Measuring E-Government: A Case Study Using Russia

Abstract

Numerous studies of global electronic government adoption use the presence or absence of website functions to measure development levels and create rankings. This paper investigates whether these ratings really reflect the overall status of e-government by using a case study of the 89 regional governments in Russia. It provides the results of two waves of evaluating these websites using measures derived from prior e-government studies. These website levels are correlated to available data reflecting the status of e-government in many of these regions. It is concluded that website levels are only loosely coupled to the overall state of e-government in these regions. It is therefore hazardous to draw too many conclusions about the development of e-government in various countries using relative rankings that are only based on websites. As a case study, this paper illustrates what can and cannot be done when highly limited data are available.

The Relationship between E-Government and National Competitiveness: The Moderating Influence of Environmental Factors

“…Conceptual studies lay the theoretical foundations for future empirical exploration whereas case-studies capture the richness of context in which the researched object is embedded, but they cannot possibly address the broad macrolevel economic issues pertaining to e-government. Further, we see that quantitative empirical studies on egovernment are relatively few and are mostly limited to analyzing a particular e-government implementation within a country [McHenry and Borisov 2006b;Ho 2002;Norris and Moon 2005;Teo et al 2008;Tung and Rieck 2005]. These quantitative studies also do not address macro-level economic issues concerning e-government.…”

Local level E-government in international comparison

“…The analysis of E-government websites and their service offering is a widely used technique for E-government evaluation. A similar approach is found in Eschenfelder et al 1997; Smith (2001);and McHenry (2006). Key elements of the studies are always the establishment of the research object, the development of appropriate criteria and the application of these evaluation criteria to the alternatives (e. g. Smith, 2001).…”

“…However, the authors evaluate E-service implementation based on a fixed set of functional dimensions and do not identify any further developments (Kaylor et al, 2001). Later studies in this context also took a similar approach, but are already using E-government stage models for evaluation (Moon, 2002;McHenry and Borisov, 2006). Nevertheless, there are certain functions that were identified in advance, often according to the United Nations E-participation index (e.g.…”

Emerging Electronic Procurement in Russia’s Regional Governments

“…We used a binary evaluation system, i.e., assign "1" when the given condition is met on the portal, and "0" otherwise, thus avoiding the necessity of judging "levels" of features present (McHenry & Borisov, 2006a). To avoid any discrepancies in evaluations we randomly chose 20 of the 88 portals and each evaluated them separately, pre-evaluating them against the developed criteria.…”