Can National E-Government Standards Find Acceptance?

In recent years many national e-government standards have been developed. Even though the definition of such standards may be a necessary condition for the creation of interoperable services, this alone does not make it a sufficient condition. In this paper we report on the results of a quantitative empirical study on the acceptance of e-government standards in German municipalities. The study reveals a high awareness level of the German standard, as well as a positive level of acceptance. This is a sharp contrast to the low publicity of the European standard, which is hardly known among municipalities.The outcome is interpreted with respect to the future development of standardization efforts. We argue that the alignment of such efforts with the requirements of public procurement legislation will play a major role.