Description (short summary):
A new methodology to benchmark electronic service provision and adoption in local public administration is introduced in this thesis in the framework of eGovernment research and compared with existing ones. This methodology was tested in a first benchmarking survey, led by the research report author, carried out in 2008 with a sample of 15 European cities, whose results are also discussed.

The main innovations of this methodology are the addition of adoption, beyond provision; an extension of the Baum and Di Maio stages model of eGovernment with a "web 2.0" stage; a bottom-up services categorisation more suitable to local administrations; and a results presentation based on charts where cities are placed with respect to averages.

The survey focus on local administration is novel, and thus the results themselves. The need of more extensive surveys (of local eGovernment especially) is revealed, as they will provide more reliable data and allow deeper and more refined analyses. Measuring adoption remains a research challenge; the hypothesis formulation, data analysis and visualisation of the results should be improved for these more extensive surveys, and new scores should be introduced to facilitate temporal comparisons in the future.

Number of pages: 152

Nature of documentation: Thesis