i4donline: November - December 2003 issue: Insight: Quantifying and assessing e-Governance

Why e-Government assessment?
All elected Governments are accountable to people. The elected representatives are accountable to the Parliament and the Executive is accountable to the elected representatives. Any spending in a Government program without the measurement of results and impact cannot go on indefinitely. There will always be one stakeholder who will ask for the impact assessment of the investment. Therefore, the spending on IT and e-Governance in the Government has to be assessed. This is part of the e-governance initiative and audit also plays a pivotal role in this, as audit findings are submitted to the legislative or parliament.

Difficulty in assessment
The process to quantify the results of e-Governance is very difficult. It is difficult to demonstrate the benefits for a given e-Government program. The various factors that lead to the difficulty are:

multiple services, processes and benefits make it impossible to estimate all the benefits
intangible benefits are difficult to capture and quantify
all e-Government Projects are not often aligned to for increased revenue.
benefits evolve as a greater understanding is gained of the project
the evolving and changing technology widens the gap
lack of pressure or will to measure
kigh cost for developing a measurement performance system
no acknowledgements for failures; though successes to be publicized, more important is failure knowledge to be documented and shared.
lack of adaptation of national standards in measurement parameters and maturity assessment.