Measuring for knowledge: a data-driven research approach for e-government

As ICT provide a lot of possibilities, high expectancies exist towards the electronic public service provision. All governments are increasingly establishing their e-strategies. However, e-Government still faces many challenges as it continues to develop. The current status of electronic services delivery opens up a lot of questions, both for practitioners and researchers. Therefore, further progress of e-Government needs a profound knowledge base. E-Government policy has focused several years on bringing online public services and on benchmarking their availability and sophistication. Simultaneously, e-Government measurement and monitoring activities are often based on the so-called supply-side benchmarking. This is important knowledge, however, it is under criticism because it lacks a user-centric viewpoint of e-Government development. This article presents and discusses a bottom-up and data-driven approach about how research can help to manage (user-centric) e-Government strategies. Based on statistical testing (techniques of structural equation modeling, SEM) of large-scale sample data from the Belgian government, the authors have investigated which relations do exist between contextual variables and the availability and/or satisfaction of electronic public services. By doing this, this manuscript presents an illustration of a data-driven approach in e-Government monitoring and it explains how this can support and enrich the management and evaluation of e-Government policy