E government portals best practices a co
Abdoullah Fath-Allah and Laila Cheikhi Software Project Management Research Team,
ENSIAS, Mohammed V University, Souissi, 713, Rabat, Morocco E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected]
Rafa E. Al-Qutaish* Department of Software Engineering & IT,
École de Technologie Supérieure, University of Québec, Montréal H3C 1K3, Canada E-mail: [email protected] Website: http://www.rafa-elayyan.ca *Corresponding author
Ali Idri Software Project Management Research Team,
ENSIAS, Mohammed V University, Souissi, 713, Rabat, Morocco E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract: An e-government portal is a website that is offering various useful electronic services to the citizens. With the traditional government portals (offices), the services provided to the citizens need a lot of paperwork and many officers are required to conduct such services, and also the citizens need to be present personally, which means they have to leave their jobs for many hours. Thus, making these services as electronic ones through the web will result in great savings for governmental entities and citizens. This paper exploring the e-government portal’s best practices collected from research and industry. Although these best practices exist in the literature, they are not classified or grouped in a logical way. In addition, this paper aims to provide a structured overview of these best practices according to three categories of best practices (i.e., back-end, front-end, and external).
Keywords: e-government; e-portal; best practices; standards; front-end; back-end; web design; web content.
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Fath-Allah, A., Cheikhi, L., Al-Qutaish, R.E. and Idri, A. (2014) ‘E-government portals best practices:
a comprehensive survey’, Electronic Government, An International Journal, Vol. 11, Nos. 1/2, pp.101–132.
A. Fath-Allah et al. Biographical notes: Abdoullah Fath-Allah holds a Bachelor degree in
Computer Science (2005) and a Master degree in Computer Networks with a minor in Software Engineering (2007) from Alakhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco (AUI). He has almost an eight years’ experience in industry, and he is an e-HR portals’ consultant. He is currently a PhD student at ENSIAS (Morocco).
Laila Cheikhi is a Professor at Computer Science and Systems Analysis School (ENSIAS, Rabat, Morocco). She received an MSc (2004) from University of Montréal and PhD (2008) from ETS, University of Quebec at Montreal, and both in software engineering. She has over eight years of experience in computer engineering at the Ministry of Finance of Morocco. Her research interests include software quality models, software metrics, software engineering ISO standards, software product and process quality, software engineering principles and data analysis.
Rafa E. Al-Qutaish is an Associate Professor at École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS), University of Québec, Canada. He received BSc in Computer Science and an MSc in Software Engineering in 1993 and 1998, respectively. Also, he received the PhD in Software Engineering from the School of Higher Technology (ÉTS), University of Québec, Canada in 2007. His research interests are in Software Measurement, Software Product Quality, Software Engineering Standardization, Reverse Engineering, Software Comprehension and Maintenance, and Compiler Construction. He is a senior member of the IEEE & IEEE-CS, and also a senior member of the IACSIT.
Ali Idri is a Professor at Computer Science and Systems Analysis School (ENSIAS, Rabat, Morocco). He received DEA (Master) (1994) and Doctorate of 3rd Cycle (1997) degrees in Computer Science, both from the University Mohamed V of Rabat. He has received his PhD (2003) in Cognitive Computer Sciences from ETS, University of Quebec at Montreal. His research interests include software cost estimation, software metrics, fuzzy logic, neural networks, genetic algorithms and information sciences.
1 Introduction
E-government is considered as an emerging field of interdisciplinary research in which practice-oriented and practical recommendations are important features (Assar, 2011).
The World Bank referred to e-government as: “the use by government agencies of information technologies like wide area networks, the internet and mobile computing that have the ability to transform relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government” (World Bank, 2011). While, the United Nations (UN) referred to it as: “the use of ICT and its application by the government for the provision of information and public services to the people” (United Nations, 2010). These two definitions about the e-government highlight the use of IT to enhance the transaction between government and other stakeholders (Moon, 2002). The stakeholders can be citizens, businesses, governments, etc. According to Fang (2002), the scope of e-government can be government-to-citizen (G2C); citizen-to-government (C2G); government-to- business (G2B); business-to-government (B2G); government-to-government (G2G); government-to-nonprofit (G2N); nonprofit-to-government (N2G); and government-to- employee (G2E). Moreover, Harorimana (2011) stated that e-government is defined as an
E-government portals best practices: a comprehensive survey 103 old thinking and a new thinking. The old thinking refers to the use of wide area networks
(WAN), internet, and mobile computing by governmental entities that can transform the relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government, while the new one is the use of internet for delivering information and services to the citizen. In addition, the old thinking includes many stakeholders and channels of delivery, while the new thinking focuses on one delivery channel, that is, the internet, and only one stakeholder, that is, the citizen.
