Designing a Model for Measuring e-Government Service Quality – The Case of Governmental Kiosks

In today's world, cyberspace and, of course, the communication and information system in the web platform is among the most popular categories. This category has attracted the attention of various private and public sectors for various reasons, including increased productivity, increased transparency, and increased serviceability. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to improve the quality of services in the field of e-government and thus increase the efficiency of government.

The proposed model incorporates the key measures of e-government service quality to achieve better reliability and user satisfaction of e-government services while keeping the recurring expenditure low. This model has been designed by Interpretive Structural Modeling and DEMATEL. The researchers have architected and engineered key factors of e-government service quality and have developed an integrated model and identified the interactions among those factors. The case of this paper is the governmental kiosks as one of the main sites for delivering service.

This research resulted in a model that indicates e-government service quality measurement indicators including customer confidence, efficiency, customer relationship, first time service, variety of services, service availability, service traceability, service support, interoperability, infrastructure, compensation, fit, compliance, quality assurance, and complaint management. Thus in the first step, the criteria were identified; in the second step, the criteria were categorized and designed by the opinion of experts; and finally, the intensity of the relationship among the criteria was determined to be aware of influence and effectiveness among them.

Design mechanisms to monitor advances in technology and e-government to improve the proposed model and update the model are the most important suggestions. Another suggestion is identifying the gap between the theoretical developed model and practice.

The implication of this study is to achieve improved quality and to reduce the cost from lack of knowledge of qualitative criteria, mapping key indicators within the framework of a scientific model to improve the quality of e-government services while missing key policymakers and practitioners. Implementing this model in practice can satisfy electronic service providers by applying a part of indicators such as efficiency, interoperability, and infrastructure and satisfy the receiver of services by another part of indicators such as quality assurance, first time service, and complaint management. As a result, if the model is fully implemented, it will satisfy both the service provider, and the customer.

 Reducing the gap between the people and the government and thus increasing public satisfaction is the most important achievement of this research. In addition, transparency, which is a very important issue, can be addressed in the context of the web. Thus, e-government can result in transparency and satisfaction.

 Because no established mapping model for governmental kiosks has been provided for effective, low-cost, high-quality e-government service systems, the proposed mapping model closes this gap and provides guidelines to evaluate e-government services. The paper provides appropriate tools both to practitioners and policymakers who work with information and communication systems.