Evaluating e-Government: A Lesson from Korea

초록

After several years of building eGovernment in Korea, some scholars of public administration and practitioners, however, expressed their concerns about the policy direction of building eGovernment. Major point in their concerns is that we need to see other critical aspects of building eGovernment. That is, managing eGovernment is as important as building it. Under the circumstances, The notion of evaluation naturally came up and quickly took its place in policy makers' mind. It's been only a few years since systematic evaluations have been developed and applied to real evaluations. Although there are many critical issues related to making such evaluations more effective and successful, the issue that this study attempts to address is to utilize the results of evaluation. Unless findings of evaluation is utilized for correcting potential or real problems in the process of building eGovernment, policy makers may not know whether they are on the right track in implementing programs and policies on eGovernment. To this end, this study tries to examine the current state of evaluation on eGovernment in Korea and use of evaluation results in building effective eGovernment. This study also offers a set of suggestions for improving the use of evaluation in the process of making decisions on eGovernment. In so doing, this study examines three major theoretical explanations for evaluation utilization and also discusses several real problems related to utilizing results of evaluations on eGovernment.