Towards a Transdisciplinary Evaluation Framework for Mobile Cross-Border Government Services

Abstract

The evaluation and assessment of project results and their impact are still a recurring challenge in the digital government discipline. Many technologically driven projects or products have faced challenges, where the technology is advanced, but the market adoption and user acceptance are still lacking. To counter these challenges, this paper presents a transdisciplinary evaluation framework and how it could be applied. The foundation for the evaluation framework was a literature review on the most recent and relevant academic publications on transdisciplinary evaluations, which was narrowed down by using selected relevant search terms. This theoretical background was enhanced by a series of practical workshops to validate the findings. By using a transdisciplinary approach, this paper presents a transdisciplinary evaluation framework that enhances the evaluation process of project results in the digital government discipline with six pillars to reflect (1) the real word context, (2) interdisciplinary research, (3) going beyond science, (4) interaction (5) integration, and (6) relevance. Alongside these pillars, dimensions of measurement for the evaluation are also presented and elaborated on. While this evaluation framework could be adopted for many types of projects or products, this paper showcases how it is applied for an international digital government pilot research project throughout its development process. It presents the methodology and process used in establishing the evaluation framework, the evaluation framework itself, and a short discussion.