KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS FOR E-GOVERNMENT: METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH TO INDICATOR DEVELOPMENT

It is often assumed that modern information technology (IT) is a source of performance improvement. Empirical research has not univocally confirmed this assumption, since complex, extensive and resource demanding IT tools require extensive organizational restructuring, in order to be properly and successfully implemented. This generates the need to create and use business intelligence and key performance indicators (KPI) to obtain a high quality basis for making decisions in real time. In this paper, authors analyze the existence of a potential relationship between the methodological approach to defining business intelligence (BI)-related KPIs and achieving business process performance, as well as the overall organizational performance. The methodological determinants of the process, in which the KPIs are defined, are empirically analyzed and associated with the two discussed aspects of performance. The empirical analysis is conducted for the case of e-government development, with the special emphasis on countries from Central, East and South-East Europe. The E-Government development is measured by two KPIs, which have been defined, by strictly following the recommended BI methodology. The two KPIs are related to a business process, performed by the public administration, which can be greatly facilitated by the introduction of E-Government. This is the process of opening a new enterprise, which can be also viewed as one of key measures of the national economic and entrepreneurial development. The public administration performance in serving the needs of new entrepreneurs for company registration is, therefore, considered in terms of E-Government performance. Two KPIs used measure the procedural complexity and costs for opening a new enterprise in a sample, consisting of 28 European Union member-states. The statistical analysis uses secondary data, available from the official Eurostat Web pages. The empirical results confirm the existence of the hypothesized relationship between the methodological procedures for developing KPIs and the process performance, which affirms the need to develop both E-Government, as well as other processes in public administration, by using solid planning and methodological approaches.