Improving Public Service From Endogenous Perspective:an Model Of E-Government Service Capability

As an important channel for implementation of the Service-oriented Government Strategy, e-government initiative has caught high level of attention from Chinese Government, for improving efficiency of public service. This issue also intensified efforts from practical authorities and scholars. Many of effort in assessment of e-government performance in past years was about government portal and public satisfaction, which to some extent, promoted the progress of e-government, but lack of persuasive evidence for indicating reasons for success or failure. As a result, the solution for improving public service using e-government was from public perspective transferred to inherent capability from agencies internally.The e-government service capability (EGSC) is a capability focusing on e-government program and its internal management strategies. This concept was inspired by the successful practices and solid agreement in the domain of Capability Maturity Model in a certain national or local governments in USA, UK, Australia etc..The CMM set criteria for evaluating maturity level of organization based on business process. Its multistep improvement path from initial to advance corresponded to a process management level from awareness to continuous improvement. The higher maturity the processes get, the higher level of management the organization has, more mature capability which provides service to public it possess.Thus, we constructed a holistic measurement framework of e-government service capability called EGS-CMM to help local government making a better use of e-government. In the first part, previous literature and best practice was reviewed as basis, especially the similarity and difference among these facts. Then, we proposed the architecture of EGS-CMM, presenting its framework, indicators, measurement methodology, calculation and improvement principle in detail. Finally, the framework was certified by tests from three agencies of Jiangsu Province. It revealed that capability of EGS-CMM was decreasing with administration level rising. This result was fit with current situation of e-government development of Jiangsu, proving its validity and rationality.EGS-CMM is not only a capability assessment indicators, but also a tool improving efficiency of e-government service. The perspective of endogenous capability will promote Chinese e-government initiative to a higher phase and make sense for administration even the entire society in future.