Andrea DiMaio

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Andrea Di Maio
VP Distinguished Analyst
12 years at Gartner
25 years IT industry

Andrea Di Maio is a vice president and distinguished analyst in Gartner Research, where he focuses on the public sector, with particular reference to e-government strategies, Web 2.0, the business value of IT, open-source software… Read Full Bio

Coverage Areas:

← →

E-Government Satisfaction Index: The Wrong Comparison

by Andrea Di Maio  |  March 12, 2010  |  3 Comments

The ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index) E-Gov Satisfaction Index Q4 2009 published today shows three government sites ahead of any other commercial site.

This would seem enough for e-gov enthusiasts to claim victory, as the ratings of some agency and departmental web sites are improving year over year.

However a closer look at this data reveals that:

What this tells us is that when government has a compelling value proposition, people come and get what they expect. All private sector sites in the comparison provide a wide variety of services. The survey did not compare SSA iClaim with – say – Google search capabilities or Amazon book reviews. It would have also been interesting to see Google or Amazon compared to USA.gov or a state portal.

Another interesting finding from the report, which confirms the above, is that

Citizens continue to be most satisfied with program sites, which often have the advantage of providing more targeted information or functionality than broader department or agency sites.

More focus, less thrills and frills: this is the way to citizen satisfaction.

3 Comments »

Category: e-government     Tags:

3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Mick Phythian   March 13, 2010 at 4:37 am

    An interesting point Andrea, however the key for me is the light that using citizen satisfaction sheds on process. As you say focussing on the citizen’s needs brings satisfaction, this includes keeping it clean.

    DirectGov, as a portal in the UK, has vastly improved by not duplicating content from the source sites. Now all we need is the source sites to clear all the superfluous crap off and serve the citizen.

    Mick http://greatemancipator.com

  • 2 uberVU - social comments   March 15, 2010 at 4:13 pm

    Social comments and analytics for this post…

    This post was mentioned on Twitter by NahumG: RT @AndreaDiMaio: E-Government Satisfaction Index: The Wrong Comparison – http://bit.ly/craW31 #egov #gov20…

  • 3 Focus not frills « The Great E-mancipator   March 23, 2010 at 3:27 pm

    [...] Andrea di Maio of Gartner highlights the E-Gov Satisfaction Index Q4 2009 from the USA in his blog of March 12th 2010 #. What Andrea picks up on is the factor that the leading sites in the satisfaction ratings are [...]