Tarun Abhichandani

Assessing User Satisfaction of E-Government Services: Development and Testing of Quality-in-Use Satisfaction with Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS)

The public sector provides a variety of services to citizens. The delivery of information for these services over electronic means such as the Internet forms an important component of e-government strategy. However, providing information is not enough; it is imperative that this delivery satisfies customers of government services. This study focuses on evaluating a citizen-centric approach in the Advanced Travel Information Systems (ATIS) domain, a form of government-citizen information service. This paper summarizes two phases of research, including findings from the first phase. It details the structure and results of the preliminary study (n=71) of usability that was conducted in two major metropolitan areas — Los Angeles and Minneapolis. Based on findings from phase I; a more comprehensive concept of overall satisfaction with these services has been developed. The paper details this satisfaction measure and future directions for the study.

Design and development of a SIP-based video conferencing application

Media communication using SIP is providing us with capabilities to architect applications over ubiquitous platforms including the Internet. Although there are certain attempts to make media-enabled applications, there exists a need to deploy security and directory features that constitute middleware services. The software application, described in the paper, is part of a research initiative in Internet2 community to deploy middleware services on video conferencing application. The paper describes the architecture of a Java-based SIP Client and the results of interoperability tests between four SIP user agents. Efforts are being made to enable the application with secured middleware features.

Secured video conferencing desktop client for telemedicine

As a result of growing interest in telemedicine during the last decade, we have seen the development and deployment of several video conferencing telemedicine applications during recent years. Deployment of these applications was on ISDN lines or dedicated circuits since the bandwidth, security, and privacy have been the biggest concern in telemedicine. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling standard that attracts telemedicine application developers since SIP was designed for multimedia communications over IP-based networks and has inherent native mode security mechanisms built in. We have developed a SIP-based video conferencing application that runs over the Internet and can provide authentication using MD5 Digest hashing mechanism. This client is designed to provide voice and video services using SIP, currently being standardized by IETF. The client is also integrated with directory service designed on commObject architecture. The video conferencing client performance and interoperability has been successfully tested. We are now working on deploying it in a telemedicine environment. In a telemedicine setting we will gather data from users in order to evaluate user satisfaction for both physicians and patients. There are additional features we have identified that can enhance the patient physician communication and they will be obtained easily from our client in the future.

Exploratory factor analysis of advanced traveller online services

Increasing usage of technology in various government services is resulting in novel applications for augmenting the efficiency and convenience of citizen-related services. Studies that measure the effects of such provisions play an important role in disseminating the expectations from these services. This study evaluates one of such digital deliveries (i.e., ATIS) to objectively and subjectively examine the performances in satisfying the information needs of citizens. Online surveys in two US metropolitan cities, Los Angeles (n = 155) and Minneapolis (n = 246), were conducted. This study details the exploratory factor analysis that was conducted and compares it with the confirmatory analysis that had been conducted in the earlier stages of this research. In general the results were consistent, though the factor loadings were more closely aligned with the confirmatory analysis for Minneapolis, though markedly less so for the Los Angeles survey respondents. Such differences may be due to the larger transit usage of the Minnesota sample, as well as differences in sociodemographic characteristics.