Assessment of the Turkish Local e-Governments: An Empirical Study

In this research, we first evaluated the current practices of the Turkish local e-governments. Then, building upon an earlier study of local e-governments in Europe (Key Elements for Electronic Local Authorities' Networks [KEeLAN], 2002), we compared the Turkish local e-government stages with their European counterparts to give a broader perspective. The basic framework focuses on the evaluation of current practices on the supply side (government), rather than the demand side (citizen). The emphasis of this research is on the evaluation of each web site in terms of nine basic public services (additional sub-services available) comprised of policy making, economic development, personal documents, credit and loans/financial support, education, building permits, environment, culture and leisure, and information dissemination. It is assumed that at least four of those services (randomly) are supplied in a local context among the Member Countries, including Turkey. We suggest the results might provide a deeper understanding of local e-governments in Turkey and lend support to advances in this under-researched area.

In this research, we first evaluated the current practices of Turkish local e-governments. Then, building upon an earlier study of local e-governments in Europe (Key Elements for Electronic Local Authorities' Networks [KEeLAN], 2002), we compared the Turkish local e-government stages with their European counterparts to give a broader perspective. The basic framework focuses on the evaluation of current practices on the supply side (government), rather than the demand side (citizen). The emphasis of this research is on the evaluation of each web site in terms of nine basic public services (additional sub-services available) comprised of policy making, economic development, personal documents, credit and loans/financial support, education, building permits, environment, culture and leisure, and information dissemination. It is assumed that at least four of those services (randomly) are supplied in a local context among the Member Countries, including Turkey. We suggest the results might provide a deeper understanding of local e-governments in Turkey and lend support to advances in this underresearched area.

E-government Status of Turkey: a General Outlook
Despite some fruitless attempts over the last 15 years towards de-concentration and decentralization, Turkey's unitary system is still comprised of a highly centralized government and administrative structure. The country is divided into 81 special provinces each of which is headed by a governor appointed by the national government. The provinces are sub-divided into a total of 850 districts. In addition to the provincial units of central government departments, there are three layers of local authorities: Special provincial administrations, municipalities and villages.
With the term "local governments" in this paper, we refer to municipalities. Municipalities are one of the most important local administrative units along with special provincial administrations and villages as well as different unions of these local representatives. Almost 79, 5 % of the whole population resides in the boundaries of municipalities (Bindebir, 2004:1).
But through the view of efficiency, subsidiary and some other additional factors not only did villages become over pacified; but also the special provincial administrations lost their entity of locality and became the extensions of central governments (Aydemir, 2003); so to say, " much weaker" than ever (Kavruk, 2004:200). Due to strict administrative tutelage system and control of the central government, almost all of the basic service provisions have been taken from the responsibility of local governments. According to Kavruk (2004:200) "today approximately 85 % of the public services are provided by the central government organizations" whereas local governments provide only "15 %". This is contradictory to the Member States' public sector provisions in general because the majority of the tasks are handled in the local level around Europe (EU, 2003). Some of these services in Turkey however, were accomplished on the local level in the past. Despite the low service provisions on local levels, overlapping of services is also common in some fields of tasks among the related parties between local and central administrations (Kavruk, 2004 Regardless of the individual efforts for years with different names and acronyms, the e-Turkey initiatives were assembled under one coordination mechanism. The leadership was assumed by a deputy prime minister and the State Planning Organization. The name became known as "e-Transformation Turkey" that took place under the Public Administration Reform heading. As an EU candidate country, Turkey declared e-government initiatives would be aligned with e-Europe framework ( UNPAN Report, 2006). The e-Europe framework is comprised of 20 basic services either supplied on local level or central level. As of the end of the year 2006, 53 % of the services are provided online. As for the maturity levels, among those online services, 42 % are at stage one; 29 % is at stage two; 24 % is at stage three; and 5 % is at stage four. But these indices constitute only central government services (Performance Report, 2006); local governments were not included because they were not measured.

E-government Assessment Methodologies
Assessment is vital to discovering the current state of e-government development, working out the extent to which objectives within various strategies and action plans have been reached, ascertaining strengths and weaknesses, shaping new guidelines, looking for examples of best practices and finally comparing different e-government organizations at the national and international levels.
Owing to the very nature of rapid evolution in this field, and disagreements on core definitions (Löfstedt, 2005) e-government initiatives around the world are trying to develop structured assessment methodologies that will fit into the context of the countries where there are established.
The vast literature of the e-government research map sees e-government as an incremental progression grounded on technological and organizational sophistication. Table 1 summarizes these incremental approaches. The ranges of sophistication change from 3 to 6 different stages.

