Satisfaction with E-Gov is Down

Every quarter, we help the University of Michigan with the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Government Satisfaction Index. We measure more than 100 federal government websites to see a) overall, are citizens satisfied with online government initiatives and b) how satisfied are they with individual sites?

The answer this quarter isn’t great: satisfaction is down for the third quarter in a row, and now it’s at its lowest score in more than three years. You can get the report, with ACSI scores and analysis for 100+ federal websites here.

One of the reasons I think the scores are dipping is the lame duck effect. President Bush, love him or hate him, has spent administration time and energy on e-gov, through making it one of the five goals of the President’s Management Agenda and through other means. But there’s no certainty about what a new administration may mean for e-gov initiatives, and I think that may make them hesitant to make the changes they need to make to keep satisfaction up. Steve Barr, federal columnist for the Washington Post, told a colleague that he usually doesn’t see the lame duck effect until summer, but he could see that might be part of it. He also mentioned that a lot of agencies got their budgets late, and that could be part of the problem as well.

A scan of the presidential candidates’ websites shows that only Barack Obama has anything significant about e-gov as part of their campaign platform, and his point is more about using e-gov for transparency than for citizens' convenience and ease or for cost-saving measures. After a very quick look, I don’t see anything on either Clinton’s or McCain’s website specifically about e-gov. (Though, you can compare your NCAA picks with John McCain, a crucial feature neither of the other candidates offers!). So who knows what the future holds for e-gov. It seems clear that it will have to be a priority of any administration both because it can save the federal government so much money and because it should be the mission of any administration to be citizen-centric, which is what the web is all about. But 2/3 of the candidates don't seem to be thinking much about it yet.

Hopefully I’ll be posting more often in the coming weeks. We’re coming down off a crazy period that has had me running dawn ‘til dusk.