In this paper, we are concerned about the new thinking or e-government e-portals, which we define as the use of web e-portals to deliver government information and services to the citizen. These e-portals transform the relationship between the government and its citizens to be electronic, and they also provide greater accessibility to the citizens with a possibility to obtain services without visiting a government entity (Moon, 2002). The success of an e-government e-portal will depend on its design, implementation, and the services provided to the users. In research and industry, various e-government implementations have showed efficient time and cost savings (United Nations, 2012a; NIA, 2013). However, there is no textbook or theory for e-government (Halachmi, 2004). The aim of this paper is to collect the best practices used in e-government e-portals from research and industry and provide a structured way to organise them in order to facilitate their use in building high-quality e-government e-portals. In fact, the website quality influences the usage behaviour (Kumar et al., 2007; Alshehri et al., 2012) and also helps in increasing the citizens’ satisfaction and e-government adoption to overcome the problems with the legacy e-government e-portals (Kumar et al., 2007; Assar, 2011; Alshehri et al., 2012).
This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 provides an overview on the classification methodology we have followed to classify the best practices. Section 3 provides a general view on the e-government best practices, whereas, Section 4 describes the best practices in a detailed way. Finally, Section 5 concludes the paper and gives directions for future work.
2 Classification methodology
Many e-government best practices were provided by research papers, industry, international standards, and case studies. However, some best practices can be raised by different authors with the same meaning and different wordings. An example is customer centricity that can be named as user focus, customer-centric, user-centric, or customer intention (ECTQM, 2002; World Bank, 2005; Forfás, 2008; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009). Nevertheless, all those wordings mean the same thing which is to design the e-portal according to the citizens’ needs. Furthermore, these best practices are not organised in a structured way.
This non-categorisation and different wordings may cause ambiguities and difficulties for the designer of those e-portals. The purpose of this paper is to propose a way to unify the best practices’ wordings and categorise them into a structured way to help designers build e-government portals easily.
First of all, nowadays in computer science the terms front-end and back-end are widely used (Turner, 2002). Front-end means what the user sees or interacts with or in other words the user interface and includes activities such as the interaction of humans
A. Fath-Allah et al. and the machine, while the back-end means what the user cannot see or run in
background (Turner, 2002) and is about business logic and/or data processing logic. From a world wide web perspective, the user can see the design and content of the e-portal, which constitute the front-end part of the e-portal and the activities are related to the best practices related to what the users see or interact with, while the business logic and data processing logic are considered as the back-end part because the users do not see or interact with them directly.
Moreover, from the literature review, we have selected a set of studies that address the categorisation of the website but from the quality point of view. For instance, Aladwani and Palvia (2002) divided the website quality into three aspects:
• technical adequacy: this focuses on technical aspects such as security, ease of navigation, search, privacy, and multi-language support
• web content: this focuses on quality aspects related to content such as usefulness, completeness, clarity, uniqueness, broadness, originality, currency, conciseness, and accuracy of content and help including FAQs
• web appearance: this focuses on the appearance of the website such as attractiveness, organisation, and some accessibility aspects such us proper use of colours, fonts, and graphics etc.
Whereas, Floh and Treiblmaier (2006) divided the website quality into: • Web design: It focuses on the aspects related to the design of the website. • Structure: It focuses on aspects related to the structure of the website. • Content: It focuses on the aspects related to the content of the website. • Service quality: It focuses on the quality of the services offered in the website.
Although this is not included in the website quality but rather considered a distinct aspect.
Furthermore, Delone and McLean (1992) divided the website quality into the following three types:
• information quality: it focuses on the aspects related to information quality such as completeness, ease of understanding, personalisation, relevancy, and security
• system quality: it focuses on the aspects related to the system quality such as adaptability, availability, reliability, response time, and usability
• service quality: it focuses on the aspects related to the service quality such as assurance, empathy, and responsiveness.
From the above studies of website quality (Delone and McLean, 1992, Aladwani and Palvia, 2002, Floh and Treiblmaier, 2006), we can notice that the quality models share some quality dimensions in common, such as:
• All the three models cover content aspect. • One model covers design aspect and one covers web appearance aspect. Both aspects
mean the same thing and can be grouped under design aspect.
E-government portals best practices: a comprehensive survey 105 • One model covers system aspect and one model covers technical aspects and some of
those aspects are also related to system aspect. Therefore, these both aspects can be grouped under back-end aspect.
Thus, we can notice that these models address the design aspect, the content aspect and the back-end aspect. Since the quality aspects are related to practices included in the e-portals, the e-portals best practices can be therefore grouped according to these categories.
Therefore, regarding the e-government portals we define these categories as follows: examples of best practices are also mentioned for each category. The best practices are included in their corresponding categories according to their purpose and use in the portals: those that are visible for the user and those that are not, those related to design and those to the content.
• Back-end includes the best practices that run in background and usually the users do not see them. This includes the system, data processing, and business logic. An example is security, privacy, and interoperability (ECTQM, 2002; Kumar et al., 2007; Forfás, 2008; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; Almazan et al., 2011; Posch et al., 2011; NIA, 2013; Makolm, 2002; Carbo and Williams, 2004; Choudrie et al., 2004; Al-Khouri, 2011; e-Estonia, 2013). For instance, it is not visible to the user how the e-portal exchanges data with other systems or how the data is encrypted. This happens in the back-end of the e-portal and is related to the data processing.
