E‐government: a new route to public sector quality

In the past government organisations have paid little attention to service quality or responsiveness to clients. This changed with the movement termed “new public management”, which occurred in most developed nations around 1990. This paper briefly examines the concept of quality and its application to the public sector and discusses e‐government, the latest manifestation of attempts to improve quality in government. The paper also reports on a survey of senior personnel across the three levels of government in Australia. The results of the survey and other published research materials suggest, that the impact of e‐government on service delivery is modest and not well distributed. While there has been widespread adoption of e‐government measures, these have generally been lacking in sophistication and have been disproportionately beneficial to city dwellers without addressing problems of equity and access.