How to benchmark public e-services. Case study: SEPE

Abstract

There are so many different opinions about how to evaluate effectively e-services and how to group them. Many studies on service quality and e-service quality have been conducted, and different scales have already been developed for measuring eservice quality. This study focuses on a creation of a complete e-service quality model with an empirical study that comprises all the different dimensions required to evaluate the e-service quality from the perspectives of the different stakeholders: citizens, companies and government. The main goal of this e-service quality model is provided a model for a deep and complete assessment of the public e-services offered by the SEPE, Servicio Estatal de Empleo Público. The mission of this organization it’s “to contribute to the development of employment policy, managing the unemployment protection system and ensure the information job market for entering and staying work market of citizenship and human capital improvement companies.” Because of the actual critical situation which is living Spain, the model provided by this project pretends to be an efficient tool for improving the e-services offered by the SEPE and it also helps to identify their weakness and strengths. The methodology used consists of three big steps. The first one is a profound and complete analysis of the SEPE organization, comprehending all its functions, responsibilities and the role they have in the society. The website and all the services offered through it are also studied. The second part consists of a deep research of some studies done by prestigious universities or organizations with a similar framework and scope. The studies selected were carefully analyzed and compared, only considering the dimensions with some relevance in the public e-services framework. Finally, the model is created using the most important dimensions the different studies emphasized. It is divided for each stakeholder and different parameters are considered for each one according to their preferences. An initial assessment of the model is done for the citizens’ point of view. The results show that the SEPE is a really powerful tool that provides citizens with a large variety of services. The main weakness is the complexity of the website, because with the large amount of information available the user can be lost. The other important aspect to bear in mind is that there is not any possibility to interact on the website with another people who may share common interests as forums, chats or blogs. Users can’t asses the website and there are no blogs for suggestions, these issues would be very interesting and could provided the organization with feedback and knowledge about the users preferences