Year

2013

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

School of Information Systems and Technology

Abstract

The increasing number and sophistication of e-commerce sites has led many people to expect the same level of personalized services from their governments. As a consequence, governments have recently implemented e-government initiatives both to meet this expectation and to achieve significant potential benefits. One important benefit is the value that the public, and in particularly citizens, receives. By adopting an e-government system (EGS), a government aims to meet its citizens’ needs and to provide them with better services, through increasing their convenience and satisfaction, saving them time and effort, and reducing their costs and dependencies on others. Fulfilling this aim is considered to be a critical success factor for e-government initiatives. However, there is a need to ensure that this objective has been fulfilled. This can be achieved by using an assessment tool based on citizens’ perceptions of the output quality of what they have received from the EGS, and the benefits they obtained as a consequence of their use of the system. However, there is a lack of a suitable, reliably validated tool which fits the e-government context.

Despite the existing arguments of the importance of EGS in saving citizens’ time and effort, there is a lack of studies that explicitly incorporate citizens’ obtained benefits, in particular the tangible ones, in their citizen-centric models. The assessment tools used from citizens’ perspective mostly measure their behaviors, their behavioral intentions, and in some cases, their satisfaction. It appears that, there are no adequate validated models that explicitly investigate individuals’ increased efficiency or the overall consequences of using an EGS. Therefore, we need to fill this gap by developing a comprehensive model that can be used with its measurement instrument to evaluate the success of an EGS by assessing the EGS output quality or effectiveness, citizens’ obtained net benefit, their behavior, and behavioral intention to use an EGS. The developed model study can be used measure to directly evaluate citizens’ benefits obtained from using an EGS while regarding the Tangible Benefits as the most influential concept that promotes EGS adoption and leads to Satisfaction. We also consider in our conceptual model other factors of individuals’ attributes which impact their use intentions.

This study also contributes to theory in that it presents a detailed theoretical discussion to synthesize the literature and provide a macro-level view. It provides a comprehensive explanation of the e-government success literature in terms of what citizens obtain when using an EGS. It also helps in understanding the concept of success and its relationships with the other determining factors in an online ‘voluntary individual use’ environment in general and in the e-government context in particular. The proposed model, together with its measurement instrument, will act as an assessment tool to identify whether a government fulfilled its goals in providing a ‘good quality’, effective EGS.

Kuwait EGS is used as an example of developing countries EGSs. A developing country was chosen because, in general, developing countries have significant shortcomings in the quality of government services provided to citizens, such as excessive bureaucracy, administrative burdens, nepotism, lost or inadequately completed tasks, etc. It is envisaged that this model could be used for evaluating other EGS in developing and developed countries. Consequently, the change in citizens’ perceptions, brought about by introducing an EGS, is likely to be more obvious in such developing countries than elsewhere. The model is validated quantitatively using the Partial Least Squares (PLS) path modeling approach. The results show that our proposed conceptual model is by and large supported.

FoR codes (2008)

0806 INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Share

COinS
 

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.