ON STIMULUS FOR USE PUBLIC INFORMATION SERVICES IN THE EUROPEAN UNION Prof. Dr. Cene Bavec University of Primorska, Faculty of Management Koper, Slovenia cene.bavec@guest.arnes.si Abstract The paper presents some social causes which stimulate or divert citizens from using public available information services in the EU countries. Analysis is based on the secondary information sources from EU. We find out that national innovativeness is the strongest indication of environment that motivates use of e-services. On the other side, we concluded that common presumption that public interest in information technologies significantly stimulates usage of e-services is not correct. We pointed to high correlation between usage of public e-services and general trust among citizens, which is an important part of the Social Capital. Consequently, well known inertia of social variables over time will prevent fast leaps in the use of e-services in countries with low or average social capital and dissimulative social values. It is also interesting that behavior of old EU15 and new EU27 member states is quite often different. For IT STAR countries it is particularly important to assess their progress into information society with proper indicators. Otherwise, they can make wrong conclusions followed by inappropriate public measures. Finally, results also indicate that large systems like public administration and other big e-service providers have to find much more innovative instrument to motivate citizens to use their e-services. Key words Public information services, Motivation of users, EU, Social environment 1. WHAT MOTIVATES THE USE OF PUBLIC E-SERVICES Implementation of any IT project depends on users’ motivation and acceptance of new e-services. Basically, we have two groups of users. In the first group are internal employees in corporations, public administration, or any other organization. As employees they are bound to use in-house introduced application regardless of their personal position. Individual motivation is obviously less important and all potential problems with the use of new services are solved internally. On the other side, we have more and more IT applications that are developed for public use outside of the provider’s organization. In such cases we don’t have a managerial authority to enforce external clients to use particular application. Typical examples are public e-government services (Scharma, 2004, Wauters in Colclough, 2006, Bavec in Vintar, 2007). Practical experiences and also researches (Heeks, 2003) confirm that citizens’ acceptance of public e-services is not granted per se and that public acceptance is quite often below what providers expected (Deursen, van Dijk, and Ebbers, 2006). It indicates that they often misjudge citizens’ motivation and stimulus to use public services. Understanding what motivates citizens is obviously a relevant issue for service providers and also for national decision-makers that are responsible for development of information society (Centeno, van Bavel, and Burgelman, 2004). From this point of view, it is interesting to notice that the use of many public services significantly vary across European regions (Wauters and Colclough, 2006). For example, Nordic countries are doing significantly better than Southern or Central European countries. We could imagine many reasons for that. The usage of public e-services is clearly correlated with economic power of these countries and their ability to invest into different e-services. However, economy cannot explain all regional differences (Bavec, 2007, Van Oorschot in Arts, 2005, Pohlmann, 2005). We should also look for other forces that cause this diversity.