Şi̇kayet Çöz: A Proposal for E-Governance

Organization Background

Although governance can be referred to as a more developed phase of participative democracy, it has various definitions. Governance is positioned as “mutual management” or “management interaction”. From this point of view, it is closely related to the development of autonomy and self management. Organization and management approach which dominated public administration in the past left its place productivity management approach which have targets such as total quality and customer satisfaction and which is based on participation of employees and stake holders. Besides services of public sector are seen as “services” which should be improved in quality. In this respect development of information and communication technologies increased the circulation capability of economic activities through global networks and facilitated a process which provides individuals with an option to obtain information and enrich their communication abilities and participate in the management process.

This process has led governments’ position themselves as institutions that provide citizens with quality services as part of management understanding. This positioning has become more suitable target to achieve through information and communication technologies which played a key role in the global development. In this respect development of information and communication technologies especially the global communication network called as “Internet” have helped rise of a new model which improves governance process, increase the effectiveness and productivity of public administration and provide new opportunities for participative and effective democracy. The name of this model is e-governance. Definition of e-governance include relations among state sector and public, state sector and sectors related to economic activities, non-profit organizations called as third sector and non-governmental organizations (Durna & Özel, 2008). Non-governmental organizations (NGO) are institutions through which individuals come together to pursue shared goals, they disagree on how to classify these actors and their actions (Lewis & Wallace, 2000: Vakil, 1997) and on how to identify core questions to systematically study them (Johnson & Prakash, 2007). Non-govermantal organizations aim for the participation of citizens into the e-governance framework.

E-governance must be responsive to the needs of citizens (Chen, Huang & Hsiao, 2002). Citizen participation is a means to reveal their collective preference to ensure that citizens’ needs are appropriately matched by government services and the service quality is satisfactory (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992). Among citizens’ participation initiatives employed by local governments in western democracies, the citizen complaints mechanism such as ombudsman in Europe is one of the most common practices (Cadeddu, 2004). In developing countries, the establishment of complaint line is considered cost (Chen, Huang & Hsiao, 2002). For this reason, it is not contained within e-government or e-governance. Whereas complaints handling increase emphasis of customer relationship management for public sectors (Hewson Consulting Group, 2002). Complaints system provides an opportunity for every segment of society to access the government easily. If the citizen conveys his complaint easily and quickly, the government will be informed of the problems more quickly (Chen, Huang & Hsiao, 2006). Actually a complaint basically indicates words of displeasure in verbal or written communication (Barlow & Moller, 1996). Customer complaints demonstrate dissatisfaction of customers implying that the service or goods provided do not meet their expectations. In fact, a customer complaint also implies that something is wrong (Stauss, 2002). Most customers buy a product or service and pay some amount of money. In return, they expect to get a value (functional, social, emotional etc.). They make a complaint when they are not satisfied.