Affiliations: [a] Municipal Institute of Informatics, Barcelona City Council, Barcelona, Spain | [b] DTIC, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain | [c] Faculty of Library and Information Science, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
Abstract: We claim that local e-services benchmarking studies summarized in indexes do
little to enhance city managers' and academics' understanding of actual
e-government performance, or to improve the e-services offered by cities. We
undertook a different benchmarking approach, focused on learning best
practices among cities, in late 2008 and early 2009. A benchlearning
methodology (BLM) was developed, and a pilot study with 15 European cities
was carried out. In this paper, we present the actual impact of the
benchmarking study with respect to improvements in services, as the
effectiveness of e-government benchmarking has rarely been evaluated. We
discuss and analyse the results of a survey carried out in the same 15
cities four years after the pilot study. This paper presents evidence that
BLM helped cities to identify good practices that they could learn from, and
that some e-services were subsequently improved. The survey reveals that
some changes are needed in the benchmarking methodology. The main one is the
updating of the BLM bottom-up e-services catalogue, which is deeply
discussed within the changing context of Smart Cities, especially the
enlargement of the ecosystem of e-services to include citizens, the third
sector, entrepreneurs, companies and other actors. A second one is the
measurement of the adoption of e-services by citizens, also rarely assessed.
Keywords: e-government, public administration, e-services, adoption, benchmarking, smart city services
