icegov2012 proceedings

E-Government Portals in Central America: A Preliminary
Evaluation and Ranking (2011-2012)
Rodrigo Sandoval-Almazan
Universidad Autónoma del
Estado de México
rsandovala@uaemex.mx
ABSTRACT
Developing e-government strategies and particularly Internet
portals could be considered an important trend for public
administrations worldwide. These government-wide websites
could potentially provide useful information and services and, at
the same time, become the gateways for citizen participation and
collaboration with government. However, the development of
these tools and their potential impacts are not the same for
developed and developing countries and there is not enough
research about less developed nations. This paper applies a
multi-dimensional evaluation model to the national portals of
Central American countries (2011-2012) and starts providing
some of the necessary knowledge about this particular reality.
The model was first used in 2005 for evaluating Mexican state
portals and has been systematically refined during the last 7
years. The results clearly identify important gaps and
opportunities for improvement in most Central American
countries.
General Terms
Measurement, Performance, Reliability, Human Factors,
Standardization, Theory, Legal Aspects, Verification
Keywords
Central America, e-government portals, metrics, e-government,
assessment
1. INTRODUCTION
E-government has become an important strategy for
governments around the world. E-government implementation
has reached all levels of government. However the development
and potential impacts of these tools and applications have not
happened equally in all countries. For instance, Central
American nations have lower levels of interaction with ICT and
technology caused by infrastructure limitations, budget
limitations or lack of knowledge about these technologies
[23][8]. The problem of e-government implementation has been
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ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
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J. Ramon Gil-Garcia
Centro de Investigación y Docencia
Económicas
joseramon.gil@cide.edu
426
Nancy Karina Saucedo Leyva
Universidad Autónoma del
Estado de México
nancykarinasl@hotmail.com
studied in several ways, from the e-readiness perspective to the
ranking or evaluation of several issues – e-participation,
interoperability or organizational – leading this to an egovernment
divide, that reflects e-government gaps among the
countries of a region [3]. On the other hand, Central American
countries are the ones that need the most the advantages of egovernment
technologies in order to share information,
collaborate with other countries, save costs, and improve their
organizational capabilities on issues such as border control,
terrorism, migration, and drug trafficking. This transnational
information sharing is another e-government trend that will be
achieve in other countries, pushing the Central America region
to achieve this challenge [24][16].
A new kind of electronic governance is reaching the Latin
American region and several scholars are now doing research on
the institutional impact of e-government [13], as well as on the
adoption of e-government [10] on some Latin American
countries such as Mexico, Argentina, Dominican Republic, and
Brazil, among others [7][14]. However, there is not enough
research to measure and evaluate e-government in Central
American nations, and to provide practical recommendations to
improve these countries’ level of e-government and the
functionality of their portals. This paper presents preliminary
results of an ongoing research that measures the national portals
of Central American countries using a multidimensional
evaluation model based on the evolutionary approach and
initially developed in 2005 for the Mexican e-government state
portals.
We evaluated the portals of Central American countries in 2011
and 2012 and this paper presents the preliminary results of this
assessment effort. The paper is divided in five sections,
including these introductory comments. Section two presents a
review of recent literature on assessment models and presents
some advantages and limitation of the evaluation model we
propose. Section three describes the research design and
methods for the two-year evaluation. Section four summarizes
the main findings and compares the results of 2011 and 2012.
Finally, section five provides ideas for future research and
highlights some practical recommendations for Central
American countries.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
State websites can be considered government-citizen
communication systems via a computer and the Internet [18].
There are different models that explain the processes of