Demarcation of the Field of E-Government Assessment

Abstract

The assessment of e-government is a part of the appealing field of e-government which has recently attracted the attention of many researchers, who most of the time carry out measurements and evaluations of e-government maturity and do international comparative analyses that rank different governments, nations, or countries. The intensive production of literature in this field for about twenty years now creates a vast pool of studies, reports and papers that differ one from the other on the basis of too many different attributes. The analysis of this literature is undoubtedly a difficult and challenging task which is beneficial to both researchers and end-users of these studies. We address this task in order to present a clear demarcation of the field of e-government assessment based on a comprehensive overview of thirty-seven written documents, studies and articles. We present a careful classification of the selected literature units according to four dimensions and attempt to draw clear lines between the terms – e-government measurement, evaluation and benchmarking, as they are often improperly used as interchangeable terms.