Information policy-based indicators to assess US federal websites: methods and issues

摘要

Assessment of government websites in terms of their compliance with information policies can be accomplished via a number of techniques and approaches. By and large, however, little such assessment is done and government agencies often have little knowledge of the information policies that may affect the operation of their website or the techniques to conduct such an assessment (McClure, Sprehe, and Eschenfelder, 2000). This situation exists for a number of reasons and because of a number of issues. The purpose of this paper is to describe key issues related to government website assessment in terms of information policy compliance and extend the previous work by the author to propose possible solutions for dealing with these issues. This paper extends work that was completed on a study funded by three U.S. Federal agencies to develop performance measures and statistics to assess U.S. government websites (McClure, Sprehe, and Eschenfelder, 2000).That effort produced preliminary performance measures for Federal websites as well as an inventory of U.S. information policies that affect website development. Specific objectives of the study included: 1 Describe the current best practices of selected Federal agencies' techniques to assess their websites; 2 Identify the range of Federal information policy (laws, regulations, guidelines) that affects agencies' development and management of Federal websites; and 3 Propose measures and indicators that can assess the degree to which Federal websites comply with existing Federal information policy.