Frontiers of knowledge and technology

The number of eGovernment services is rapidly increasing. The Norwegian monitoring service to evaluate the quality of eGovernment carried out annually by DIFI. The eGovMon project will try to supplement such evaluations with more automated solutions that will allow more frequent evaluations.

In Norway like in many other countries, there is no unified approach to measure the eGovernment status and progress. Multiple sources need to be consulted to obtain understanding of the eGovernment status:

  • Accessibility, usability and utility of eGovernment web sites is benchmarked annually by DIFI (Norge.no).
  • Further data on eGovernment advancement, use and utility are gathered through surveys commissioned by the Statistics Norway and other research institutes, and data on uptake of particular online services are reported by responsible government agencies.

While each of the evaluations provides a useful insight regarding a particular aspect of eGovernment, a unifying and transparent framework is useful to facilitate data acquisition and ensure that the evaluation results deliver a coherent picture of the eGovernment development.

An example of such explicit evaluation framework is the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology (UWEM) developed by the EU-funded Web Accessibility Benchmarking (WAB) cluster. Several of the partners in the eGovMon project have been actively involved in this work through the European Internet Accessibility Observatory (EIAO) project. This expertise and experience is now used to develop and implement a unified evaluation framework for assessing eGovernment.

Web accessibility, which is the main focus of the UWEM, is one of the aspects covered by the eGovMon framework. The other areas to evaluate are transparency, efficiency and impact.

The eGovMon indicators are related to the Norwegian national IT plan (eNorge 2009, see also Report No. 17 (2006 - 2007) to the Storting: An Information Society for All) and other, already existing evaluation frameworks like, eGEP, the measurement framework used by Capgemini, etc.

Automated evaluation procedures are implemented for as many of the indicators as possible.
The automatable UWEM indicators implemented by the EIAO project are the starting point. The eGovMon project, however, also covers indicators that require manual and semi-manual assessment, developing new methods for combining these results with the results of automated evaluations.

The eGovMon eGovernment evaluation methodology

A coherent evaluation methodology comprising of a set of explicit indicators for Accessibility, Transparency, Efficiency, and Impact (eGovATEI indicators) and the associated evaluation and aggregation procedures are being defined.

Each indicator will be fully operationalized, i.e. a detailed and explicit definition will be provided, ensuring robustness and the ease of use. Where feasible, the indicators definitions are being enhanced by automated tests. Methods for aggregating the results of automated and manual evaluations are being developed.

The entire methodology will be published under an open license to assure the transparency of the methodolgy and to simplify its further development.