• Front-end web design that can be defined as the best practices that the user usually interacts with and see and are related to the interface or design of the e-portal. This includes one-stop shops, ease of navigation, user forms, and structuration (ECTQM, 2002; Carbo and Williams, 2004; World Bank, 2005; Kumar et al., 2007; Seifert and McLoughlin, 2007; Forfás, 2008; Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; Klischewski and Askar, 2010; United Nations, 2012a, 2012b; Peters et al., 2004; Makolm, 2002). For instance, designing the e-portal in a way that helps citizens navigate and find information easily or even making the user forms easy and intuitive are all aspects of e-portals that the user can see and interact with and are related to how the e-portal is designed.
• Front-end web content that can be defined as the best practices that the user usually interacts with and see and are related to the information and content of the e-portal. This includes rich content, periodical change, statements, translations and understandability (Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; United Nations, 2012a, 2012b; DeLone and McLean, 1992; ECTQM, 2002; Delone, 2003; Choudrie et al., 2004; Makolm, 2002; Kumar et al., 2007; Capgemini, 2009; West and Deitch, 2004; Sørum, 2011; PLAIN, 2014). For instance, making up-to-date e-portal content, translating the e-portal content, or even writing the content in a plain language that can be easily understood are all aspects that the user can see and are related to the information or content of the e-portal.
On the other hand, some of the best practices found in the literature do not fit in the above categories. According to their purposes and relation to e-portals we found that they are loosely coupled with the technical aspects of the e-portal; in particular, they are related to the marketing of the e-portal. We have groups of such set of practices in a new category to which we refer as ‘External’. This category can be defined as the best
A. Fath-Allah et al. practices that are loosely coupled with the technical aspects of the e-portal such as
advertising, referencing, incentives, and contests. More closely, advertising the e-portal in media channels, making the e-portal pages available in search engines, encouraging the citizens to use e-portals via incentives, or even organising contest for citizens to compete with each other can all be grouped in one category which we call external and focus on marketing the e-portal. Besides that, all those aspects are not related to the technical aspects of the e-portal.
To sum up, the e-government portals best practices can be classified into the same composition of e-portals. This assures the validity and reliability of this categorisation since this classification reflexes the nature of the websites (e-portals) structure which consists of front-end part, back-end part, and external part.
3 E-government best practices: a general view
The growth and need of e-government e-portals are resulting in demands from users and governments to support their competitive position and to facilitate their functions. Therefore, it is appropriate to review the strategic considerations (i.e., best practices) that influence e-government e-portals in determining a broader understanding of what actually contributes to their quality. This section provides a general overview of the e-government best practices collected from research and industry and classifies these best practices into three categories, that is, front-end, back-end, and external.
3.1 Distribution of the back-end subcategories The back-end best practices describe the system, architecture, data processing, business
logic, and functionalities of the e-portal that are implemented in the back-end (the users often do not see them and are not aware of their presence). Those subcategories are:
• Customer centricity: It relates to ensuring that services are designed for the citizen and not for the organisation (ECTQM, 2002; World Bank, 2005; Forfás, 2008; Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; Capgemini, 2009; Al-Khouri, 2011; United Nations, 2012a; NIA, 2013). An example is the interaction with each government agency after the execution of a service. This should run in the background or back-end; the user should not be aware of this.
• Interoperability: It relates to integration between systems or government to exchange information (Layne and Lee, 2001; ECTQM, 2002; Kumar et al., 2007; Forfás, 2008; Al-Khouri, 2011; Posch et al., 2011; e-Estonia, 2013).
• Use of standards: It relates to the use of standards which is related to interoperability (West and Deitch, 2004; Seifert and McLoughlin, 2007; Forfás, 2008; Alasem, 2009;
Posch et al., 2011). • Modularity: It relates to building the e-portal in a modular way or module by
module (UNDP, 2007; Klischewski and Askar, 2010; United Nations, 2012a). This is concerned with the system architecture.
E-government portals best practices: a comprehensive survey 107 • Security: This concerns allowing citizens to make secure transactions (ECTQM,
2002; Kumar et al., 2007; Forfás, 2008; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; Almazan et al., 2011; Posch et al., 2011; NIA, 2013). It relates specifically to data security and generally to data processing.
• Privacy: This concerns keeping the citizens’ data private (Makolm, 2002; Carbo and Williams, 2004; Choudrie et al., 2004). It relates specifically to data privacy and generally to data processing.
• Single sign on: This concerns the fact of signing in into the e-portal only one time (United Nations, 2012b). It relates to data processing.
• Delegation: It relates to acting on behalf of other users (Posch et al., 2011) and this is concerned with security.
• E-participation: It relates to the involvement of the citizen in the e-government process such as communication with officials, surveys, and e-petitions (ECTQM,
2002; West and Deitch, 2004; Kumar et al., 2007; Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008; Iribarren et al., 2008; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; Capgemini, 2009; Assar et al., 2011; United Nations, 2012a, 2012b). Although those features are visible to the user, their business logic is present and implemented in the back-end.
• Payments: It relates to offering user payments in the portal (Makolm, 2002; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; United Nations, 2012a, 2012b). This is related to the e-portal’s functionalities. Although this feature is visible to the user, its process is implemented in the back-end.
