Inclusion in the E-Service Society - Investigating Administrative Literacy Requirements for Using E-Services

摘要

This paper investigates potential changes in requirements for "administrative literacy" - knowledge and skills required from citizens - when manual services are replaced by electronic ones. Do requirements increase, decrease or change qualitatively? We compare manual and electronic versions of ten commonly used services. The needs for knowledge and skills, content and procedures were considerably less for the e-services in eight out of ten cases; however, in complicated services there may rather be a change of skills, e.g. replacing verbal skills with skill in searching for information online. E-services relieve the user of some requirements; hence one obstacle for inclusion is reduced. However, we also found problems with the e-services implying that design of e-services should be informed by the kind of measure we have used as it is of great importance for inclusion in the e-society.