DIGITIZATION AS A TOOL OF E-GOVERNMENT IN SELECTED PUBLIC SERVICES OF THE STATE: INTERNATIONAL COMPARISON OF SLOVAKIA AND THE CZECH REPUBLIC

Abstract

E-government and digitalization have been representing a promising topic of public administration reforms for more than two decades, but still today it is widely discussed that the progress has been rather slow in some countries and various failures have occurred. This article extends existing research on the issue of digitization of key government services for citizens in the CEE environment and expands to the Slovak Republic. The purpose of the research is to examine selected areas of e-government, that is, the digitization of basic public administration services in Slovakia compared to the Czech Republic. It also provides an overview of the latest e-government evaluation benchmarking studies in CEE countries. It uses a flexible, simplified framework that seeks technology neutrality and focuses on the citizen-centered evaluation of e-government services which is not frequent in the existing literature. The results showed that Slovakia achieved a higher score when examining the level of digitization of key government services to citizens compared to the Czech Republic, which confirms the results of the examined studies in their individual subareas. Both countries have some reserves in several areas, and it is necessary to use the space to improve them, which they also commit to in their strategic documents. Subsequent research efforts on this issue should focus on expanding the research to other EU member states that were part of the former Eastern bloc.