In his study titled State and Federal Electronic Government in the United States, 2008 Darrell M. West of The Brookings Institute conducted a survey of over 1,500 state and federal government websites to find out how the current status of e-government across the country at all levels. The goal was to determine how technology has changed the practices of government. The findings provided detailed information on what is available online, how sites differ from one another, and how the use of online services has advanced and changed in the last decade.
The findings were supportive of the idea that governments are interested in, and developing greater ability to distribute services online. In fact, close to 90% of state and federal websites have services that are fully executable online. This number is only slowly advancing, however, as it are only up a few percentage points from the previous year. Also, there is the point that if a state agency or other government body has still not developed a website, there’s a good chance they never will. This number sounds good, but the fact that there are still over 10% of state and federal agencies without websites is pretty surprising.
There are many improvements that need to be made in order for government websites to be full effective, and the study illustrated this point effectively. For instance, only 3% of government web sites can be accessed through mobile devices such as cell phones. This is a feature that is becoming more and more of a necessity to meet the needs of citizens in an ever increasingly mobile world. The use of notebooks and cell phones with incredible internet capacity is growing at a greater rate than e-government has kept up with.
There’s a serious issue with access as well. The first finding that was rather startling in this regard is that only a quarter of federal websites and less than one in five state websites are accessible to the disabled, less than half of websites have foreign language translation, and 64% are written at a reading level that is above that of the average citizen. These sorts of accessibility issues need to be addressed considering the wide range of customers that will require the use of the website.
West makes a point to suggest that all government websites have a foreign language translation or some other means to make the information accessible to non English speakers. This is especially true now as more Spanish speakers enter the country and need the services provided on government websites. The data is trending in the right direction in this regard, as then number of states with foreign language translations has doubled since 2007.
The policy recommendations made by West are pretty well thought out. Many of the suggestions revolve around making the websites user friendly and easily navigable. Especially effective is the recommendation that agency websites have similar layouts to one another so that users realize they are using a government website. Furthermore, having an effective site map and search engine is especially necessary. Nearly all internet activity is instigated through a search rather than a unique visit. This should be incorporated into state websites. Knowing to go to Delaware.gov is simple, finding out where to go to do what the use needs to do within the states website is another thing.
The demand for e-government services is only going to go up in the future. Adopting the changes suggested by West and addressing the deficiencies this study points out would go a long way in getting e-government to the level of effectiveness that it will have to be in the future. However, it must be pointed out that needed changes will continually come up as technology adapts. This is an ongoing development process and not something with a definitive end point.
Sources:
West, Darrell. "State and Federal Electronic Government in the United States, 2008." 26 August 2008. The Brookings Institution. 6 May 2011 <http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2008/0826_egovernment_west/0826_egovernment_west.pdf>.
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