• Workflows: This concerns the possibility for citizens to track the status of their applications online (Makolm, 2002; United Nations, 2012a). It relates to the business logic or the flow of events.
• Responsiveness: It relates to the speed of execution of the business logic or services of the e-portal (DeLone and McLean, 1992; Delone, 2003).
3.2 Distribution of the front-end best practices The front-end best practices are generally described in terms of web design and web
content categories. • Front-end web design best practices: The subcategories of the web design best
practices are: • One-stop shop: It relates to centralisation of administrative procedures in a
single place which is directly visible to the user (ECTQM, 2002; Carbo and Williams, 2004; World Bank, 2005; Kumar et al., 2007; Seifert and McLoughlin, 2007; Forfás, 2008; Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; Klischewski and Askar, 2010; United Nations, 2012a, 2012b).
• Ease of navigation: It relates to the ability for the user to navigate in the e-government e-portal easily which is directly visible to the user (ECTQM,
A. Fath-Allah et al. 2002; Carbo and Williams, 2004; Peters et al., 2004; Kumar et al., 2007;
Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008). • Social networks: It relates to the use of social networks (Forfás, 2008;
Capgemini, 2009; Assar, 2011; Assar et al., 2011; United Nations, 2012b). The business logic in this case is supported by the social website and not by the e-government e-portal and it is directly visible to the user.
• Personalisation: It relates to the possibility of the citizen to personalise and customise the e-portal’s functionalities according to his needs (Makolm, 2002; Kumar et al., 2007; Forfás, 2008; Capgemini, 2009; Assar et al., 2011; United Nations, 2012a, 2012b). Furthermore, this is directly visible to the user.
• User forms: It relates to the way user forms are designed (Makolm, 2002). Furthermore, this is directly visible to the user.
• Industrialisation: It relates to following industry guidelines for web design (ISO, 2002; Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008; W3C, 2014).
• Structuration: It relates to organising the e-portal in a structured way (ECTQM, 2002; United Nations, 2012b); it focuses on the structure or design of
the portal. • Front-end web content best practices: The subcategories of the web content best
practices are as follows: • Relevancy: It relates to organising the e-portal’s web content according to the
citizens’ needs (Alasem, 2009; Capgemini, 2009; Sørum, 2011; United Nations, 2012b).
• Accessibility: It relates to the accessibility of the web content to people with and without disabilities (ECTQM, 2002; Choudrie et al., 2004; West and Deitch, 2004; United Nations, 2005, 2012a, 2012b; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; Capgemini, 2009; W3C, 2014).
• Search engines: It relates to the ability to search for the content of the website (ECTQM, 2002; Peters et al., 2004; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; United Nations, 2012b).
• Periodical change: It relates to updating the e-portal’s web content periodically (DeLone and McLean, 1992; ECTQM, 2002; Delone, 2003; Choudrie et al., 2004; United Nations, 2012a, 2012b).
• Rich content: It relates to offering rich web content in the e-portal (Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; United Nations, 2012a, 2012b).
• Interactive games: It relates to offering interactive games in the e-portal (United Nations, 2012a).
• Mobile applications: It relates to offering mobile applications in the e-portal (United Nations, 2012b).
E-government portals best practices: a comprehensive survey 109 • Statements: It relates to offering privacy and security statements, disclaimers,
and copyrights in the e-portal (ECTQM, 2002; Makolm, 2002; Kumar et al., 2007; Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008; Capgemini, 2009).
• Translations: It relates to offering translations of the e-portal’s web content (Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008; Capgemini, 2009; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; United Nations, 2012b).
• Understandability: It relates to writing the web content in an understandable way (DeLone and McLean, 1992; Delone, 2003; West and Deitch, 2004; Sørum, 2011; PLAIN, 2014).
3.3 Distribution of the external best practices The external best practices are loosely coupled with the technical aspects of the e-portal.
This means that they are not tightly dependent on the back-end and front-end best practices. The subcategories of the external best practices are:
• Advertising: It relates to the promotion of the e-portal and its services (West and Deitch, 2004; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; United Nations, 2012b). This is loosely coupled with the technical aspects of the e-portal.
• Referencing: It relates to search engine optimisation. This is loosely coupled with the technical aspects of the e-portal.
• Incentives: It relates to granting privileges for online users (United Nations, 2012b). This is loosely coupled with the technical aspects of the e-portal.
• Contests: It relates to organising competitions for the public (ISL, 2008; Assar et al., 2011; United Nations, 2012b). This is loosely coupled with the technical aspects of the e-portal.
• Reusability: It relates to reusing Web 2.0 components that are already available for use like ‘Plug & Play’ modules (Assar et al., 2011).
The front-end, back-end, and external best practices can all be united in order to achieve e-government e-portals with the highest possible quality. The descriptions of the best practices in the next sections include definitions, descriptions, sometimes advantages, and examples of implementations or case studies.
4 E-government best practices: a detailed view
This section provides a detailed overview of the e-government best practices collected from research and industry as described in Table 1. Each best practice contains details, advantages, and examples or case studies.
