This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Web of Science (1) Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Bannister, F. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

The curse of the benchmark: an assessment of the validity and value of e-government comparisons

Department of Statistics in Trinity College, Dublin

Benchmarking of e-government and the information society is a booming business. This phenomenon raises several interesting questions. Why does this particular part of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) world receive so much of this type of attention? Why are there so many benchmarks? What do they purport to measure? Who reads these and how much credence is given to them? Do they play a valuable role in advancing e-government and e-society or is their impact actually negative? This article looks at these and a number of related questions including the degree of consistency between different benchmarks, trends over time and the importance or otherwise that governments place on these reports. From this, some tentative theories about the role of benchmarking, the pressures that benchmarks place on public managers and their significance are proposed and some limitations of benchmarks are identified and discussed.

Key Words: e-government, evaluation • ICT • information society measurement • on-line services • public administration

International Review of Administrative Sciences, Vol. 73, No. 2, 171-188 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0020852307077959


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?