Servicios

Services provided are the backbone of any government website that aims to be used by a significant portion of the population. Well-designed online services are key to governments’ provision of activities that were traditionally required in an official government building.

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Online services represent an opportunity for governments to reduce the costs, time and bureaucracy surrounding citizen engagement with their government (Davies, 2015). Bekkers and Homburg (2007) identify the main types of services provided as being: information, contact, transactional and participatory (p. 374). This hypothesis looks at whether presence of these factors is related to rates of usage in the three Baltic states.

Estonia’s good results on the provisions of services part of the research are clearly reflective of the top down, as well as bottom up enthusiasm for the online government that permeates Estonian society. The only factor that this part of the hypothesis failed was the message boards - not a single Estonian website utilised these (nor had any link to somewhere where they could be found) in order for group wide or community discussion. This may have been related to the openness of their contact section - there is a very accessible way to reach the departments, or potentially issue related and thus stored outside their main official website. On the Ministry of Education, they even have multiple personal contact details of members of staff. In addition, all three websites in the Estonian example provide a link to their national porta eesti.ee, which shows that government departments communicate with each other and are not stovepipe systems. This represents a higher level of data readiness between and within Estonian departments and increases the usability for those who do not want to be clicking back and forth to find the information they need. Therefore, there is a strong relationship between how the extent to which information and services are available and the levels of usage. This shows high levels of data readiness and institutional capacity between government departments in Estonia, as well as the open communication that is considered a vital aspect of citizen participation.

Services provided is a central aspect of the usability of government websites as they are one of the main reasons that citizens engage government websites (Nam, 2014). This part of the study that shows a difference between Estonia and Latvia. Both countries scored well on open information availability and the opportunity to contact the government departments through general email addresses, physical offices and contact phone numbers. However, on the observation on a link to online services portal, the Latvian case failed. This shows a lack of communication between departments, as well as between ministries and civil servants, indicating that Latvian processes are still caught up in stovepipe departments, as they are not communicating the processes of information and services. In the Estonian example; it is easy to make the step from information to activity, which the Latvian sites lack. The strong focus

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on information is interesting (there are multiple links to further information), however the lack of links to the national portal latvija.lv, where explicit actions can be carried out is indicative of lower organisational maturity.

The case of Lithuania is similar to that of Latvia as the both received the same score of 50% in this part of the research. While both had open access to information and robust contact details, neither had a discussion board (like the case of Estonia) nor clear links to their online services portals (e-paslaugos). This is in line with the OECD report from 2015, which writes that there is a national desire to provide a range of services and information, but there are still different of levels of quality among departments. By not linking to external services that are also provided by the Lithuanian government, it shows that there is a lack of data readiness and ability to collaborate across multiple actors. In this case, there is an inability to avoid stovepipe organisations within a single government and is indicative of a lack of institutional capacity in Lithuania, which is in turn also reflected in the low level of usage across the country.

The results of this hypothesis show that usability is at least partially related to the provision of services. Again, with Estonia performing the highest among the three countries, its place again shows the superior levels of governmental organisation as well as citizen interest in utilizing the internet for government services. Latvia in this case is interesting - it performed rather badly, but Latvia’s usage rates are still phenomenally higher than Lithuania that received the same score. This shows that the hypothesis cannot be proven for Latvia, as their usage does not align with the low level of service provision on the page. While Lithuania proves the hypothesis with both low rates of usage and low rates of service provision, when compared with Latvia indicates that there are other factors in play beyond just each country’s government capabilities and commitment to online solutions that manifest themselves in the design of online services.