Evaluating Digital Government Projects: Emphasizing Process and Relevance Through Transdisciplinary Research
摘要
Government organizations worldwide focus on digital solutions to improve public services and enhance citizen experience. These initiatives continue to receive significant resource allocation. There exists the need for a thorough evaluation to ensure that these projects deliver the intended benefits and address citizen needs. Currently, the absence of a single suitable evaluation method poses a challenge. The complexity of these projects demands a dynamic evaluation environment to understand societal impact and relevance. Relevance implies assessing to what extent a project aligns with the stakeholders’ goals, needs, and desires, mainly government organizations and citizens or businesses. This chapter explores the importance of relevance in evaluating such projects and highlights the reasons for adopting a transdisciplinary research approach. Unlike traditional disciplinary-focused approaches, transdisciplinary research focuses on real-world context and interdisciplinarity, goes beyond just science, and promotes interaction and integration among involved parties to produce high relevance. By focusing on project outcomes and processes, this research aims to propose relevant metrics for evaluating digital government projects and their relevance in a real-world context. To do so, a series of European research and development projects focusing on digital government will be analyzed using the proposed transdisciplinary evaluation framework to understand if outcomes and processes promote project relevance. This research will help enhance current evaluation approaches for digital government projects. The findings of this study will contribute to the widening of evaluation frameworks for digital government initiatives.