Benchmarking of local e-government services and its applicability to smart city services

E-government is generally described as the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in government processes. The potential of ICT to transform governmental organizations into more efficient, accessible and accountable ones is widely recognized. Taking into account that according to EUROSTAT, the total EU28 public sector expenditure in 2014 represented 48.1% of its GDP, and that this percentage was 49.0% for the EA-19, the economic impact of such a transformation is of capital importance for economic growth. All national governments, nearly all subnational governments, and most local governments of any size are adopting and expanding innovative means of delivering government information and service by means of a quick technology adoption process. This is a transformation characterized by intensive ICT use and adoption of new organizational paradigms. But in addition to changes in internal processes, e-government impacts the relationship with citizens, which is shifting towards “one-stop-shops” supported by a more intelligent organization able to know who the citizen is and what the citizen's needs are in each case. In other words, public organizations are reforming themselves to be more proactive and provide services to citizens more efficiently. Putting the focus at local level public government agencies, it can be seen that cities and municipalities develop an important number of functions related to urban management such as traffic, public transport, the environment, cleaning, garbage collection, street lighting, culture, education, welfare, crime control and civil protection among others. In some countries, cities are also responsible for providing basic services such as water, gas and electricity. All these specific functions are not found at other levels of government and therefore introduce special features to local e-government. At present, the way cities are managed and developed is starting to transform dramatically thanks to the intensive application of ICT, leading to what is known as the smart city phenomenon. New developments and technologies, derived from the introduction of sensor elements and the collection and processing of large amounts of data, are improving or even “reinventing” functions directly related to the provision and management of urban services. At the same time, this transformation aims to reduce the environmental impact of city activities. Measuring e-government progress is of capital importance to manage public resources, shorter the transition to achieve a successful end. However, a review of the most recent papers published reveals a lack of academic literature and scientific reports devoted to the evaluation of e-administration at city level. There are no methodologies to perform international benchmarking of e-administration tailored to local government specificities. There are no common references established to compare the quality of public services in different cities. Therefore, it remains hard to learn from others’ experiences around the world. The aim of this PhD thesis is to contribute to a better knowledge of the local e-government phenomena by designing and implementing a benchmarking methodology. The methodology proposed is oriented to perform local e-government benchmarking at international level, based on the e-services provided by local administrations. It promotes the learning aspects of a comparative evaluation instead of the competition among participant cities. After a detailed review of the state of the art in local e-Government benchmarking, the research deals with a bottom-up process to define the benchmarking methodology which groups meaningfully services taking into account prevalence. Special attention has been paid to the adoption measurement, as it is crucial to evaluate the actual impact of electronic public services. This methodology is applied in a European measurement, and the results are discussed. The impact of such benchmarking is assessed four years afterwards by means of a survey. The feedback received confirms the utility of such benchmarking, at the same time, it provides information for improvements of the methodology and shows the need to update the catalogue of services. Finally, the research explores the extensions required to allow benchmarking the new generation of smart city services, thus paving the way for its applicability in a Smart City context.