An Approach to Assessing Quality of Electronic Government Services: The Case of an Urban Municipal Authority from India

Abstract

The emergence of e-Government in developing countries has led to the discovery of many innovative ways of public service delivery to citizens and businesses. India has chosen the common service center based service delivery model, where multiple services from single or multiple government agencies can be obtained in one location. However, the assessment quality of service at these centers, especially in comparison to the quality of service delivery under manually run operations has not been addressed in literature. In this paper, the authors propose and demonstrate a method to evaluate the quality of service at common service centers by exploring the case of an urban local body in India. Specifically, the paper uses the Analytic Hierarchy Method to assess quality improvements and discusses the implications for public managers.