Assessing Transparency in eGovernment Electronic Processes

Abstract

Context. The electronic government has become a trend for transforming public management to comply with the performance of an efficient, modern state. The processes for public procurement and personnel recruitment represent an essential fraction of a country’s public spending. Objective. Maturity models are tools for assessing different management dimensions resulting in some level of organizational maturity on an ordinal scale which can show null, partial, or total progress towards the desired state. This paper presents an e-government maturity model for public procurement and personnel recruitment processes, based on a literature review to determine the current state of research in the field. Methodology. We have used a known procedural model from Becker to support the design of the proposed model. Later on, we have tested it with government buyers and personnel recruiters. Findings. These initial results show that users understand the questionnaires designed for the study, and their answers allow us to obtain deep validation. A tool with these characteristics can be handy for measuring the degree of transparency in public entities, thus reducing corruption levels in their processes. Conclusion. This proposal describes the complexity of variables that influence the transparency of a socio-technical process in public tenders. We describe five levels of transparency for software procurement through development projects. These classifications enable the maturity levels of the transparency of electronic procedures used by government agencies to be measured in different dimensions. Implications. One of the crucial challenges to increasing a government’s transparency is defining a regulatory or legal framework that regulates its processes and allows the levels of transparency or corruption to be measured in its different departments. Thus instruments and metrics play a crucial role in monitoring the expected change. With direct application in the industry, a model is an essential step for fundamental transparency in electronic governments.

Keywords

• Maturity models
• transparency
• procurement
• public tenders
• e-government