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Standards set for global government services

Governments in Turkey, Qatar and Lebanon have benefited from a tool that evaluates the way they deliver their online services for citizens.

Brunel Business School helped design the eGovernment evaluation standards with the perspective of the citizens of the countries in mind.

It is this approach that has led to a more complete approach to eGovernment evaluation, raising satisfaction levels among users.

The research was conducted as part of the European Union-funded CEES (Citizen-Oriented Evaluation of e-government Services) project for benchmarking eGovernment services globally, carried out between April 2009 and March 2013.

Prof Zahir Irani, Dr Habin Lee, Dr Vishanth Weerakkody and Dr Aggeliki Tsohou contributed to the project for Brunel, along with partners at the American University of Beirut and Turksat.

The outcome is a citizen-oriented model of evaluation called COBRA (Cost, Opportunity, Benefit, Risk Analysis). Initially used to evaluate Turkey’s eGovernment function, contributing to an increase in the country’s citizen satisfaction index from 65.5 in 2010 to 66.18 in 2011, the framework has since been applied to Qatar, Lebanon and the UK.

More recently, an Estonian research team has used the COBRA framework to evaluate their own eGovernment services and researchers will be looking for opportunities to reach other governments across the world.