Service Quality in E-Government Portals

In recent years, e-government seems to become a driver of the government modernization in the world. According to Ronaghan (2002) and Musgrave (2004), the use of computers and ICT by government departments becomes a significant part of the service delivery mechanism, and egovernment programs remain at the top of most countries policy agendas. Enthusiasm for e-government may be justified by its widely recognized potential to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of public services (Ancarani, 2005; Buckley, 2003; Ronaghan, 2002). E-government may connect dispersed and disparate systems to give access to information and work to common service level delivery through a gateway portal, which provides information to users and supports one-stop transactions through a single point of contact, avoiding the need for dealing directly with different government agencies (Kaaya, 2004, Musgrave, 2004). For example, the Tunisian national government portal (www. bawaba.gov.tn) has links to ministries having Web sites and to postal e-services. Portals allow better online service delivery by facilitating ease of access to information and services and reducing costs of services provision. Nevertheless, only a well-composed portal can add substantial value and signal important potential benefits to consumers (Van Riel & Ouwersloot, 2005), leading to better service quality. Several studies attempted to identify service quality attributes in online service environments (Cai & Jun, 2003; O’Neil, Wright, & Fitz, 2001; Tan, Xie, & Li, 2003), but they seem to focus on private organizations (Buckley, 2003). In fact, in the context of public organizations, less concern is given to service quality (Buckley, 2003), and research on eservices quality in public area is still in its infancy (Ancarani, 2005; Barnes & Vidgen, 2004; Buckley, 2003). This article proposes, at a first time, an overview of works on e-government portals and e-service quality in both private and public sector. At a second time, authors will identify, using the cited works, dimensions, and items to measure eservice quality in the case of e-government portals.