In apparent contrast to the Pitney Bowes short study of UK users of e-government Australians are much more satisfied, to the extent that they prefer doing things online! The new Australians’ use and satisfaction with e-government services—2011 review makes an interesting comparison against the unwillingness of the 1000 Brits interviewed. One must of course assume the bias on either side – PB sell white mail handling equipment and the Aussie government would, for financial reasons, prefer their citizens to go electronic.
In the PB study “half of respondents (50%) prefer to respond to communications through the post and a third (33%) opt for email when replying. In third place came web-based responses with 8 per cent of the vote, followed by phone (7%) and text (1%)”, which may not be surprising depending upon how the question was phrased.
In the Australian report it should first be noted that the telephone is still considered a part of e-government (Section 5 – “Two in five (38%) people contacted government by telephone in 2011”), much in the way it was used as a ‘get out of jail free’ card in the UK 2005 targets – but I think it’s time that approach to defining e-government was dropped, it makes comparisons very difficult. Other than that the document identifies little change since 2009 – not really much to crow about then…
Posted by greatemancipator 
The Great E-mancipator 