4.1 Back-end best practices The back-end best practices are focusing on system or data processing best practices, and
they are explained in the following subsections:
A. Fath-Allah et al.
4.1.1 Customer centricity It is a very important practice in e-government e-portals (Forfás, 2008) and different
terms are used to show the focus on customer, such as: • the European Centre for Total Quality Management identified ‘user focus’ – not
organisational focus – as a trend for a successful e-government e-portal (ECTQM, 2002).
• the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) in the UK is aiming to make its services more customer-centric by providing access to many e-government e-portals (ECTQM, 2002)
• Charles Watt a Senior ICT Policy Specialist stated that making public services provision user-centric is a challenge for e-governments in Europe (World Bank, 2005)
• Accenture (a multinational company) use the design by customer intention as an indicator in its benchmarking study for ranking countries’ e-government e-portals (Berntzen and Olsen, 2009).
Table 1
E-government e-portal’s best practices Best practices’
categories Best practices’ subcategories Back-end
Customer Centricity (ECTQM, 2002; World Bank, 2005; Forfás, 2008; Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; Capgemini, 2009; Al-Khouri, 2011; United Nations, 2012a; NIA, 2013)
Interoperability (Layne and Lee, 2001; ECTQM, 2002; Kumar et al., 2007; Forfás, 2008; Al-Khouri, 2011; Posch et al., 2011; e-Estonia, 2013)
Use of Standards (West and Deitch, 2004; Seifert and McLoughlin, 2007; Forfás, 2008; Alasem, 2009; Posch et al., 2011)
Modularity (UNDP, 2007; Klischewski and Askar, 2010; United Nations, 2012a) Security (ECTQM, 2002; Kumar et al., 2007; Forfás, 2008; Berntzen and Olsen,
2009; Almazan, 2011; Posch et al., 2011; NIA, 2013) Privacy (Makolm, 2002; Carbo and Williams, 2004; Choudrie et al., 2004) Single sign on (United Nations, 2012b) Delegation (Posch et al., 2011) E-participation (ECTQM, 2002; West and Deitch, 2004; Kumar et al., 2007;
Iribarren et al., 2008; Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; Capgemini, 2009; Assar et al., 2011; United Nations, 2012a; United Nations, 2012b)
Payments (Makolm, 2002; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; United Nations, 2012a; United Nations, 2012b)
Workflows (Makolm, 2002; United Nations, 2012a) Responsiveness (Delone, 2003; DeLone and McLean, 1992)
E-government portals best practices: a comprehensive survey 111
Table 1
E-government e-portal’s best practices (continued) Best practices’
categories Best practices’ subcategories Front-end web One-stop-shop (ECTQM, 2002; Carbo and Williams, 2004; World Bank, 2005;
design Kumar et al., 2007; Seifert and McLoughlin, 2007; Forfás, 2008; Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; Klischewski and Askar, 2010; United Nations, 2012a; United Nations, 2012b)
Ease of navigation (ECTQM, 2002; Carbo and Williams, 2004; Peters et al., 2004; Kumar et al., 2007; Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008)
Social networks (Forfás, 2008; Capgemini, 2009; Assar, 2011; Assar et al., 2011; United Nations, 2012b)
Personalisation (Makolm, 2002; Kumar et al., 2007; Forfás, 2008; Capgemini, 2009; Assar et al., 2011; United Nations, 2012a; United Nations, 2012b)
User forms (Makolm, 2002) Industrialisation (ISO, 2002; Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008; W3C, 2014) Structuration (ECTQM, 2002; United Nations, 2012b) Relevancy (Alasem, 2009; Capgemini, 2009; Sørum, 2011; United Nations,
2012b) Accessibility (ECTQM, 2002; Choudrie et al., 2004; West and Deitch, 2004;
United Nations, 2005; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; Capgemini, 2009; United Nations, 2012a; United Nations, 2012b; W3C, 2014)
Search engine (ECTQM, 2002; Peters et al., 2004; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; United Nations, 2012b)
Periodical change (DeLone and McLean, 1992; ECTQM, 2002; Delone, 2003; Choudrie et al., 2004; United Nations, 2012a; United Nations, 2012b)
Rich content (Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; United Nations, 2012a; United Nations, 2012b)
Interactive Games (United Nations, 2012a) Mobile Apps (United Nations, 2012b) Statements (ECTQM, 2002; Makolm, 2002; Kumar et al., 2007; Georgescu and
Georgescu, 2008; Capgemini, 2009) Translation (Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009;
Capgemini, 2009; United Nations, 2012b) Understandability (DeLone and McLean, 1992; West and Deitch, 2004; Delone,
2003; Sørum, 2011; PLAIN, 2014) External
Advertising (West and Deitch, 2004; Berntzen and Olsen, 2009; United Nations, 2012b)
Referencing Incentives (United Nations, 2012b) Contests (ISL, 2008; Assar et al., 2011; United Nations, 2012b) Reusability (Assar et al., 2011)
These different terms focus on the importance of the users in the e-government e-portals and we group all of them in the customer centricity, which can be defined as ensuring that services are designed for the citizen and not for the organisation. Al-Khouri (2011) explained the difference between department-centric and citizen-centric from a back-end
A. Fath-Allah et al. perspective. Department-centric means that the citizen needs to interact with each
government agency at a time. This will certainly cause inefficiency to the user. He argued that services that need approval from other departments may cause a lot of delays to be completed. In a citizen-centric approach the customer does not need to be aware of the separated interaction with each government agency. Therefore, multiple agencies may be integrated into one e-government e-portal giving a ‘one agency feel’ to the customer. As a matter of fact, customer centricity will lead to ease of use, usefulness, and satisfaction of the citizen. Actually, understanding and engaging the citizen through user- centred service provision can help in achieving trust and confidence (Capgemini, 2009). Moreover, Georgescu and Georgescu (2008) stated that websites in Taiwan are designed with “its users in mind” by a customer-centric approach, and they dispute that this is reflected in the ease of use and usefulness of their websites. Besides, Korea’s government is providing tailor-made services to its citizens (NIA, 2013). Also, the My Central Provident Fund (CPF) retirement e-portal in Singapore is delivering services in a customer-centric way (United Nations, 2012a).