Stages
Descriptions Reference 3. Enables customers to obtain government services and information from a single point.
4. Provide customers with opportunities to customize portals according to their need.
5. With portals becoming better, government departments will disappear where government will seek to gather common services to hurry the process of delivery.
6. Government departments will disappear others will appear; some departments will keep the same names but become entirely different internally.

Research Methodology
This Actually, these service provisions were 12 in total but in order to deal with a sufficient amount of public services nine basic services were defined along with their sub-services and included into the tool (KEeLAN, 2002).

Policy making
The service on 'policy making' involves the degree in which stakeholders are involved in the decision making process by the local authority / council, supported by the website.

Economic development
This service on 'economic development' involves support for companies and consists of the following sub-services:

Building permits
This service on 'building permits' involves support for companies and citizens in acquiring permits, and consists of the following sub-services: monitoring planning applying for building permission querying for cadastral planning

Environment
The service on 'environment' involves support for companies and citizens in applying for permits and controlling their waste-management and consists of the following sub-services: applying for permits waste management pollution control

Culture and leisure
This service on 'culture and leisure' involves information for all stakeholders of the local authority on requesting and applying for this issue, and consists of the following sub-services: information on culture and leisure within the local authority access to/ querying public library information on, and access to sports facilities

Information dissemination
The service 'information' involves (requesting) information on issues other than the defined services (like opening hours of town hall, important telephone numbers etc.), and submitting information.

Table 2 The Services and subservices Measured by the Web-Scanning Tool
Depending on the depth of interactivity the tool automatically computes a score (score for generation) that indicates the stage of the corresponding service. (For a detailed computation methodology check the relevant website: http://www.keelan.ie/) Following the web scanning process, 20 of those local authorities were invited for online indepth interviews to explore and clarify some certain issues like unexpected high stages or visa versa.

Analysis of the Findings and Discussions
It took seven months (July 2005 to March 2006) to complete the web scanning process and an additional two months to evaluate the results.
During the study period there were 969 websites out of 3228 local governments (30, 01 %).
And from these, 104 (10, 7 %) were offering certain basic services on their websites. But at the end of web scanning, we found that 63 (60, 6 %) websites seems to be functioning. The rest was either temporarily out of order or not operating at all. The tool computed the e-government stages for each service of these 63 local authorities.
All the results are collected into  I r e l a n d S p a i n B e l g i u m L u x e m b o u r g G r e e c e P o r t u g a l A u s t r i a U K / E n g l a n d T h e N e t h e r l a n d s I t a l y G e r m a n y U K / S c o t l a n d S w e d e n F i n l a n d U K / W a l e s F r a n c e D e n m a r k T u r k e y I r e l a n d

Figure 1 The Means of Front Office Performances Per Country
The means in figure two suggest that the promise of democracy through e-government in  I r e l a n d G r e e c e P o r t u g a l S p a i n L u x e m b o u r g I t a l y A u s t r i a T u r k e y B e l g i u m G e r m a n y U K / S c o t l a n d F r a n c e T h e N e t h e r l a n d s S w e d e n U K / E n g l a n d D e n m a r k U K / W a l e s F i n l a n d

Figure 2 Policy Making Performances
The education system is centralized in Turkey. So, the level of stage for educational services was not available. In Europe, Italy leads the top country in that element. However, there are certain areas of online opportunities for the local administrations waiting to be exploited; such as shared portals supplying information about local schools, types of schools, number of teachers, students per class, schools' capabilities, performances, etc.

