Electronic Government Adoption Based on Citizen-Centric Approach in Regional Government in Developing Countries: The Case of Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI)

Abstract

In the latter part of the 20th century ICT has been broadly employed in an effort to enhance the quality of service provision to the public. In the light of this, both public and private sectors have recognised the necessity of adopting technology and its applications in their potential. However, using ICT facilities for development facing various factors such as; establishing technical infrastructures, users and employees’ awareness, legal framework for interactions with public authorities, security, privacy, trust, digital divide, along with organizational issues should be taken into consideration. Therefore, all these challenges should be considered and discussed if continuing progress is to be maintained because missing a few issues and only discussing some of them will lead to a waste of resources. Currently, most of the developing countries suffer from the lack of transparency, accountability, and increasing corruption in government administration. E-government has appeared as a potential solution to reduce the level of corruption by enhancing the services to its citizens effectively and efficiently. Furthermore, e-government has the potential to enhance and organise the relationships between stakeholders which include; citizens, government, and business. So, thriving implementation of e-government will improve accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness of government institutions and also may decrease corruption at both federal and regional levels. This research proposes a novel e-government stage model based on the citizen’s participation of improvements in the delivery of governmental services. In other words, find the importance of putting citizens’ insights and their requirements in the context of e-government development along with the potential use of a multi-channel delivery of services. It is expected that the model will enable more transparent and effective communications with businesses. Thereby, reducing bureaucracy and by implication, may result in a reduction in corruption. To accomplish this, the researcher investigates in the literature to find out the existing models and experiences in the area of e-government in order to identify the drawbacks reasons and limitations of the failure. The researcher also set out to investigate and analyse iii one of the well established e-government stage models, to identify possible opportunities to adopt for use in regional government in developing countries. The proposed model has been evaluated by adapting the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) decision making method and integrating it with the SWOT analysis method. SWOT factors were identified through interviews with experts from various ministries in the KRG. The proposed model were evaluated by adopting a qualitative case study strategy such as IT projects, taking the expert’s opinion of the proposed model by using qualitative method. Moreover the researcher, by using a qualitative case study strategy such as the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), observes the proposed model in various government institutions in the KRI. The analysis of pragmatic data leads to a narrative inclusive model for e-government initiatives in the public sector that can be assisted in different ways. The advantage of this model is to decrease the uncertainty of e-government implementation in the public sector by recognising the consequence of the institutional readiness, adoption processes, the needs of ICT tools, and the factors that influence the implementation process. The model might also assist policy makers in government to offer a clear vision for e-government. Ultimately, any conclusions could be useful to other researchers in the developing world who are seeking to explore the potential of similar initiatives.