eGovernment for Development

Planning

WHY do you want to set up an eGovernment website?

You may be tempted to answer "because other agencies have websites", or "because my boss asked me to do it", but these usually aren't very good reasons (or good enough) for having a website.

Your website will be more likely to be successful if you set a series of clear objectives for it. These objectives can be improved if they are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Agree, Realistic and Timed.

• Specific - setting goals as specifically as possible will enable you to provide clear guidelines on the features and functions that need to be implemented on your website, and therefore economise in terms of time and resources. For instance, instead of defining your goal as "providing information to the public", it would help to say "provide X type of information, to Y type of public, in Z format and at XYZ conditions". Vagueness in your objectives may lead to the realisation of an unfocussed, confusing and potentially unsustainable web application.
• Measurable - the objectives you set should be measurable. If, say, one of your objectives is "to reduce the time it usually takes to obtain a licence by half" (e.g. by allowing the transfer of documents in electronic format through the site, rather than relying on traditional mail), you should make sure that the organisation you work for already has reliable methods in place to measure this reduction. In this case it would mean that you need to a) establish the average time taken to obtain a licence with traditional methods, and b) record the time when the request is filed through your site, and the time of release of the licence, and compare this to the time taken with traditional methods: some of this requires the implementation of specific technical features in your website, and it is essential to establish this from the start.
• Agreed - it is important that the objectives you set are agreed with the key stakeholders in your organisation, and particularly with management; this will provide you with common and formally accepted criteria to review the progress of the project in the future, and with the clarification of the different lines of accountability by the people involved in the project. If you obtain the sponsorship of key people in your organisation, you will also be in a better position to solicit resources for the project's realisation. Best practice would be also to include representatives of user groups in your discussions and consult them on their expectations from the website you intend to set up.
• Realistic - agencies should make sure that they evaluate the skills and resources they have at their disposal, and plan accordingly; setting unachievable goals for an e-government website represents a waste of time and public resources; e.g. rather than aiming to handle ALL applications online, it may be better to aim to handle "at least 90%" of applications this way.
• Timed - it is valuable to set deadlines for the achievement of objectives, as it helps to measure the achievement of your objectives: e.g. "handle 90% of enquiries online by 2006". Deadlines can be reviewed if priorities change or unforeseen difficulties arise (including technical problems, which can be quite common with websites): it is therefore important to also build some flexibility into their definition.

Priorities

By consulting with the relevant people in your organisation, it is likely that you will come up with more than a single objective for your website. In this case, it can help to prioritise objectives.

Assigning different priorities to your goals will help you make important decisions that affect the design and implementation of your website (e.g. gearing the design towards a particular type of audience in order to obtain the site's primary goal). This will help especially if resources are scarce: if you don't possess the necessary resources to achieve all goals, you can use what is at your disposal to obtain at least the most important ones.

For example, the prioritised goals for a public agency's website could be:

1. to publish a specific set of information in order to reduce the number of queries from the public,
2. to enhance the profile of the institution in order to attract donors to collaborate with it, and
3. to enable users to carry out online transactions with the authority.

If you only possess very limited resources, you may consider dropping the third goal (online transactions) or deferring it to a later stage of the life of the website, especially because it is likely to put heavy technical requirements on the project (more than simply publishing information). If instead you had assigned top priority to online transactions, you would need to use most of your resources towards that goal, which may jeopardise your chances of achieving the other ones.

The bottom line is that it is usually better to achieve a limited number of goals efficiently than to pursue a larger number of goals and only achieve them partially.