Year

2013

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

School of Information Systems and Technology

Abstract

Electronic government (or, e-government) aims to provide comprehensive and timely public services to citizens through the adoption, use and management of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in government. In this thesis I hold that e-government benefits realization, therefore, critically depends on citizens’ satisfactory experience and “continuance” (or, continuing use) of e-government services. Despite the rapid growth in e-government research and practice, problems of low-level egovernment use, especially more advanced transactional services, have not been systematically studied in e-government research literature.

To fill this gap, this empirical research draws from Oliver’s (1980) expectation confirmation theory and IS continuance literature to develop a better theoretical explanation for the problem of low-level e-government use. The “IS continuance” research finds “the substantive differences” in construct between initial IS adoption/use and IS continuance over time. This research has constructed a new research model for citizens’ continuance of e-government services. Furthermore, the new research model was empirically tested using a structural equation modelling (SEM) approach in the research context of Saudi transactional e-services provided via the Saudi Ministry of Higher Education’s integrated interoperable portal. An online survey collected 846 survey returns from 8,175 Saudi citizens, who comprise the entire population of Saudi students studying in Australia.

SEM and multiple regressions analysis results indicate that 42% of the variance of egovernment continuance is explained by the model constructs. SEM results provide strong evidence for statistically highly significant positive correlations between citizens’ continuance of e-government services and three of its antecedents: service quality, user satisfaction, and intention to use. While statistically significant, an antecedent, habit, is not found to strongly associate with e-government continuance. I hold that the research findings have public policy implications. Government needs to pay greater attention to e-service governance and strategic management of both government supply-side (quality of e-government services to citizens) and citizen demand-side (intention to use and satisfaction with e-government services) which are both technological and organizational policy issues in order to enhance and sustain citizens’ continuing use of e-government services for greater e-government benefits realization.

FoR codes (2008)

0806 INFORMATION SYSTEMS, 080609 Information Systems Management

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Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Wollongong.