To Örebro University

This literature review looks at research conducted on the phenomenon of benchmarking e-government during the years 2003 to 2016 and entails 27 articles. The review shows how this field has changed over time, its main findings and what the potential benefits are for the public sector in using the results from benchmarks. The findings reveal how initial research created taxonomies of benchmarks and criticised them for being too focused on measuring online services. This research was followed by even more criticism on how benchmarks can have a negative impact on e-government policy and development. During the same time-period there is research giving methodological support on how to improve ways of benchmarking. Later research offer theoretically and conceptually informed critique of benchmark-studies. The review finds that there are mainly implicit assumptions about the potential benefits in using benchmarks for improving e-government. The article concludes by discussing the implications of the findings in terms of the lack of context and relevance in benchmarks for e-government in relationship to the nature of public administration and makes suggestions for ways forward.

Based on the perspective of e-government practitioners at a government agency in Sweden, this article analyses the design-process with the aim of unearthing the design-principles of a Digital Index (DI). The DI is developed to address challenges of how to: understand; appraise; learn from and develop e-government – by combining digital technologies with the context of public administration. This study applies a design-science research method and analyses the initial steps of the design-process: awareness of the problem, suggestion, and development. The results show how the abstract artefact – the DI – is constructed and how it is based on three main design-principles. Firstly e-government should be contextualised with the nature of public administration – which means relating digital technologies vis-a-vis core-businesses of a public authority. Secondly: digital technologies support administrative processes and must be premised on the classification of information and law. Thirdly, apply a process view of e-government that highlights the relationship between internal administrative procedures, the interaction with citizens/companies and the sharing of government data. The discussion highlights how the DI is relevant for research on e-government by offering some concrete as well as general perspectives on how to combine e-government and public administration.