A Sustainability-Driven E-Government Maturity Model (SDEGM) from the Perspectives of Developing Countries

Abstract

E-government has become an essential means for delivering government services in effective, efficient and transparent way. While the implementation and adoption of the e-government services have been rapidly expanding, the governments of the developing countries are facing enormous challenge to make them sustainable. The sustainable e-government services require high level of agility and elasticity while keeping the government expenses within the budget. Traditional e-government projects have become more expensive and less affordable for the countries those have tight budget and resource constraints they require more time and more money to deploy. Beside this, sustainability of the e-government has been affected by the different factors, i.e. technology centric e-government design, human resources, access to the information communication technology and digital divide. Along with these factors, e-government maturity model has been identified in the existing literature as a major contributor of the e-government project failure. Studies shows that the development of the e-government projects in the developing countries does not align with the stages defined by the existing e-government maturity models. To verify the findings of the previous studies, we have critically reviewed the existing maturity models for their impact and contribution on sustainability of the e-government projects and made several observations, i.e. lack of detailed activities, technology-centric nature, emphasis on implementation, and lack of an adoption perspective. The review showed that it is imperative to develop a new maturity model in order to deliver sustainable e-government services in the context of the developing countries. Therefore, this research contributes towards proposing a sustainability-driven e-government maturity model (SDEGM) to design and deliver sustainable e-government services. The SDEGM adopts holistic approach of e-government sustainability that gives equal importance to the implementation and adoption dimension of the e-government services. Five determinants are considered, i.e. a detailed process, streamlined services, agile accessibility, use of state-of-the-art technology, and trust and awareness for a sustainable e-government services from the perspective of developing countries. To guide the government in e-government implementation process, SDEGM introduces list of concepts, and assimilation process. The concepts supports government to define different requirements, i.e. goal, approach, services, stakeholders and risks. Similarly the assimilation process serves as a detailed strategic guide to implement SDEGM. The SDEGM is evaluated through real e-government project in Nepal by following empirical investigation that adopts methodological triangulation. Since the sustainability has been defined from the different perspectives, i.e. implementation and adoption, the methodology employed to evaluate each dimension also differs. The triangulation includes, case-study, expert opinion and survey methods. Implementation dimension of the SDEGM has been evaluated by adopting the case-study method that verifies whether the sustainability goal of SDEGM, i.e. cost, time, usability and adoptability have been met or not. Similarly, survey method has been adopted to evaluate the sustainability of the SDEGM from the adoption or user perspectives that evaluates if the government services are aligned with the user requirements. Finally, the expert opinion is used to generalize the findings and validating the model. The empirical research findings confirm that the proposed model is able to deliver sustainable e-government services.