E-government Maturity at Spanish Local Levels

E-Government practices are no longer strange for most local councils. As a consequence, some of them have reached more mature stages in the interaction between technological abilities and organisational processes. Nevertheless, there seems to be a wide gap between what academics say and practitioners do, so it is believed to be necessary to compare theory and facts. The objective of this paper is to address e-Government maturity by stating the differences between academic theory and the results of a quantitative survey addressed to the Chief Technology Managers (CTO) of the Spanish municipalities with more than 5000 inhabitants that have adopted an official web page to communicate with their citizens. CTOs were to answer a set of dichotomous variables regarding whether the selected services were achievable or not through their web pages. These questions were posed on a web-based questionnaire that had a rate of response of 17% (165 out of 960). Results show that Spanish councils still remain at the most basic levels of e-government maturity.