*** Democracies Online Newswire - http://www.e-democracy.org/do *** Linked from: http://www.nasire.org/publications/index.cfm Preliminary Survey of the Digital Government Landscape (April 2000) Based on the results of a recent NASIRE survey of state chief information officers, this report examines the status of government web portals in the states. States reported on such topics as CIO authority over portals, access for citizens with technology and disability concerns, and other barriers to implenting digital government. Download this publication [40kb PDF file] >From the July ISOC Members Newsletter: * NEW ZEALAND BUDGET BOOSTS E-GOVERNMENT RESOURCES Plans to improve New Zealand's e-government and e-commerce structures received a boost in the country's most recent budget. Finance Minister Michael Cullen, who announced the new funding, said that it was important for all government information and services to be made available online. But Commerce Minister Paul Swain said that leadership and the vision to develop a strategy are more important than large sums of money. The budget news comes in the same week as a Deloitte Consulting report suggesting that New Zealand is about two years behind Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada in developing an e-commerce focus. The report says that New Zealand lags in providing government information and services on the Internet and should adopt a more customer-focused approach. This corresponds with findings in a Victoria University study that found that less that half the people visiting government Web sites managed to find what they were looking for. The Deloitte report concluded that a central agency needs to take responsibility across all governmental sites. For more information see http://nz.internet.com/article.jsp?sid=632903 (16 June 2000) ($38 million NZ dollars - SLC) >From the article above: http://www.scim.vuw.ac.nz/Research/govtonline/press_release.html (Every major regional and state government of the world should fund similar independent surveys and reviews of their public online activity. With the Internet moving from its fourth to fifth generation of sites, most governments have struggle to get to the second generation type of site working (database driven with some transactions versus flat HTML in generation one) - a review would help generate a citizen/consumer demand functions because unprofitability and customer loss isn't a measure that works well with government. - SLC) clip ... Victoria University researchers recently completed a year-long study of government web sites. The project 'Democracy on-line' involved an independent assessment of 52 of the main government web sites using well established international criteria, and a user survey that captured 648 responses to 24 of these sites over a period of 4-6 months in the second half of 1999. The project was carried out by Rowena Cullen of the School of Communications and Information Management and research assistants David ten Have and Caroline Houghton. In the first part of the study independent evaluators rated the sites on 34 aspects of quality used to assess government web sites in the international literature. These cover how well the user is oriented to the site; how well information is organised and communicated; the services offered; liability, copyright and privacy issues; the quality of links and feedback mechanisms; design; and navigability. An important criterion was the ability of users with lower level web browsers to access the site and all of its contents. clip ... Visitors to 24 of the government sites under study were invited to participate in a survey, and fill in a questionnaire which was linked to the site. Nearly seven hundred people did so. One key finding to come out of the survey is that although 94% of visitors to the sites approached a site with a specific purpose in mind, less than half were able to fulfil this purpose. On some sites this figure is as low as 20%. This is reflected in the lacklustre satisfaction rates returned by users. Overall, sites were rated by all users between 2.11 and 2.5 on a range of quality indicators such as usefulness of content, content accurate and up-to-date, navigability, links and services robust, etc. This rating was on a Likert scale of 1-5 where 1 is a very positive score and 3 neutral. ^ ^ ^ ^ Steven L. Clift - W: http://www.publicus.net Minneapolis - - - E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota - - - - - T: +1.612.822.8667 USA - - - - - - - ICQ: 13789183 *** Please send submissions to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** To subscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** Message body: SUB DO-WIRE *** *** To unsubscribe instead, write: UNSUB DO-WIRE *** *** Please forward this post to others and encourage *** *** them to subscribe to the free DO-WIRE service. ***
