Professional e-government seeking behavior

Abstract

The present paper is concerned with professional e-government seeking behavior. With the digitalization of governments, expectations have been raised with regard to changes in the composition of employee work tasks. The purpose of our study is to determine whether these changes affect seeking behavior and if so how they change it. We focus on the status of current seeking behavior in a Danish government administration. The results showed that information needs are commonly verificative and consciously topical and that information seeking most often takes the form of mere "look-ups." Employees experience many search problems, such as the lack of specificity, differences in the interpretation of the topics of documents, and unwieldy and irrelevant search results. These problems can be solved by a combination of improved indexing practices and search features.