report on electronic government, the idea itself at the federal level must undergo two years of experimentation; integration and use by the citizens; and a final phase of user-centered service delivery coordinated across government entities. At best, this is not likely to happen on the federal level until 2002 to 2005. Because e-government in practices is still in its infancy compared to e-government in concept, it is difficult to discern what minimum baseline of standards to use in measuring the success of online government as implemented so far.
A September 2000 report2 by Darrell West, professor of political science and director of Brown University's Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions, highlights a number of e-government practices which could be taken as a baseline measure of activity at the state and federal level. The researchers looked at 1,813 websites (1,716 state government websites, 36 federal government legislative and executive sites, and 61 federal court sites) for the quality and effectiveness of electronic government, and featured an e-mail survey of chief information officers in each state and 38 agencies. A number of the findings were encouraging. Of the chief information officers surveyed, 86% said e-government improved service delivery, 83% felt it increased efficiency, and 64% believed it reduced costs. Some 91% of government websites responded to an e-mail request for official office hours, with three-quarters of those sites responding within one business day.
The principles underlying e-government, however, are equally as important as the model utilized. A Federal Sources Inc./META Group Inc. report3, also released in September 2000, featured a survey of 110 government information technology officers. The study found that states and municipalities, adopting e-government practices at a faster rate than the federal government, are serving as testing grounds for new approaches to connect citizens to the deliberative processes that affect them. Interestingly, when asked why they provided the services they do, 63% of the state officials attributed it to a desire to provide better service, compared to only 20% of federal officials who emphasized legislative and legal requirements as the reason why. But, the study also discovered that the federal government, possibly because of the mandates under which it operates, is more likely to have an e-government plan compared to states.
The picture of e-government that emerges from available literature, is one in which states are implementing a wide range of approaches and techniques to meet growing information demands at a quicker pace than the federal government. The suggestion, however, is that this quicker implementation by the states creates a potentially ad hoc framework for e-government, compared to more systemic approaches by the federal government that takes into consideration a broader set of needs.
Federal versus State
There are problems with gaps between federal and state government with respect to the development, experimentation, use and coordination of online government resources. The Brown study found that the federal government had better information and service websites than the states overall. With respect to the states, the best predictor of high ranking in terms of "e-government" service was the size of its population. The states with smaller populations tend to lack resources to support the economies of scale to adopt online government services (it costs more to implement similar systems across smaller user bases than larger ones, where cost per user is less). Interestingly, at the federal level, judicial websites did worse than executive or legislative ones in terms of providing basic contact information for their agencies, or even links to other resources. The study, in general, points to a great need for consistency and standardization among government agencies from the national down to local level in order to make "e-government" a workable proposition. Coordination, however, must take into account the range of offline services— and constraints— faced by government bodies at the federal and state level.
What prevents e-government from happening? The aforementioned Brown report findings identified a range of standards where federal and state government entities fell short. They found that, overall:
A 1998 OMB Watch report,4 looked at Congressional attitudes towards and usage of Internet tools to determine the effectiveness of e-mail as a communications tool and the Web as a policy dissemination tool. Personalized e-mail from constituents was increasingly treated as a primary communications tool, but members and their staffs were not consistent in using the Internet to respond to e-mail communications. There was also little consistency among member websites, design standards, timeliness of information delivery, accuracy, relevancy, and usefulness of content, accommodation and consideration of barriers with respect to sites, and ease of use. Thus, newer information and communications tools placed a burden on constituents and the public to reveal their information without any guarantees on their privacy, security, or even when or how the concerns would be addressed via technology. While not representative of Congress as a whole, that assessment found that Congress did, however, have a substantial presence on the Web through individual member use; utilization of the Web to release information to the public by individual committees; and the development of the THOMAS legislative information system.
Congress, however, is not the only legislative body with which citizens interact or receive information online. It is important to keep in mind that the frameworks under which state legislatures operate are different than that of Congress. First, there is the simple fact that there are 50 separate legislative bodies, compared to one federal. Second, not all state legislatures meet every year, nor do all meet full time during their sessions. Third, state legislatures provide a more localized set of services to constituents than their Congressional counterparts, who address concerns at the district, state, national and international levels. In general, state legislatures address a workload comparable to Congress in terms of volume, yet in a shorter timeframe, and with different institutional constraints.
Nonprofit Involvement
A key role of the nonprofit sector sectoris to educate the public about public policy matters relevant to the mission of the organization. The Internet can play a powerful role in facilitating and engaging the sector. Accordingly, it is important to the nonprofit sector to understand the capacity of state legislatures to make its information and activities more accessible and transparent to the public. It is hoped that this assessment, therefore, can address the needs of nonprofits, as well as those of state legislatures. NOTES
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