Title: Evaluating the effect of e-government services on the citizens' quality of life: the case of Greece

Authors: Ourania I. Markaki, Dimitris E. Charilas, Yannis Charalabidis, Dimitris Askounis

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Heroon Polytechneiou 9, Zographou, Athens, 15773, Greece. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Heroon Polytechneiou 9, Zographou, Athens, 15773, Greece. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Heroon Polytechneiou 9, Zographou, Athens, 15773, Greece. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Heroon Polytechneiou 9, Zographou, Athens, 15773, Greece

Abstract: Governments around the world are embracing the digital revolution to enhance services for their citizens. However, the development of quality electronic services and delivery systems that are efficient and effective is only one way to improve the citizens| quality of life. The essence of e-government lies as well in engaging citizenry into the use of e-government services. As a result, this paper builds on the elementary concept of the time that citizens spend on their transactions with the public administration to provide: a) an evaluation of e-government services in terms of the benefits that their use involves for citizens compared to the use of conventional ones; b) an evaluation of the actual utilisation of e-government services by the citizens. To overcome the impediment of subjectivity and uncertainty that is innate in the citizens| estimations regarding the time spent, fuzzy triangular numbers are adopted. The proposed framework is then applied for the case of Greece using actual data and a comparison with EU27+ is carried out so that useful conclusions can be drawn.

Keywords: e-government; electronic government; quality of life; fuzzy sets theory; fuzzy triangular numbers; Greece; citizen engagement; digital revolution; delivery systems; public administration; benefits; time; EU27; European Union; subjectivity; uncertainty; knowledge; learning; sophistication stage.

DOI: 10.1504/IJKL.2009.031512

International Journal of Knowledge and Learning, 2009 Vol.5 No.5/6, pp.505 - 518

Published online: 08 Feb 2010 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article