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This paper aims to introduce a European project CEES to develop a standard for the evaluation of Electronic Government (e‐Government) services from a citizen satisfaction perspective.

The aim, objectives, methodology, and deliverables of the project CEES are detailed. Furthermore, the challenges of the development of a reference process model in different countries are addressed and academic and practical implications of the project for the citizen‐oriented evaluation of e‐Government services are discussed.

A reference process model for the evaluation of e‐Government services from a citizens' perspective receives strong support from experiences in other similar areas such as software process and information systems governance. The reference model needs to overcome such challenges as the differences in culture, the maturity of e‐Government systems, and citizens‐government relationships.

The research is expected to trigger international collaboration to develop international standards for the evaluation of e‐Government services.

The paper contributes to the literature by enriching the views on e‐Government services and their evaluation via introducing a reference model concept. The CEES project will be the first attempt to apply the reference model concept in the information systems evaluation domain. Despite the wide adoption of reference models in software process, software design, and business process automation, the concept is yet to be applied to the IS evaluation domain.

This paper aims to gauge the feasibility of workflow technology as a potential solution to facilitating citizen participation in policy‐making processes. The gaps in and future direction of a current workflow models to be used to automate policy‐making processes are to be discussed.

A thorough review on the principles and philosophies of policy‐making processes and process models is performed to extract the core constructs of the processes. This follows critical analysis of existing workflow models to identify gaps of the models to be used to support policy‐making processes. An e‐participation perspective is also taken to identify additional modelling constructs that are required when a large number of citizens is involved in a workflow task for opinion gathering.

While workflow technology has been adopted in the public sector, the use of the technology is mostly limited to supporting administrative business processes, leaving the potential to automate policy‐making processes. There are some studies that take a life‐cycle approach for policy making and they can be the starting‐point of applying workflow technology to policy‐making process automation. The application of workflow technology to policy‐making processes is expected to facilitate the participation of citizens in these processes through the automatic delivery of relevant policy issues into citizens' lives. A new type of workflow model is required to reflect factors specific to the public sector, including rules for role resolution, considering large‐scale citizen participation and modelling constructs to penetrate into citizens' everyday lives for proactive stimulation for e‐participation.

The analysis is based on a literature review, and empirical data collection could complement the analysis results of the paper. This is included in the future research agenda.

The findings provide policy makers with a stimulus for adopting workflow technology in the public sector. Gap analysis and future directions of a workflow model for policy‐making processes are expected to be informative for any practitioners who are intending to develop workflow management systems in the public sector.

This paper is one of the first efforts to gauge the potential of using workflow technology from an e‐participation perspective to engage a wide spectrum of stakeholders, including citizens, in policy‐making processes.

This paper aims to investigate any cultural impacts on end‐users' web page design in weblogs.

The design preferences of 201 weblogs in Malaysia have been collected using content analysis method and the existence of Malaysian cultural traits on the web pages tested.

The results confirm that there is no cultural impact on weblog designs, which is contrary to existing studies that reported cultural traits in static web page design. This paper concludes by suggesting the increased social interaction among webloggers as one of reasons of weakened cultural impacts in weblog design behaviour.

Culture has been considered as one of major factors that affect the design behaviour of static web pages which mostly support one‐way interaction between information providers and information consumers. On the other hand, the recent adoption of Web 2.0 technology enabled bi‐directional interaction between information providers and consumers and it is not known if there is still a strong cultural impact on web page design based on this new technology.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the research design, methodologies and approaches utilised in electronic government (e‐government) research studies published in the last decade (2000‐2012).

A profiling approach is employed to analyse 114 (out of 3,934 from 2000 to 2012) e‐government publications (with specific focus on user satisfaction) including examining variables such as country of research, sample size, type(s) of respondents, data collection methods, and statistical tools and techniques employed.

Among the research design, methodologies and approaches adopted in the extant e‐government research studies, the quantitative research based approach supported by statistical analysis was the most dominant approach applied by authors in the last decade. Few studies were found to use qualitative‐based approaches such as case studies and interviews.

The prime value and uniqueness of this research lies in presenting the type of research design, methodologies and approaches used in studies that focus on issues surrounding user satisfaction in e‐government research. This has been achieved by synthesising existing publications in Electronic Government: An International Journal (EG), Electronic Journal of Electronic Government (EJEG), International Journal of Electronic Government Research (EJEGR), Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy (TG:PPP), Government Information Quarterly (GIQ), Public Administration Review (PAR), Public Administration: An International Quarterly (PA), Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART), and Local Government Studies (LGS).

The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze challenges and to discuss proposed solutions for innovative public governance through cloud computing. Innovative technologies, such as federation of services and cloud computing, can greatly contribute to the provision of e-government services, through scaleable and flexible systems. Furthermore, they can facilitate in reducing costs and overcoming public information segmentation. Nonetheless, when public agencies use these technologies, they encounter several associated organizational and technical changes, as well as significant challenges.

We followed a multidisciplinary perspective (social, behavioral, business and technical) and conducted a conceptual analysis for analyzing the associated challenges. We conducted focus group interviews in two countries for evaluating the performance models that resulted from the conceptual analysis.

This study identifies and analyzes several challenges that may emerge while adopting innovative technologies for public governance and e-government services. Furthermore, it presents suggested solutions deriving from the experience of designing a related platform for public governance, including issues of privacy requirements, proposed business models and key performance indicators for public services on cloud computing.

The challenges and solutions discussed are based on the experience gained by designing one platform. However, we rely on issues and challenges collected from four countries.

The identification of challenges for innovative design of e-government services through a central portal in Europe and using service federation is expected to inform practitioners in different roles about significant changes across multiple levels that are implied and may accelerate the challenges' resolution.

This is the first study that discusses from multiple perspectives and through empirical investigation the challenges to realize public governance through innovative technologies. The results emerge from an actual portal that will function at a European level.

Evaluating and optimizing e‐government services is imperative for governments especially due to the capacity of e‐services to transform public administrations and assist the interactions of governments with citizens, businesses and other government agencies. Existing widely applied evaluation approaches neglect to incorporate citizens' satisfaction measures. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to contribute to the understanding of citizen‐centric e‐government evaluation and unify existing key performance indicators (KPIs); and to propose a reference process model of a novel evaluation approach that uses the unified KPIs to facilitate the creation of a “know‐how” repository.

The authors adopt a quantitative research approach for the evaluation of e‐government services that is based on data envelope analysis (DEA). A survey was conducted for the empirical investigation and data were collected from 13 e‐government services in Turkey. Based on the empirical application of the e‐government evaluation method, a reference process model is designed.

The proposed evaluation method was proved valid and able to provide assessment with richer explanations than traditional statistical measurements. DEA enabled the identification of insufficient e‐government services and the provision of suggested improvements.

The reference process model is constructed based on the experience gained by applying the method to a sole cultural setting;, i.e. e‐government services in Turkey.

The proposed evaluation method, in comparison to other user‐oriented ones, provided assessments with richer explanations than traditional statistical measurements, such as structured equation modelling. The reference process model constructed based on the empirical research is expected to accelerate the citizen‐oriented evaluation of e‐government and promote impact‐oriented indicators.

This is the first application of DEA in the e‐government field, although it has been widely applied for performance measurement in other fields, especially operations research. The novelty of DEA is that the assessment results provide suggestions for strategic improvement of the e‐services.