An Investigation of the E-Services Quality provided by Kuwait Government Portal

Abstract

The unlimited development and extensive use of ICT has helped governments around the world to innovate and improve public services through the advantages of egovernment services. First step of this study was an attempt to measure the quality of e-services provided by the usercentric Kuwait Government Online Portal through investigating the quality standards of e-government services and different quality dimensions of e-government services as identified in the literature. Post examining E-service quality models one model was selected and used to validate the quality of e-services provided by the Kuwait Government Online Portal. A survey was presented to 486 valid participants through an online questionnaire. The result of the survey in general showed a diverse quality results which was around the range of “Neutral”. This could be due to having a large number of diverse e-services provided by more than 60 government agencies all enclosed in the Kuwait Government Online Portal. The second step of this study was to validate the result from the survey through conducting a semi-structured interviews by the authors with three top management officials at the government entity responsible for implementing e-government program in Kuwait. The interviews have revealed interesting insights, namely the existence of strong presence of silo-mentality in government entities which could be the main cause for not achieving integrated e-services. Future work will include studying specific e-services and defining suitable categorization that helps in determining their quality. The model that was used in this study was based on high-level dimensions that needs to be broken down into subdiminutions that could contribute to increasing the accuracy of the results of e-service quality evaluation. In addition, measuring the effect of silo-mentality of the government over the quality of e-services in Kuwait is desirable.