dg.o 2007

Benchmarking and Measuring Digital Government: Lessons from the EU Experience

Benchmarking, the activity of comparing an object to a chosen point of reference, emerged as a management technique to improve the strategic and operational performance of private organizations by comparing them to their competitors or to the recognized industry best performer. The unit of analysis in this case is the organization as a whole or some of its key processes. Being a voluntary and flexible tool, the comparison involves items that are comparable by choice and usually relies on fairly rich and accessible industry data.  There are  very clear and stark differences when benchmarking, used at the national and/or international level in the public sector, stops being a management tool and becomes a sort of prescriptive, regulatory instrument. In a national-level benchmarking effort, the unit of analysis is no longer the organization, but an entire policy domain. In international-level benchmarking efforts, such as the EU25, the unit of analysis is often an entire policy system.

This panel presents the lessons from 5 years of experience in the development of benchmarking and measuring digital government for public policy within the European Union. The panelists are researchers and consultants who have been working for the European Commission to develop benchmarking for digital government initiatives. Within the context of the Lisbon strategy, the panelists will offer their observations about how digital government benchmarking has evolved from a management technique to become a regulatory instrument.

The overall goal of this panel is to enable cross-fertilization among the European and North American communities of scholars and practitioners interested in the development of digital government in strategic areas, including benchmarking and measurement as instruments to improve performance and, most importantly, democratic accountability of how public funds are spent. More specifically, the panel aims to do the following:

• Provide North American scholars and practitioners with a state of the art overview of European experiences, which may find useful application in the North American context;

• Obtain input and critiques on the EU experiences from a North American perspective;

• Enable the establishment of collaborative networks between European and North American scholars and practitioners, possibly leading to joint activities in the field of digital government benchmarking and measurement.

Moderator

Gabriella Cattaneo

Director, Expertise Centre on Competitiveness & Innovation for Government Insights

IDC EMEA

Panelists

Professor Pál Gáspár

Director, International Center for Economic Growth

Associate Professor, Budapest Corvinus University of Economics

Karsten Gareis

Senior Researcher, Empirirca

Patrick Wauters

Managing Consultant, Public Sector Unit, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Belux