The Same but Still Different: Forms in E-Government

Forms are essential artifacts of government service delivery to transmit information between the customer and the government. However, customers perceive forms as too complex. Since the complexity of a system is influenced by the diversity of its components, this paper’s main contribution is the identification of characteristics of forms and their components that drive the diversity of different forms. For this purpose, we evaluate a set of 69 forms of 27 German municipalities according to various criteria. The results reveal that different partitions of forms in subparts, varying sets of presented and requested data, different element types and varying captions for equal elements drive the complexity of current government forms. On the contrary, orders of elements are similar across the forms at hand.