Conception, development and implementation of an e-Government maturity model in public agencies Gonzalo Valdés ⁎, Mauricio Solar, Hernán Astudillo, Marcelo Iribarren, Gastón Concha, Marcello Visconti Departamento de Informática, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Valparaíso, Chile abstract article info Available online 26 January 2011 Keywords: e-Government readiness Maturity model IT governance Governments worldwide are encouraging public agencies to join e-Government initiatives in order to provide better services to their citizens and businesses; hence, methods of evaluating the readiness of individual public agencies to execute specific e-Government programs and directives are a key ingredient in the successful expansion of e-Government. To satisfy this need, a model called the eGovernment Maturity Model (eGov-MM) was developed, integrating the assessment of technological, organizational, operational, and human capital capabilities, under a multi-dimensional, holistic, and evolutionary approach. The model is strongly supported by international best practices, and provides tuning mechanisms to enable its alignment with nation-wide directives on e-Government. This article describes how the model was conceived, designed, developed, field tested by expert public officials from several government agencies, and finally applied to a selection of 30 public agencies in Chile, generating the first formal measurements, assessments, and rankings of their readiness for e-Government. The implementation of the model also provided several recommenda- tions to policymakers at the national and agency levels. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction In addition to the necessary technological initiatives, the imple- mentation of e-Government programs in a country is accompanied by the redesign of processes that support the new models of service delivery, by structural reforms in the public agencies that establish those responsible for promoting and managing new technologies, and by major efforts to update the legal framework to support and regulate the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the public sector. For example, in Chile, several regulations have been issued in this regard, 1 and an interoperability platform (funded by the Inter-American Development Bank) 2 is currently being built to enable public agencies to exchange and integrate information coming from different services. Hence, there is a need to measure and assess the readiness of public agencies to comply with new national directives on e-Government and – more generally – to address the new challenges posed by the e-Government approach to public administration. The eGovernment Maturity Model (eGov-MM) (Iribarren et al., 2008; Solar, Astudillo, Valdes, Iribarren, & Concha, 2009) was a result of a project carried out to satisfy this need; the project was developed by the Informatics Department at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (Chile) for the Executive Secretariat of Digital Strategy belonging to the Chilean Ministry of Economy. The eGov-MM model allows public agencies to be evaluated against international best practices in the area of e-Government, including the formulation of organizational strategies and policies, management of ICT, operative management, and organizational capabilities of human resources and the organization overall. It also proposes specific roadmaps for capability improvement, i.e., directives about where the financial and human resources of an organization should be allocated to improve its ability to carry out e-Government initiatives. eGov-MM and its assessment methodology were evaluated, provided with feedback and validated by expert public officials from several government agencies through a pilot study and several workshops, and the model was finally applied to a selection of 30 public agencies, generating the first formal measurements and rankings of their preparedness for e-Government. These results may be useful for the formulation of e-Government policies at national and agency level. This article is organized as follows: Section 2 defines the theoretical framework to address the problem and presents the state of the art. Section 3 describes the architecture of the eGov-MM model and its mechanisms for fine-tuning with international e-Government trends and the local policy context. Section 4 describes the assessment methodology and the institutional framework needed for effective assessments. Section 5 discusses important issues of the model's validation and replication of its measurements. Section 6 analyzes the results of the application of the model to 30 public agencies in Chile and Government Information Quarterly 28 (2011) 176–187 ⁎ Corresponding author. Present address: Av. España 1680, 2340000 Valparaíso, Chile. Fax: +56 32 2797513. E-mail address: valdes.ulloa@gmail.com (G. Valdés). 1 http://www.guiaweb.gob.cl/recursos/documentos.htm. 2 Code CH-L1001, available at http://www.iadb.org. 0740-624X/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.giq.2010.04.007 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Government Information Quarterly journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/govinf