From the above it is clear that there is a major shift in the design of the services to be more centric. However, there are different approaches that help designing citizen-centric or tailor-made services, such as (Capgemini, 2009):
• observatory approach: to observe users trying e-government services • ethnographic approach: to group users according to some socio-cultural criteria like
age and educational level • eye tracking approach: to observe users trying the e-portal’s functionalities during
implementation in a living lab. All these approaches were implemented worldwide. Some examples are the ones
implemented in the European Commission, Belgium, and UK, and can be explained as follows:
• The European Commission benchmarking project monitors users’ needs during implementation and aims at involving the user in the design of the service (Capgemini, 2009). This is achieved by using observatory or ethnographic approaches. It helps brainstorming the particular needs for each group and provides tailor-made services accordingly.
• The Belgian federal e-portal was upgraded using eye-tracking approach in a living lab (Capgemini, 2009).
• The UK is trying to better understand the daily life of the users to design the services according to their needs via the ‘power of information’ and ‘customer journey mapping’ approaches (Capgemini, 2009).
While ethnographic approach plays an important role in the design of customer-centric services, another way to achieve customer centricity is via one-stop shops which we are going to discuss in detail in the web design section. Due to this fact, interoperability is one of the pillars to achieve customer centricity.
E-government portals best practices: a comprehensive survey 113
4.1.2 Interoperability It can be defined as joining up governments to work together and exchange information.
It has been identified as an e-government trend (Forfás, 2008). One tip for successful public website is joined-up governments. Accenture Company identified the following two levels of integration (Kumar et al., 2007):
• The first level (vertical level) of integration is across different departments: federal, provincial, and municipal in the same jurisdiction. Layne and Lee (2001) mentioned that citizens prefer to access information from their local e-portal because they are familiar with it. This means that the citizen will be able to access federal information and services from their local e-portal because the e-portal is integrated with the upper levels (i.e. municipal with federal, etc.).
• The second level (horizontal integration) is the integration across various jurisdictions of the government. For instance, a citizen who has been moved into a new area looking for information about schools, doctor’s phone number, and his advice bureau needs to find all these information in one service (ECTQM, 2002).
An example of interoperability implementation is the Estonian project X-Road (Forfás, 2008). X-Road is a backbone tool that allows the databases to interact and making integrated e-services possible (e-Estonia, 2013). This means that if an agency needs to get information from other agencies, it will not contact each agency at a time. However, it will just contact the X-Road coordinator which will be responsible for querying the multiple agencies’ databases and providing the agency with the requested information.
Another example of integration between various government jurisdictions is the electronic file system (ElektronischerAkt, ELAK) in Austria (Posch et al., 2011). ELAK is a workflow enabled system that allows processing of electronic records easily and without delays (Posch et al., 2011). All ministries are connected to the ELAK system. Furthermore, officers can access and edit documents, while citizens can access documents instantaneously at any time, enabling them a one-stop administration for all documents (Posch et al., 2011).
In order to achieve interoperability between systems, the use of standards is very important. Al-Khouri (2011) emphasised that in order to facilitate interoperability between systems, we need to use technologies complying with technical standards.
4.1.3 Use of standards It can be defined as enabling the use of standards and especially the open source ones in
the implementation of the e-government e-portal. Capgemini (2009) stated that there is an increasing interest in using open source standards. Also, following international security and privacy standards is a best practice in e-government e-portals (West and Deitch, 2004). The purpose of using open source standards is to:
• Enable cross platform interoperability and facilitate interoperability efforts (Forfás, 2008; Posch et al., 2011).
• Enable flexibility and ease of change in requirements and technology. This was achieved in the Altinn project (a tax e-filing system in Norway) by the use of web services and open standards (Forfás, 2008).
A. Fath-Allah et al. Prevent the fact of ‘re-architecting’ as problems arise, and reinforce coordination across
the enterprise as stated by Seifert and McLoughlin (2007). For example, XML and SOAP standards that were used in the Altinn project (Forfás, 2008) and Dublin core metadata standard which is the most widely used among the other metadata standards (Alasem, 2009).
