e-Macao Policy Report 022 - The State of Electronic Government in Macao - Volume 1: Survey

TOMASZ JANOWSKI; ADEGBOYEGA OJO; ELSA ESTEVEZ

2004-07-01/2005-04-25

1-122

Organizacional

Des.Socioecon.y Serv.-Des.de los serv.socio

This two-volume report describes the outcomes of the Macao e-Government Survey, carried out as Task 1 of the e-Macao project. Volume 1 (Survey) contains the results of the survey. Volume 2 (Agencies) contains the data collected on the agencies. Altogether, 44 agencies of the Macao SAR Government participated in this survey. Volume 2 contains a section for each agency, including an account of the agency's:mission, structure, relationships with external entities, services provided to external entities (citizens, business, other agencies), services received from external entities, internal services exchanged between agency units, financial resources, human resources, technical resources (software, hardware, networking, telecommunication), website and other e-government projects, and challenges and expectations towards the development of Information Technology and e-government in particular. In addition, detailed descriptions of three to five of the selected core services provided by each agency are included: recipients, cooperating agencies, inputs and outputs, processes, performance measures, quality attributes, delivery channels, usage, personnel, system support, legal issues and anticipated improvements. Attached to the end of every section is a table with quantitative data about an agency and a pair of graphs to depict the networks of services the agency exchanges with other government agencies and other non-government entities.Volume 1 describes the methodology adopted in the survey; in particular, how the data described in Volume 2 was collected, consolidated and analyzed. It also describes the results of analysis carried out. The data in Volume 2 has been consolidated as a spreadsheet of values of a set of 168 variables representing the structure, services, resources and on-line presence of the agencies. In addition, two matrices have been created to describe the number of services the agency provides and receives from other government agencies or non-government entities (e.g. citizens and businesses). The consolidated data was used to carry out different kinds of analysis. One of the major results of the analysis is the "average agency" - a hypothetical agency that is most representative of the whole of Macao Government, based on the data collected during the survey and represented through the choice of 168 variables. The analysis also shows the distribution of values of individual variables across different agencies. In addition to frequency distributions, the analysis employs basic descriptive statistics to study the variable's central tendency and its deviation from this average. Correlations between variables are also computed to explore explanatory relationships between these variables. The matrices of the services provided and received were used to visualize the relationships between agencies in terms of service dependencies, and to carry out a so-called social network analysis of the agencies collectively. In the social networks, the agencies are represented as nodes and the services as edges - the agency at the origin node provides a service, the agency at the target node receives this service, and the label at the edge represents how many services the former agency provides to the latter. Various measures were calculated to characterize such relationships. It should be stressed that the survey was not strictly limited to the electronic, information or even technical aspects of the agencies of Macao Government. Instead,it was carried out as a broad and in some aspects in-depth domain analysis of the public administration system of Macao, with questions related to the very nature of the agencies' function, structure, operations, services and resources. Therefore the results could be used for e-government as well as for other purposes.