抄録
The e-Japan Strategy formulated in 2000 considers the establishment of an e-government or e-local governments to be one of its major projects. Among the themes related to the establishment of e-local governments, the implementation of a new-type local portal sites has begun to attract all related parties; local governments, private sectors and third sectors as site operators, and local residents as site users. On the local portal site, administrative information released by local government is provided together with business information from local private sectors. Local governments are able to cut the operational cost of their official web site by outsourcing its operation, and outsourced operators are able to attract more viewers by enriched site contents and thus earn more advertisement revenue. Moreover, users will have easier accesses to their target information, as all relevant information is found on the same portal. Therefore, this seemingly making-every-stakeholders-happy policy will become popular among local governments in the near future; in fact, some advanced local governments have already started to implement such a local portal site. However, there are several issues to be considered: apart from expectations of local governments and web operators, it is not yet clear which organization is supported as operator of their portal site, or how they would evaluate the method that provides administrative information and business information on the same web site. Furthermore, the economic advantages of this method have not yet been determined. The purpose of this research is to examine two of the issues mentioned above: residents' preference for site operators and contents provided by applying conjoint analysis. The research was conducted using a questionnaire which was administered to the residents of Itami City, Hyogo. The survey results indicated that the residents placed the highest value on the combined provision of customized administrative information and business information. The most cost-effective way at the moment is to re-design the traditional official web sites of local governments, aiming to enhance the residents' convenience by customizing the information by users' demographic attributes. Results also indicated that the residents preferred their local government to operate the site. We believe that these study results provide basic but valuable suggestions for the gradual establishment of true e-local governments.