4.1.4 Modularity It can be defined as the fact of building the e-portal in a modular way or module by
module. An example of modularity is the service oriented architecture (SOA). The SOA is a software architecture that focuses on breaking down an application into modules called services; each module is responsible for a small functionality. It has been recommended for e-government followers in a United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report (UNDP, 2007). In addition, Klischewski and Askar (2010) stated that SOA helps achieving:
• reusability (reusing services or components) • flexibility • interoperability (the web services can run in harmony in different servers and are
platform independent) • maintainability (because the services in SOA are loosely coupled, changing small
functionalities does not break the whole functionality). According to the UN (United Nations, 2012a), modularity was considered as a keystone
to build the e-procurement e-portal in Belgium; thus, these modules were implemented one by one.
4.1.5 Security It can be defined as the fact of allowing citizens to make transactions in a secure or safe
way. It is a major concern in e-government e-portals since it is very important to allow citizens to make transactions securely and keep their records confidential. This increases adoption and trust in e-government (Kumar et al., 2007). For example, to achieve security you may need to use digital signatures. Brown University considered the use of digital signatures as a measure to benchmark e-government e-portals (Berntzen and Olsen, 2009). Moreover, digital signatures can be used for both authentication and securing transactions.
According to Forfas (2008), Denmark seems to be a good example in handling trust, security, and identity issues. They used the digital signatures to:
• secure e-mails • identify users • secure submission of forms. The quality and security of digital signatures in Denmark is guaranteed by certified
authorities. For instance 95% of accountants and 80% of lawyers have digital signatures (Forfás, 2008). On the other hand, France uses one system for user identification while
E-government portals best practices: a comprehensive survey 115 services are separated in different networks. Similarly for UK, security is guaranteed by a
central e-government gateway, while digital signatures allow complex transactions to be done electronically. For instance, by filling contracts online, human resources (HR) department can accept forms from their employees where authentication is required (ECTQM, 2002). The state of Jalisco in Mexico implemented an interoperability platform that allows agencies to share information with a necessity to have digital signatures for each official that requires an electronic authorisation (Almazan et al., 2011). In spite of the fact that the digital signatures are virtual, they can be used as an equivalent to the handwritten signatures. According to the signature directive published in 1999 by the European Union (EU) (Posch et al., 2011), digital signatures can be used not only for authentication and identification but also as an alternative to the handwritten ones. For example, the digital signatures in Austria have the ability to verify that the signer is a public authority even if the document is printed; this was achieved by relying on text- based signatures (Posch et al., 2011).
Recovery and backup are also classified among the security aspects. The Ministry of Public Administration and Security in Korea (NIA, 2013) identified the disaster recovery system and real-time backup system as best practices for e-government e-portals.
4.1.6 Privacy It can be defined as keeping the citizens’ data and preferences private from any
disclosure. Choudrie et al. (2004) argued in their evaluation study that privacy is among the important aspects of the government e-portal success. They have examined privacy issues, such as P3P (platform for privacy preferences) compliance, cookies set by the e-portal designers, and the use of HTML GET forms as they are a potential security risk. In addition, WebXact tool was used to measure privacy in their study. On the other hand, Carbo and Williams (2004) identified protection of privacy and inclusion of privacy policies as one of the metrics for evaluating local e-government systems. Moreover, Makolm (2002) identified role-based authorisation as a best practice for government applications. This means that employees within the government will have access to only the data they are allowed to process. This normally could enhance data privacy for the user.
4.1.7 Single sign-on It can be defined as the fact of signing in only one time. This should give access to all the
other services/systems without having the need to log in another time. Single sign-on is a best practice implemented by some countries, like Seychelles and Saudi Arabia (United Nations, 2012b). The Seychelles’ integrated e-portal in Eastern Africa offers a single sign-on to its users (United Nations, 2012b). While, the e-Dashboard e-portal in Saudi Arabia provides a single sign-on to all services provided in the e-portal (United Nations, 2012b).
4.1.8 Delegation It can be defined as the fact of someone acting on behalf of a person or company. It helps
ensuring the continuity of the citizens’ tasks when they are busy or simply unavailable. It is a key concept to authentication (Posch et al., 2011). Posch et al. (2011) mentioned
A. Fath-Allah et al. that Austria is the only country in Europe having mechanisms supporting delegation; in
this case, electronic mandates are handled with the digital signature of the citizen.
4.1.9 E-participation It can be defined as the involvement of the citizen in the e-government process, and it can
be achieved by: • providing communication with government officials or between citizens (for
example, chat rooms and comment forms to ask question and receive answers) (Berntzen and Olsen, 2009)
• seeking feedbacks, opinions, and suggestions from the citizens (for example, feedback icons, suggestion programs, surveys, ratings, and scoring a service) (West and Deitch, 2004; Capgemini, 2009)
• integrating the users’ feedbacks into the e-portal (Kumar et al., 2007; Iribarren et al., 2008; Georgescu and Georgescu, 2008)
• involving the citizen in the policy-making process (for example, e-petitions) (United Nations, 2012b)
• gathering feedbacks from non-users (the citizens who did not use the e-government e-portal or one of its services) (Capgemini, 2009).
