Evaluation of Demand for e-Government: the Case of Saint-Petersburg

1. Introduction Development of electronic government is the global trend of public sector reforms of the last decade. E-government is a tool for fudamental transformation of the way government works, enabling faster, cheaper, more personalized and more efficient service delivery to citizens and businesses anytime and enywhere. Many countries have developed and introduced concepts of e-government. By nowadays e-government programs and projects have allowed to accumulate significant experience and to reveal the key success factors. Among these factors-use of citizen-centric approach in electronic services delivery, development of the personalized services, application of Customer Relationship Management methods, creation of the integrated government portals. The first strategies of electronic services development were guided by knowledge and representations of government structures. Today the experience of e-government leaders' shows that e-government program should be primarily based on consumers' research. In order to develop e-government vision and to plan electronic services development strategy more effectively the government needs to improve its understanding of the target market segments, their size and expectations. Market research allows to identify electronic services which are mostly demanded by consumers and to concentrate efforts on their development. It is especially important in case of limited financial capacities. Failure to respond to market demand, expressed in terms of citizen-centricity, represents lost opportunities for government. Consumers' studies help the government not only to estimate demand for electronic services, but also to define factors constraining electronic government take-up and to determine the most perspective ways of demand expansion. This paper describes methods of analysis of demand for the e-government and also presents the results of demand analysis for electronic services in Saint-Petersburg. Despite of significant progress in electronic government development in Saint-Petersburg, little attention is given to demand analysis and citizen-centric approach. In order to extend the knowledge of public expectations we investigated three groups of e-government stakeholders: civil servants, businesses and nonprofits. We investigate awareness on e-government projects and the attitude to them. Then we study expectations of electronic services consumers. The received results allow developing recommendations for the further e-government development in Saint-Petersburg.