An User-Centric Check Of The Available E-Government Services In Europe

The success and sustainability of the e-Government Services seems to be strictly related to the adoption of the "user-centric approach" during the services development process, in which citizens/end users are considered the real source of knowledge and inspiration for building added value public services. On the basis of this assumption, this work describes the result of the analysis of the application of the user-centricity approaches in a list of running e-Government services. The main scope of the analysis is to have a global vision about the actual usability of these cases in other environments and propose to the Community at large insights and recommendations for enhancing the use of user-centricity in Europe. The analysis has been carried out within the activities of the NET-EUCEN network: the 40 cases discussed in this study belong to the repository of more than 70 experiences deeply analysed by the network, retained as actually interesting among more than 450 cases filtered in the ePractice portal, as they are characterized by (at least) two out three of the user-centricity criteria measuring the User Involvement: 1. Co-design; 2. Development and Implementation; 3. Deployment and Running. The overall analysis has been enriched by the comparison in the International Arena against the scouted best practices of Bahrain, Canada, Dubai, Singapore and the U. S., so to build a global positioning for European scenarios; it has been introduced a global competitiveness 4-level mask able to provide also a graphic positioning on the "competitiveness reference system". This study brought us to have a more coherent vision highlighting the limits and potentialities of the cases, in terms of the application of the different services to the users and business perspectives. This approach brought an added value to the whole process of bringing the user-centricity in the European Countries since it provides, at a glance, good quality examples to be reused and a preliminary feasibility analysis. The most important result is represented by the alignment of Europe with the rest of user-centric offer worldwide. We would underline as the methodology developed for the cases study analysis can be easily adopted in other analysis focused on network studies and can be even standardised to identify the main bottlenecks, technical challenges, acceptance problematic and mass-user needs.