A framework to evaluate the impact of e-government services in the improvement of the citizens' quality of life

Abstract

Governments around the world are embracing the digital revolution to enhance services for their citizens. However, the development of quality electronic services and delivery systems that are efficient and effective is only one way to improve the citizens' quality of life. The essence of e-government lies as well in engaging citizenry into the use of e-government services. As a result, this paper builds on the elementary concept of the time that citizens spend on their transactions with the Public Administration to provide a) an evaluation of e-government services in terms of the benefits that their use involves for citizens compared to the use of conventional ones b) an evaluation of the actual utilization of e-government services by the citizens. To overcome the impediment of subjectivity and uncertainty that is innate in the citizens' estimations regarding the time spent, fuzzy triangular numbers are adopted. The proposed framework is then applied for the case of Greece using actual data. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.