Quality approaches for performance measurement in Jordanian E-government services

Improving the efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of public services has become a growing concern for many governments across the world, and more so with recent popularity of online services, widely referred as e-government services. The application of quality approaches for measuring and improving e-government services has been the subject of much research within the academic world over the last two decades. This chapter discusses the use of key quality approaches to improve services in Jordan's e-government initiatives. As more and more developing countries are adopting e-services as a means of providing quality services to their community and people through the Web, the necessary benchmarking plays an important role. Many traditional quality benchmarking performance measurements have proved futile in improving e-government services due to their quantitative focus. Though qualitative frameworks and measurement approaches such as Six Sigma and Balanced Scorecard have found their success in certain industry sectors, their relevance in the service sector has drawn attention only recently. While some studies have employed such approaches for evaluating projects in information and communication technologies, literature lacks investigations in the e-government sector. To fill this gap, this chapter investigates the application of Six Sigma and Balanced Scorecard approaches to improve quality in Jordanian e-government services.