EVALUATING THE PUBLIC VALUE OF E-GOVERNMENT SERVICES: ACTOR NETWORK THEORY APPROACH
Abstract
Government all over the world are working on a broad array of e-services, re-designing
services as diverse as tax filing, applying and registering for social security, obtaining birth
and marriage certificates, procurement for business, government transactions and customs
declaration (Kotamraju & van der Geest, 2012). Studies have shown that different
stakeholders benefits from e-government services. However, through objectively evaluating
e-government services, the benefits between citizens and governments can be successfully
understood and improving areas correctly identified. Recently, researchers have shown
interest in IS evaluation and the public value perspective segment taking the lead. This is in
support of the view that the prime objective of e-government is to produce public value
through effective use of ICT (Moore, 1995; Qiang, 2010). Also, research in the field of IS
evaluation has begun to recognize the need for grounding evaluation approaches and studies
in the ontology and epistemology of relevant paradigms (Lagsten, 2011). The main aim of
this article is to develop a understanding of evaluation of the public value of e-government
services using Actor-Network Theory (ANT) perspective. This research mainly focus on two
aspects: studying the concept of public value and how it is relevant in evaluating egovernment
services and using ANT, to conceptualise the evaluation of public value of egovernment
services, that is, using ANT as an ontological foundation to anaylse the relations
among actors in evaluating the public value of e-government services.