Assessing e-government implementations

Since the mid-1990s, governments around the world have been taking extraordinary efforts to make services and information available over the web. E-government implementations have been helping to improve service delivery and offer greater transparency and accountability in governance systems. Few studies such as the e-Europe benchmarking project, the UN study of benchmarking government, the Brown University Study and the Accenture study of e-government benchmarking have ranked countries for e-government implementation. Many of these benchmarking studies are media hype usually branding "Country X lags behind in e-government" or "Country Y takes lead in international e-government race". These studies do not account for many important measures of e-government implementations that are significant in the full scope of an e-government framework. This paper provides a critique of these benchmarking studies and presents an e-government framework that could provide guidelines for comprehensive measures to assess e-participation and e-democracy in e-government implementation.