The development of e-government in most countries is still primarily aimed at developing electronic services that customers can access via the internet. This has been matched by the methods for monitoring e-government development, which fall far short of providing a true overall assessment. Such a narrow focus on e-government has led to a significant slowdown of development in most countries. Countries have used "quick fix, quick win" solutions, while continued development require above all the development of an integrated government portal and reengineering of back-office processes. The more developed countries are therefore increasingly tailoring their e-government strategies in the direction of customer-orientation and instead of persisting with rigid organisational structures are working on integrating services and processes across individual administrative bodies and institutions and even include private businesses. The development of e-government therefore demands a holistic strategic approach that encompasses the entire public administration and is not limited to individual bodies and institutions, or individual sectors and levels of administration. The methods of monitoring, evaluating and benchmarking e-government development will have to follow the same principles. Based on critical analyses of existing approaches, this paper attempts to define the areas and aspects that must be included within the integrated approach in order to facilitate the progress of e-government towards its strategic objectives, that is the development of services based on user's needs and problems, i.e. integrated services or life-events.

In this chapter, the authors present and discuss the results of the IDEAL-EU project, in which three European Regions - i.e. Tuscany, Catalonia, and Poitou-Charentes - have involved citizens (and particularly young people) in discussing and deliberating on the priorities of the new climate change agenda of the European Parliament, supported by two distinct ICT instruments: a Social Networking Platform and a pan-European Virtual Town Meeting. The authors describe and assess the technical tasks and the concrete initiatives undertaken from project conception to the end of trials. They introduce a participatory workflow composed of four modules: 1) agenda setting and prior analysis, 2) getting support and topic refinement, 3) discussion and deliberation, and 4) orchestration and evaluation. Finally, the authors address the sustainability of the IDEAL-EU workflow and its corresponding ICT infrastructure in the perspective of future utilization in additional eParticipation experiments.

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The article presents users' views on the development of e-government, addressing two interrelated questions that have not been sufficiently answered thus far:(1) How to increase the current low level of e-government use, and (2) How to advance the current practice of analyzing data from e-government satisfaction surveys in order to arrive at guidelines for decision-makers when shaping future actions of e-government development. For this purpose, a cause-and-effect model was developed and operationalized by a set of indicators observed by a citizen satisfaction survey carried out in Slovenia between 2005 and 2006. The model was then estimated using the PLS (Partial Least Squares) regression method. Finally, an improvement-priority matrix was applied to prioritize significant factors. The proposed manner of analyzing data from user surveys offers a universal tool for analyzing drivers and consequences of user satisfaction and the use of e-government, and prioritizing them in order to assist decision-makers in preparing future strategies, action plans, or guidelines for further developments.Points for practitioners Methodological implications:G guidelines on how to conduct e-government user satisfaction surveys;G guidelines on how to analyze user survey data in order to formulate guidelines for future development of e-government.

E-government has been a hot topic in the public administration research community for some time now. While still considered by some to be merely a technological phenomenon, it also includes organisational changes in public administration, development and implementation of new business processes, discovering better and faster ways of providing public services and offering entirely new services, not known before. In this article we try to look at the development of e-government in Slovenia from both perspectives, technological and organisational. We explore the public administration presence on the Internet, the services it provides and the back-office systems that support them. The current state of electronic services provided by various public administration bodies is examined, both from the end user's perspective and from a technological point of view. We present the current state of e-government with respect to the action plans it has committed itself, while relying on well-known methodology adopted by the European Commission.