E-Government's Role in Shifting the Paradigm of Performance in the Public Sector

The emergence of e-government changed the world of the Public Administration (PA) and the discipline ofPublic Management dramatically. Through the presentation of a case- study of the municipality of Palermo,this article attempts to discuss the renewed need for assessing performance of e-government services in a localgovernment and to disclose the main critical issues in accomplishing this evaluation. Palermo is experiencingthe implementation of a second- generation e-government project that is embodied in the realization of a webportal. The conceptualization of a framework to assess the performance of the digital services appears to becrucial in order to improve the system and to avoid the errors of the frst project. This work relies on a surveyto the citizens and semi-structured interviews to managers in charge of the development of the project. SystemDynamics, a particular kind of dynamic simulation, is used to provide the necessary feedback structure foridentifying the determinants of the success of the portal.