Evaluation of electronic public services in agriculture in the Czech Republic

Abstract

RYSOVÁ HANA, KUBATA KAREL, TYRYCHTR JAN, ULMAN MILOŠ, ŠMEJKALOVÁ MARTINA, VOSTROVSKÝ VÁCLAV: Evaluation of electronic public services in agriculture in the Czech Republic. Acta Universitatis Agriculturae et Silviculturae Mendelianae Brunensis, 2013, LXI, No. 2, pp. 473-479 The goals of the paper are to analyze the uptake and to evaluate the quality of electronic public services among Czech agricultural enterprises. A sample of 119 entrepreneurs in the agriculture from diff erent regions in the Czech Republic was chosen. This research is based on the application of scientifi c analysis, synthesis and deduction. Descriptive statistics were calculated from the data obtained in the questionnaire survey. There were fi een diff erent electronic services examined in the survey. Respondents made a plain ordinal-scaled evaluation of all used services in terms of the frequency of use, usefulness, importance and quality. Working hypotheses about dependencies among rates of use of particular services and fi ve factors (plant production, animal raising, hectares of land, number of employees, subsidies) were examined with regression analysis. Eleven statistically signifi cant dependencies were proved between the number of hectares and electronic services, which means that with growing number of hectares of land the rate of use of particular electronic services increases. Electronic services provided at eAGRI Portal run by Czech Ministry of Agriculture were utilized the most among agricultural enterprises (each by more than 50 %) and electronic mail (79 %). eAGRI Portal services were assessed the best in terms of importance, usefulness and quality. Farmers and agricultural businesses in the Czech Republic are currently not obliged by any law to use any electronic service, and they can still opt for traditional paper mail or personal visit. eGovernment, agriculture, Czech Republic, electronic public services, evaluation of quality, eAGRI Portal According to the study developed for the European Commission (Capgemini et al., 2010), there are eight major electronic public services that must be monitored and measured such as: social contribution for employees, corporate tax, valueadded tax, submission of data to the statistical offi ce, custom declaration, registration of a new company, public procurement, and environment-related permits.Czech authorities off er several more specifi c online services for entrepreneurs than the EC study settles such as: Information system of data boxes that is compulsory for public authorities and corporates do deliver offi cial electronic documents towards offi cial bodies, and Czech POINT which is a network of one-stop places to submit or retrieve output from diff erent public registries. In 2009, 44 % of respondents claimed that they used at least once the Czech POINT service, and 64 % used data box to receive a digital message from a public authority and only 28 % used the data box to send a message to an authority (CZSO, 2011a). There are also services such as electronic communicatio...

Potential of Open Data in the Agricultural eGovernment

“…An obvious need of value-added information dedicated to decision making in small and medium agricultural companies was identified during the previous research (Rysová et al, 2013). A lack of this information can be easily eliminated by open data through the open agricultural e-government.…”

Identification of Business Informatics Specifics in Agricultural Enterprises

“…If those sources are integrated it could help to provide better operation of BInf in the company (Rysová et al, 2013). However, the outer sources of data and information are vast and heterogeneous as could be seen in Table 1 (see below).…”

“…The hardware capability is important for availability of up to date information about climate, seasonal character of production and further information needs supplied with the Internet. Internet based services for agriculture are growing with fast pace (Rysová et al, 2013).…”