for Local Governments

2.4.4.4 Back office
The term “back office” refers to the internal operations of an organization that support
core processes and are not accessible or visible to the general public. The implementation
of e-government goes hand-in-hand with a number of back office reforms.
On the one hand, e-government will help bringing these reforms, while, on the other
hand, e-government requires such reforms in order to be successful.
2.5 Benchmarking
For strategy and action planning reasons, it is important to know what the ICT situation of
the municipality is like. Providing local eGovernment services extends simple availability
of public services in electronic form. There is no use in delivering eGovernment services if
these are not used or do not deliver the expected benefits to users. The end results must
reflect the outcome they deliver for citizens, businesses and government itself. This outcome
proves itself through usage, delivery of relevant high impact services, convenience,
and time- efficiency gains. A recent study by T.E.Wohlers[40] shows that local e-government
sophistication increases for municipalities governed by professional managers, endowed
with more organizational resources, characterized by higher socioeconomic levels,
and increasing population size.
One example of an assessment that balances efficient administrations with responsive democracy
is the BEGIX (Balanced e-Government Index) [24] tool focused on measuring ‘balanced
e-government’ by combining electronic and participatory services.
The self-evaluation tool BEGIX (Balanced E-Governance Index) is based on the concept of
balanced e-government, according to which a “correct” e-government is a balanced combination
of electronic services and forms of electronic participation that is developed within
change management framework. The concept was developed in the course of a benchmarking
survey carried out by Bertelsmann Foundation and BoozAllenHamilton.
The balanced e-government scorecard serves in the recording and evaluation of various
dimensions of e-democracy and e-government services, as can be seen from Figure 5.
Figure 5:
Balanced e-Government
Scorecard
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