Evaluation of government services delivery on New Zealand city council websites

Abstract

At the time of New Zealand E-government Strategy 2007 milestone, this research project addresses the need for research into New Zealand local e-government. It intends to provide some first-hand and up-to-date findings to reveal the breadth and depth of services delivery on sixteen New Zealand city council websites, and test existing e-government theories, including e-government stage model and the relationship between city size and e-government capacity. Content Analysis is employed to assess the sixteen city council websites. A standard list of council services is established to count the number of services on each council's website against. A set of criteria with regard to "information delivery" and "transaction delivery" is also developed to quantify each city's online presence. The finding for 'breadth of services delivery' shows that, as a whole, the New Zealand city councils are providing a reasonably wide coverage of services on their websites. The disparity in the quantity of the 30 services examined in this research is not great among the councils. The statistical test does not confirm that the coverage of services is related to the city population. The finding for 'depth of services delivery' shows that, the cities have performed significantly better for the information delivery of services than for the transaction delivery, which indicates that a distinction does exist between the two hypothetical stages - catalogue stage and transaction stage - proposed in the e-government stage model theories. New Zealand city councils have generally gone through the catalogue stage of the e-government. However, it would be too optimistic to say they have passed the transaction stage as well. The movement from the e-government lower stage to the higher stage is dynamic and is imbalanced across the cities. Statistical tests have not confirmed that a city's capacity for information and transaction delivery is positively correlated. However, the positive relationship does exist between the city population and the depth of services delivery, both for information and for transaction delivery. Other issues raised include: Many websites are still facing the basic website design and navigability issues. The websites should have a systematic strategy to implement its delivery of services and learn from 'best practices' from other websites. Agreement on some fundamental issues relating to 'services' should be made among the councils. As a whole, attention needs to be paid to how to collaborate more effectively across local government authorities in delivery services on the Internet, especially in the absence of a direct 'authority' in this sector.