Assessing web services of emerging economies in an Eastern country — Taiwan's e-government

doi:10.1016/j.giq.2013.02.003

Government Information Quarterly

Volume 30, Issue 3, July 2013, Pages 267-276

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2013.02.003 Get rights and content

Highlights

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Taiwan’s e-governments are well developed in the northern and southern regions.
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Physical location and population size hinder regional e-governments’ development.
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The emerging economies should focus on the website design of their e-governments.

Abstract

Accessibility of much country-level information and many web services, originating from governments are a global standard. The governments of emerging economies in the eastern countries especially need to adopt, without undue delay, the advanced technologies for providing better web services to their citizens. However, consideration and evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of governments' web services is currently lacking in previous literature. Thus, this study first adopts a computational approach suggested in the literature to measure the effectiveness of Taiwan's established, city- and county-level (25 cities and counties, and 1411 governmental units) governments' websites. Then, by considering the IT-related input and output resources as suggested by the experts of e-government during several in-depth interviews, data envelopment analysis (DEA) evaluates the efficiency of Taiwan's governmental web services. This study reveals that the well-developed web services provided by Taiwan's government are apparent in two geographically dispersed cities (north and south) and one county in the northern region of Taiwan. In addition, six cities and counties appear to be ineffective and inefficient in providing web services to Taiwan's citizens due to their geographical remoteness from the capital and small regional populations. An additional finding confirms the significant effect of population size on Taiwanese services for e-government in each city and county. Finally, this study suggests applying more attention to website designs for different levels or regions of governments and building alternative communication channels for citizens with different backgrounds. Consequently, providing citizens' most-requested services becomes easier, and the resources' distribution becomes effective and efficient for those in different geographical locations. This study's findings represent a reference for providing better electronic publically accessible services, and a benchmark for scholars conducting further research in this area.

Introduction

The importance of the internet for communication between the government and the public has been growing (Miranda, Sanguino, & Banegil, 2009). Since the initial proposal of the concept for e-government, numerous researchers focused on relevant issues. In the subject areas of policy-making, strategic planning, success factors for implementation, and system development, researchers have mainly discussed theories for e-government and proposed insightful suggestions. However, most prior studies utilized qualitative research methods in general and emphasized theoretical reinforcement without attention to practical applications (Heeks & Bailur, 2007).

The studies exploring the issues related to the development of e-governmental systems have become increasingly important since people's use of e-governmental systems is more common (Shan, Wang, Wang, Hao, & Hua, 2011). For example, every administrative agency or unit in Taiwan already has its own website. Taiwanese people's lives currently appear to be typically more convenient than before due to some well-developed web services. Since the web services have become more popular in Taiwan, city and county governments are accessible, on-demand, and available to serve local populations. To this end, an imperative is assessing the development of systems for e-government. However, Taiwanese counties' and cities' e-governmental services differ greatly from each other in terms of developmental levels and quality due to the influences of geography or populations' environments. Cardo and Williams (2004) indicated that the studies assessing effectiveness and efficiency of e-governmental systems are relatively rare.

To compensate for the gaps in assessing effectiveness and efficiency, the purpose of the current study is to evaluate Taiwan's e-governmental services by measuring both city- and county-level websites according to their electronic performances. The degree of success of Taiwanese e-government services, relating to effectiveness and efficiency, can become a reference-point for practical operation and implementation by governmental agencies in other countries and for scholarly studies in the future.

Section snippets

e-Government

e-Government began to receive attention and rapid development when the internet began to commercialization in the 1990s. With the development of more and more web-based technologies, governments of emerging economies (in eastern countries especially) quickly adopted the new methods for improving levels of service to become comparable with other western or more developed countries, and importantly, for providing better and more extensive services. Taking advantage of the electronic processes,

Research method

To achieve this study's purposes, the effectiveness and efficiency of domestic or regional governments' websites in Taiwan, including all city- and county-level agencies and units, require careful investigation. This study regards the website as the Taiwanese government's developmental end-product, since the major bridge connecting the government to the public is still “the website,” according to the literature. Notably, this study only focuses on the level of electronic use for discussion and

