Public Value and E-Government

This paper calls for new ways of defining and evaluating e-government. Too many people discuss e-government as if it meant nothing more than putting services online. Important activity, such as the use of ICT by teachers in the classroom or the use of ICT on the ward or in the GPs surgery escapes their attention. Similarly, much evaluation work on e-government turns up little of relevance for key policy issues and debates. The problem here is not simply that our evaluation frameworks are not good enough or not deployed often enough. It is that the things we choose to measure are not things which demonstrate the relevance of e-government to all those who care passionately about the future of the public services.