E-government services involve many stakeholders who have different objectives that can have an impact on success. Among these stakeholders, citizens are the primary stakeholders of government activities. Accordingly, their satisfaction plays an important role in e-government success. Although several models have been proposed to assess the success of e-government services through measuring users' satisfaction levels, they fail to provide a comprehensive evaluation model. This study provides an insight and critical analysis of the extant literature to identify the most critical factors and their manifested variables for user satisfaction in the provision of e-government services. The various manifested variables are then grouped into a model consisting of four main constructs: cost; benefit; risk and opportunity (COBRA) and a measurement scale is developed, tested, refined and validated on a sample group of e-government service users in Turkey. A structured equation model is used to establish relationships among the identified constructs, associated variables and users' satisfaction. The results confirm the COBRA model as a useful tool for evaluating the success of e-government services from citizens' perspective. Keywords: E-government service assessment; Citizen Satisfaction; Structured equation modeling; Scale development Final version is published in Government Information INTRODUCTIONE-government services influence many stakeholders including citizens, government employees, information technology developers, and policy makers. Each stakeholder has different interests and objectives that may have an impact on the success and take-up of egovernment services . In the literature, there have been a large number of models and frameworks to evaluate e-government service success for different purposes or from different perspectives (Jaeger and Bertot, 2010). Although, these models aim to help policy makers and practitioners to evaluate and improve the provision of e-services, little effort has been made to develop a holistic model to evaluate e-government services and their interactions with users (Wang, Bretschneider and Gant, 2005). However, the success of egovernment services is a complex concept, and its measurement should consider multidimensional factors (Wang and Liao, 2008;Irani, Elliman and Jackson, 2007; Irani, Love 3 and Jones, 2008;Weerakkody and Dhillon, 2008). Therefore, in this study, a new conceptual model to measure e-service success from diverse stakeholders' perspectives is proposed.The model development methodology follows a grounded theory approach in which an extensive literature review on existing e-service assessment models is conducted to identify the various fragmented success factors (or key performance indicators, KPIs). The identified KPIs are then classified into four main groups: cost; benefit; risk; and opportunity.Accordingly, users' satisfaction is measured in terms of the cost-benefit and risk-opportunity analysis for engaging with an e-service. This analysis has its ...

The purpose of UbiPOL project is to develop a ubiquitous platform that allows citizens be involved in Policy Making Processes (PMPs) regardless of their current locations and time. However, literature highlights one of the foremost reasons that make citizens de-motivated in engaging themselves in policy making—the ignorance of germane policies and PMPs within the government organisations. It is highly suggested that while more citizens find connections between their everyday life activities and pertinent government policies, the more they become pro-active or motivated to be involved in PMPs. For this reason, UbiPOL aims to provide ‘context aware knowledge’ provision with regards to policy making, i.e. through UbiPOL enabling citizens in identifying any relevant policies along with other citizens’ opinion ‘whenever they want’ ‘wherever they are’ according to their everyday life pattern. As a result of this platform, citizens are anticipated to be more acquainted with the newest relevant policies and PMPs for their participation during their routine life activities. Moreover, this platform is also anticipated to provide policy tracking functionality through a ‘workflow engine’ and ‘opinion tag’ concept to improve the transparency of PMPs. As a final point, the platform intends to facilitate policy makers to collect citizen opinions more efficiently as the opinions are collected as soon as they are created in the middle of citizen’s everyday life. UbiPOL provides security and identity management facility to ensure only authorised citizens can have access to relevant policies according to their roles in PMPs. The delivery of the opinion and policy data over the wireless network is secure as the platform use leading edge encryption algorithm in its communication kernels. UbiPOL is a scalable platform ensuring at least 100,000 citizens can use the system at the same time (e.g., for e-Voting applications) through its well proven automatic load balancing mechanisms. The privacy ensuring opinion mining engine prevents unwanted revealing of citizen identities and the mining engine prevents any unrelated commercial advertisements are included in the opinion base to minimise the misuse of the system.

Representing the co-authors’ academic and practitioner background, this chapter provides the most-up-to-date information for an ongoing work on citizen-oriented e-government initiatives. The purpose of this work follows the importance, priority, and necessity of paying attention to citizen side, and aims to improve understanding and better address the citizen demands and expectations towards e-government public transformation. The research aims to question and understand better what citizens think regarding the currently available e-government services in Turkey. In response to this purpose and question, this work-in-progress chapter presents secondary information from literature review and context of the ongoing practical and academic works, and primary findings from both a preliminary and a recent study. These presented information and findings mostly represent practitioners’ viewpoint that is mostly based on the authors’ professional, academic, and personal involvement in the various aspects of the Turkey case, and in return are expected to provide certain input for the on-going practical affairs. As the research is a work-in-progress that traces long-lasting development and ongoing operations of e-government in practice, at this point, providing some suggestions and directions rather than concrete practical and theoretical implications is considered to have the most value. As a result, security, trust, ease of use, service, and information quality are determined to be significant for citizens’ perceptions and suggestions as factors that affect their usage of e-government services in Turkey. The resulting chapter first provides a relevant literature review then information about the history and latest developments in e-government from the perspective of citizen side. Following this background information, the preliminary descriptive study on citizen perceptions of demands and expectations conducted last year is reminded. Build upon these ongoing researches on the academic and practical side, latest research findings as a result of analysing citizens suggestions for E-Government Gateway (EGG) in Turkey are also shared. Finally, suggestions for future based on latest work are given.

Development and extensive use of information and communication technologies has led to important implications for public sectors throughout the world. As a result, in governmental services, citizens have been enjoying better quality services, in an efficient and effective manner. e-government, however, is more related to “government” rather than the “e” as the technical and technological one. The challenge is to use technologies to improve the capacities of government institutions, while improving the quality of life of citizens by redefining the relationship between citizens and their government. Accordingly, this chapter focuses on e-government applications highlighted to reach a more citizen centric e-government in Turkey. Especially, two concepts of e-government, content management system and measuring citizens’ satisfaction from e-services are underlined. Therefore, after giving a theoretical background first on e-government, content management and then measuring e-services satisfaction, new developments towards these concepts are accounted.