This research attempts to identify factors that may affect the institution of a national evaluation regime for ombudsmen. Employing evaluability assessment methodology, issues are identified that may arise for the design of a regime to evaluate ombudsmen exercising different jurisdictions within sectors which experience similar national variables like social structures, economic conditions, political stability, legal institutions, evaluation culture and form of public discourse. The research aims to address a gap in the evaluation of ombudsmen. It has become an accepted 'truth' in the public discourse that benefits - social, political and financial- accrue from the creation of an ombudsman. Substantial resources have been and continue to be channelled into the creation and provision of ombudsman services in many countries, including the case-study, Ireland. The result is that, in many countries, what has evolved is a community of ombudsmen that includes a variety of types, from the classical parliamentary ombudsman overseeing administrative practices to schemes that exercise sector-specific jurisdictions using a variety of powers provided for through a variety of mandates. There is not an established methodology for evaluating the performance of these ombudsmen. In very few instances has there been an attempt to evaluate several ombudsmen within a state in the context of a national regime. Where this has occurred, it has not been preceded by the establishment of stakeholder perspectives on that methodology. The research undertaken here addresses that gap directly through a form of evaluability assessment of a community of programmes i.e. ombudsman schemes and the sectors in which they operate. The assessment addresses evaluation-related issues of demand, purpose, capacity, location, criteria and regime. The research concludes with a proposed evaluation regime as the optimum means of explaining the issues discovered and extent of the viability of a national evaluation regime .

World-over, E-Government has been recognised as a tool for radically improving the way governments interact with their citizens. While the obvious benefits of E-Government include providing convenience and easy access to customers thereby resulting in improved services to citizens, reduction of costs (by re-deploying resources from back-end processing to front-end customer service); providing easier access to information, increasing transparency and communication between government departments and with the public, the long term benefit of E-Government is also to make it easier for people to conduct their daily lives and business in the nation, thereby making it an attractive location to attract global talent. On the other hand, introducing E-Government requires a transformation in the way the government structure functions – thereby requiring a change in the organisational culture, managerial styles, systems and procedures apart from large financial investments towards technology upgrades. In order to ensure that e-Government is actually bringing about the changes that are desired (via the benefits) it is vital that strict performance measures be instituted on a continuous basis to check the effectiveness of e-Government. This study investigates 8 government departments employing e-Government in Dubai through a case study method and seeks to identify the challenges faced by each department in providing their services to their customers, the performance measures that have been instituted by these departments to evaluate the effectiveness of their e-services and the benefits that they have derived there from. The key challenges and performance issues have been studied and how these challenges could be managed effectively has been analysed. The study utilised the case study method by interviewing key members from each of the 8 departments studied. Important documents were reviewed and the researcher made personal observations from visiting the websites and portals of each of these departments. The results show that while the e-Government initiative in Dubai is quite advanced in comparison with the similar initiatives in countries across the world, there are several challenges faced by these departments. These include – no clear and standardised performance measures being used across the board, lack of technological knowledge and education initiatives for department staff and perhaps not enough organisational learning to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the e-Government Initiative.