Figure 3 Performances of Building Permit Services
The stage level for building permits are mainly comprised of look-up and online application of those services (Figure 3). There are ongoing efforts of setting a common ground for interoperability issues among the related parties such as municipalities, subsidiaries of central government on cadastral issues and General Command of Mapping (National Geographic Informaton System [NaGIS] Action Report, 2005). According to a recent research by TurkStat (2006a) on Municipal City Information System Research among the Turkish municipalities pointed that 21 % installed Geographical Information Systems in their jurisdictions.
Differences in data exchange models and the low use of e-signatures are the main obstacles before the full realization of these services online.
Except for seven local governments, providing only downloadable documents about the environmental issues online, the Turkish local e-governments performed poorly. However, some specific issues like waste water and solid waste (from homes and industries; organic/inorganic, chemicals, medical, etc.) are dealt under intermixed topics. For example waste water events are processed through the general water topics and there are many stage four e-services in this respect (57 out of 63). Hence, a single topic on environment was hard to find during the web scanning phase. Applications regarding waste management issues are made both by phones and e-mail/e-forms to online clearing desks.
Online e-services on culture and leisure were not prevalent among the Turkish authorities. As mentioned before, the priority of e-service provisions was economic rather than cultural or When asked to those municipalities the main drivers behind these online cultural activities, all told that the push came from down-to-top, from the citizens; two of these authorities suggested a high level income and a high rate of literacy in their regions. T h e N e t h e r l a n d s U K / E n g l a n d F r a n c e T u r k e y I t a l y I r e l a n d U K / S c o t l a n d F i n l a n d S w e d e n D e n m a r k L u x e m b o u r g F r a n c e I r e l a n d U K / N o r t h e r n I r e l a n d B e l g i u m G r e e c e P o r t u g a l T h e N e t h e r l a n d s S p a i n G e r m a n y I t a ly D e n m a r k U K / S c o t l a n d U K / E n g l a n d S w e d e n A u s t r i a F i n l a n d U K / W a l e s T u r k e y

Figure 5 Performances of Information Dissemination
Although not included as a separate service among the context of e-Europe Basic Services, usability is also one of the most important features of websites. It focuses on and addresses logic-design of software applications and services to ease of mental comprehension for all type of users; even these practices become good accessibility practices (Criado & Ramilo, 2003). It is one of the "highly significant issues and need due consideration in the planning, development and implementation process of e-government" (Choudrie et al., 2004: 582). The performance of the Turkish local administrations regarding the usability issues is average (Figure six). The main reason for the high scores of the Member Countries on usability may be found in the way they approach to these topics. The usability and accessibility issues are considered as the primary factors of their national strategies for e-government websites (England, Scotland, Finland). But for the Turkish Local Governments, all of the scanned websites have problems on usability as much as accessibility. This gives rise to the debate of digital divide. Impaired and older citizens, children, and women are not totally considered during the design procedures of the websites. Given to the fact that websites are the front offices of the local governments, in other words, the first time confrontation desks, these issues should be carefully elaborated. I r e l a n d S p a i n I r e l a n d I t a ly P o r t u g a l B e l g i u m G r e e c e A u s t r i a L u x e m b o u r g G e r m a n y T u r k e y S w e d e n U K / S c o t l a n d F i n l a n d U K / E n g l a n d F r a n c e The average is relatively high given to the fact that other high levels from economy related services. To take a closer look and to make a sound comparison, the means of all stages are given in figure eight. Educational and environmental service levels couldn't be measured for the Turkish side. However, five service stages for economic development, personal documents, credits and loans, information, and building permits are significantly higher than their counterparts. This suggests that these service levels were at the third stage or offering two-way interaction e-services. Meanwhile, European local administrations offer mainly one-way interaction or stage two e-services.

Figure 7 The Overall Stage Levels of the Turkish Local e-Governments
The high levels of online economic services imply that local authorities are looking for ways to decrease the cost of providing services while simultaneously enhancing their efficiency. And investing on high volume services to justify by great economic gains is also consistent with literature (Christiansen et al., 2003;Arslan, 2006). This is rather logical for the Turkish local governments because they are facing more constraints in their attempts to implement egovernment projects than the central governments. But on the other hand, as it was stated in the literature earlier by Ho (2002), the focus might be rather internal, considering managerial operating efficiency and enhancing internal communication through ICTs.

Conclusions
Supplying good content and information alone will not suffice. Sophisticated services on cultural and social life events should be reviewed and revised with more consideration. There were good examples (Ten websites), yet not as many as the European ones.
We have witnessed wide discrepancies among municipalities regarding the scope and the quality of e-government initiatives during the scanning sessions. We argue that this is partly due to the financial power used for accommodating qualified personnel and sufficient resources for online service provisions; bigger means better. Likewise, follow up online interviews with the authorities presented a bulk of barriers like interoperability issues between agencies, technology and organizational incompatibility, security, regulations, culture, and legality issues. Often, having a website is considered as enough or worst, only online presence was seen as e-government itself.
The interview sessions evoked another important topic. Most of the local authorities outsourced their e-services. In-house e-service development processes were very rare (2 out of 20 interviewed). There is a need for an urgent coordination mechanism for the local authorities to