Effectiveness of Taiwanese e-governments' web services

This study first carefully investigates the websites of 1411 governmental units to calculate the scores obtained according to each city- and county-level government for 12 assessment items (Appendix A), thereby obtaining an overall ranking. This study also uses horizontal bar charts to display the different levels of effectiveness of governments' performances in different regions according to five criteria, excluding DA and IY for some items with different measurement units. Then, as a weather

Website design

In terms of effectiveness, according to scores, this study finds that websites designed by Taiwanese regional governments in J- and S-cities and K-county occupy the top three places. The rankings provide better overall understanding of governmental websites' functions and completeness. For example, websites' designs can include specific features, such as barrier-free access, children's version, linguistic options for foreigners, and business portals. The website should also include electronic

Conclusions

This study has respectively presented the assessment methods and analysis results of all Taiwanese regional governments' effectiveness and efficiency for providing web services. To determine the effectiveness, the revised GES indicator, including five criteria (12 assessment items) is appropriate. The efficiency scores, obtained by conducting DEA after selecting appropriate variables for inputs and outputs results in exposing that cities' governments in the northern regions or among larger

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P. H. Hsieh received her Ph.D. degree in the Instructional Systems program, Pennsylvania State University — University Park, State College, PA. She also received two master degrees in the Educational Administration (M.S.), National Chengchi University (geographically located in the northern Taiwan), and then the Learning Technologies program (M.A.), University of Michigan — Ann Arbor, MI. She is currently the faculty member of the Department of Industrial and Information Management and the Institute of Information Management at the AACSB-accredited College of Management, National Cheng Kung University (NCKU, geographically located in the southern Taiwan). Her research interests are e-learning and its applications. Every academic year at the NCKU, she offers two undergraduate-level technical courses, Introduction to Computer Science, specifically C++, and Windows Software Design, specifically Flash, and two English-lecture graduate-level core courses, Information Ethics and Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation. In addition, she leads two research projects funded by the National Science Council every year, and since 2010 she begins to conduct the Industry–University Cooperative Research funded by the Institute for Information Industry. Dr. Hsieh has published many journal articles, conference papers and book chapters. She is also the reviewer of several academic journals, including SSCI-index ones. She is the active member of the AIS (Association for Information Systems) and Taiwan AIS, and the CSIM lifelong member (Chinese Society for Information Management). She has served as the academic exchange contact window of the NCKU Office of the International Affairs, the review committee of the NCKU Exchange Student Program, and the international academic exchange committee of the College of Management for more than two years.

C. S. Huang is currently serving in the armed forces in Taiwan. He received his M.S. degree in the Institute of Industrial Management at the National Cheng Kung University (NCKU). His research interests are in the field of finance and investments, with a special focus on statistics. His bachelor's degree was obtained from the Department of Finance at the Chihlee Institute of Technology (geographically located in the northern Taiwan).

David C. Yen is currently the Raymond E. Glos Professor in Business and Professor of MIS of the Department of Decision Sciences and Management Information Systems at Miami University. He assumed the position of Raymond E. Glos Professor in Business from 2005 to 2007, and he served as department chair from 1995 to 2005. After receiving his PhD in MIS and MS in Computer Sciences in 1985, professor Yen has been active in research. He has published books and articles which have appeared in Communications of the ACM, Decision Support Systems, Information & Management, Information Sciences, Computer Standards and Interfaces, Information Society, Omega, International Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, and Communications of AIS among others. Professor Yen's research interests include data communications, electronic/mobile commerce, and systems analysis and design.

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View full text

Assessing web services of emerging economies in an Eastern country — Taiwan's e-government

Highlights

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

e-Government

Research method

Effectiveness of Taiwanese e-governments' web services

Website design

Conclusions

European Journal of Operational Research

Government Information Quarterly

Government Information Quarterly

Government Information Quarterly

Some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis

Management Science

Models and metrics for evaluating local electronic government systems and services

Electronic Journal of e-Government

Bringing e-democracy back in: Why it matters for future research on e-governance

Social Science Computer Review

Principle of web design

The measurement of productive efficiency

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General)

From red tape to results: Creating a government that works better and costs less: Report of the national performance review