Next, we are going to discuss, give examples, and determine the importance for each point of the above five points.
Firstly, ‘communication with government officials’ can be achieved using comment forms or chat rooms. These were used by Brown University as metrics for benchmarking e-government e-portals (Berntzen and Olsen, 2009). This allows citizens to engage with the government and increased e-participation (United Nations, 2012b). However, there are various e-portals that implemented this worldwide, for example:
• the UK e-government website winner Leicestershire CareOnLine provides online forums where users can chat, share information, and advice with each other (United Nations, 2012a)
• same case for Austria; their e-portal provides a forum where citizens can ask questions and receive answers (United Nations, 2012a)
• while the national Indian e-portal gives discussion forums and an ‘ask an expert’ section (United Nations, 2012b)
• finally, the Kazakhstani government provides a blog site where citizens can communicate with the government agencies to ask questions and post comments to
receive answers by the executives (United Nations, 2012b). Secondly, ‘seeking feedback from citizens’ is essential for e-government development
(West and Deitch, 2004). It can be achieved via the following four techniques (Capgemini, 2009):
• Feedback icons or ‘have your say’ icon: For example, the government websites in Finland and Malta allow users to share their experience with the government upon using one of its services (Capgemini, 2009).
E-government portals best practices: a comprehensive survey 117 • Suggestion programs and mail boxes: For example, the ‘e-box’ in the Danish
e-government e-portal (United Nations, 2012b) and the suggestion program in the official website of Dubai’s police (Capgemini, 2009).
• Surveys: they were identified as a key component of the UK e-government initiative (ECTQM, 2002). For instance, the Saudi eDashboard e-portal and France’s e-government e-portals gathers citizens’ opinions through surveys (United Nations, 2012b), (Capgemini, 2009).
• Assessments or offering the opportunity to the users to rate or score e-government services or websites: This improves the provided services and the interactions between citizens and governments (Assar et al., 2011). Furthermore, it was classified as a user satisfaction monitoring metric for assessing European websites (Capgemini, 2009). For example, the use of ‘emoticons’ in the Italian e-government to rate public services in various criteria, such as, waiting time, need to return, and quality of support. Besides that, the French e-government e-portal offers the possibility to the users to rate overall satisfaction level in which it gives a performance indicator of the e-portal (Capgemini, 2009).
Most of the above techniques were used by the European Commission benchmarking project to monitor users’ needs during usage.
Thirdly, seeking feedback should be accompanied by a ‘review or integration of this feedback into the e-portal’. Otherwise, getting feedback will be unnecessary. One of the best practices used in the e-government maturity model (eGov-MM) – which is proposed by Iribarren et al. (2008) – to learn from feedback provided by customers about service effectiveness. Georgescu and Georgescu (2008) mentioned that revising website based on the evaluation of results and feedbacks is a best practice for a successful e-government. The Canadian e-government website regularly executes a set of surveys and polls to identify citizens’ needs regarding access to e-government e-portals (West and Deitch, 2004). The results of the users’ surveys are used to build newer version of the website (Kumar et al., 2007). Layne and Lee (2001) suggested that digital metrics can also be used to enhance the e-portal, and they stated that online activities can be tracked, for example, the frequently accessed products, the length of time spent on each page, and the length of time spent searching. This can be used to improve the website.
Fourthly, ‘involving the citizen in the policy-making process’ is another technique to encourage e-participation. However, it should include:
• the ‘have your say’ section: the e-government e-portal of Australia where citizens can send their comments on draft regulations to the intended ministries (United Nations, 2012b)
• the ‘e-petition page’ in the UK’s e-government e-portal where citizens can lodge petitions on government issues that can be proposed to parliament if they receive
enough signatures (United Nations, 2012b). Fifthly, feedbacks can also be gathered from non-users (the citizens who did not use the
e-government e-portal or one of its services). This can be achieved by using telephone surveys and computer-assisted telephone interviews which can help capture the non-users and the barriers causing the services not being used. In fact, surveys can be targeted to
A. Fath-Allah et al. actual users or to non-users. This can also give insights into why the services are not
used. For example, the Slovenia satisfaction forms include (Capgemini, 2009): • computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI) survey
• e-mail survey • postal survey • field survey for citizens visiting public offices.
4.1.10 Payments It can be defined as offering the ability for citizens to pay in the e-portal via credit/debit
cards or electronic banking. It is one of the features used by Brown University to benchmark e-government e-portals (Berntzen and Olsen, 2009). Makolm (2002) stated that the choice of the payment type (credit card, debit card, internet banking, or cash) was considered as a required best practice. Many e-portals worldwide offer this functionality. An example is the official web e-portal of Dubai’s police which allows citizens to pay for traffic violations (United Nations, 2012a). The e-portal of the Republic of Macedonia also offers the e-payments of the services processing fees (United Nations, 2012a). Besides that, Singapore’s e-portal offers a wide range of online payments for its citizens, ranging from taxes to fines and fees. The payment could be done by credit cards, debit cards, internet banking, or even phones (United Nations, 2012b).