The e-government survey has been in existence since 2001, and has measured the share of public services fully available on line in the EU. To complete the survey, the Commission partnered with market research firm Capgemini to examine 14,000 web sites in the EU, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland.
The survey sought to measure the 'sophistication' of EU's online public services, meaning the degree of interactivity between the site and the user. The scale ranged from 'basic,' where information was simply posted with no ability to process user input, to two-way interactions with some user input, to 'full' electronic case handling (fully available online).
The survey gave the overall public service delivery in EU states a rating of 75 per cent. Nearly 50 per cent of public services are fully available online. Austria was found to have the best online public services, followed by Malta and Estonia.
Since 2000, the Commission's e-government initiatives focussed on increasing online access to public services. After the results of the most recent survey, the Commission has concluded that this objective has mostly been met, and that governments should move on to the next stage of developing intelligent, user-oriented e-services.
