Applying Gap Model for Bringing Effectiveness to e-Government Services

Abstract

Taking the means-ends approach to e-governance service quality the authors adopt the Parasuraman's ‘Gap Model' to evaluate the antecedents of service performance in an Indian context of government-to-citizen (G2C) service deployment under the national e-governance plan (NeGP) of India. This e-governance initiative in India has been implemented at multiple tiers of the government that integrates administration and service processes at different levels that includes center, state, district, block, and further to the lowest level of governance unit (Panchayat). The authors acknowledge five levels of potential service discrepancies across the service delivery chain, from designing the service policy to achieving citizen satisfaction. These are service conceptualization, service design, service capacity, service offering, and service consumption. Corresponding to these discrepancies, the authors explain six types of potential gaps in e-governance G2C service context: Assessment Gap, Design Gap, Capacity Gap, External Communication Gap, Delivery Gap, and Service Gap. Preliminary strategies to close these gaps are also proposed.

Emerging scenario of online counseling services in India: a case of e-government intervention

“…For example, a gap exists between what is theoretically known to follow under counseling services, which is yet to reflect through the emerging websites. Gaps may exist at several levels (Amritesh et al, 2013a), starting from the fundamentals i.e. level of policy formulation, institutional infrastructure, departmental procedures and, at the front end, service delivery.…”

“…• A framework is required to rationalize the current practices under online counseling services and to examine if they are aligned with internationally accepted beliefs about government's role in educational counseling, and to identify the potential service gaps (Amritesh et al, 2013a;Parasuraman et al, 1985) for further research. • Online counseling services are strongly tied up to the education and labor market, and thus in addition to the common perspectives as applied in other e-government research, researchers essentially require additional theoretical directives to achieve strategic balance of interests of three key stakeholders -government, academic institutions and student, involved in this online service.…”