کیفیت در خدمات دولت الکترونیکی: طرح پیشنهادی ابعاد از دیدگاه کارمندان بخش دولتی Quality in e-Government services: A proposal of dimensions from the perspective of public sector employees

1. Introduction The technological advances taking place in recent years have allowed organisations to improve their management processes. The emergence of the Internet has led to a revolution in the way that individuals, organisations and the Government carry out their tasks (Alawneh et al., 2013). It can also be seen that in recent years there has been an increase in recommendations from international organisations, encouraging Governments to use the new technologies and leading to the modernisation of the Government and an improvement in transparency and the services it provides to the public (European Commission, 2015). Quality management in electronic services has been extensively studied, with definitions, models and measurement instruments being proposed, above all in the for-profit sector (Ladhari, 2010; Park and Gretzel, 2007; Sylvester et al., 2013; Verma et al., 2016). In this context, researchers are relatively unanimous in arguing that for these technological innovations to be effective and of benefit to both parties it is necessary to provide the best quality in the service. To achieve these improvements, it is very important that “managers of businesses with Web presences must first understand how consumers perceive and evaluate online customer service“ (Parasuraman et al., 2005). However, the studies carried out within the public sector have not examined the issue to the same extent (Alawneh et al., 2013; Papadomichelaki and Mentzas, 2012) and as indicated by Gutiérrez Rodríguez et al. (2009), there is an open debate about whether the concept of the quality of the services provided can be transferred from the private sector to the public sector. Whilst scarce, some studies have been carried out on this issue in the areas of local government (Lee and Levy, 2014; Sá et al., 2016a), postal services (Águila-Obra et al., 2013), healthcare (Büyüközkan and Çifçi, 2012), tax management (Barnes and Vidgen, 2006; Belanche et al., 2014; Connolly et al., 2010; Lee et al., 2011), library services (Hernon and Calvert, 2005; O’Neill et al., 2001), etc. All these studies analyse, from the public’s perspective, their relationship with the Government. However, only Alawneh et al. (2013) study the problem from the perspective of the public employee, measuring the satisfaction of university employees in Jordan. Our work aims to look at this area in more depth, specifically focussing on ensuring that the managers of university websites understand how their employees perceive the quality of these service portals, and in this way to contribute to improving the online services that public organisations provide to their employees. The main objective of this article is to make a proposal on the dimensions or characteristics that a Government website must have if it is to be considered by its employees as high quality. To achieve this objective, a qualitative study was carried out using the Delphi method. To do this, surveys were conducted involving experts in the field of quality management in public services. The article is structured as follows; in Section 2 we define and classify the e-Government concept. Section 3 then contains a clarification of the electronic service concept. Section 4 is dedicated to describing the methodology used in the study. Next there is an explanation of how the participants were selected and how the two rounds with the panel of experts were performed. The article continues with a proposal of dimensions and items for measuring quality in the services provided by the Government to its employees, and it ends with the main conclusions, recommendations and limitations of the study.