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Benchmarking scale of e-government stage in Chinese municipalities from government chief information officers’ perspective

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Abstract

Introduction

Most extant e-government measurements are tailored for front-end website evaluation from the perspective of citizens and business. This paper develops a valid scale to evaluate e-government evolution from the perspective of government chief information officers, which act as an instrument for measuring back-office e-government.

Method

A survey was conducted through a questionnaire administered to 13 large cities in the Chinese context. The investigation involved 331 government information officers, who are or had been in charge of e-government construction.

Analysis

By conducting a series of studies like literature review, q-sorting, the EFA and CFA methods, this study establishes an instrument that measures e-government stage evolution of public agencies.

Results

Within the instrument, five dimensions are applied, namely, cataloging, transaction, vertical integration, horizontal integration, and e-participation. Each of the five identified and verified dimensions plays a significant role in overall e-government stage. The 21 evaluation criteria across the five factors can serve a useful diagnostic purpose. Furthermore, a sample consisting of 24 city agencies in Shanghai China are employed to test the benchmarking instrument. Contrary to the stage theory (Layne and Lee in Gov Inf Q 18(2):122–136, 2001), the stages of vertical integration and horizontal integration do not take place in sequence in our context.

Conclusions

This paper develops a valid scale to assess e-government development in the perspective of back-office e-government, with an aim to diagnose, examine, and guide the growth of e-government.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants (91024007, 70901052), the “Shu Guang” project was supported by the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, Shanghai Education Development Foundation under Grant 09SG16, and the MOE Project of Humanities and Social Sciences under Grant 09YJC630155.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Bo Fan

  2. Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Jifeng Luo

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  1. Bo Fan
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  2. Jifeng Luo
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Correspondence to Bo Fan.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 12.

Table 12 Sorting results
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Fan, B., Luo, J. Benchmarking scale of e-government stage in Chinese municipalities from government chief information officers’ perspective. Inf Syst E-Bus Manage 12, 259–284 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-013-0225-0

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