Mechanisms underpinning the usage of e-government services by businesses: A proposal based on previous empirical research

Martha Liliana Correa Ospina,Beatriz Helena Díaz Pinzón,Deepak Saxena

doi:10.29379/jedem.v13i2.685

Abstract

For many years, the public sector has been undergoing digital transformation. Information and communication technologies (ICT) have offered new ways of interaction between governments and their constituents. However, governments face different challenges to migrate users towards digital channels and electronic documents, which are believed to be more cost-efficient for all stakeholders. Despite a plethora of empirical research conducted towards the identification of factors that influence e-government services usage by businesses, there seems to be a lack of 'holistic' understanding in the absence of systematic literature reviews. This paper aims to contribute by hypothesizing a set of mechanisms based on a critical realist process of retroduction. We argue that the factors identified in previous research are a manifestation of mechanisms. Such mechanisms might explain businesses’ usage of ICT when interacting with governments, whether in the context of incidental situations or regular administrative tasks (through online self-service applications) or regular exchange of information (through inter-organizational e-services).

Highlights

In the information systems (IS) field, the adoption of technology is an area that has received wide attention
We identified mechanisms that would explain why and under what circumstances businesses adopt and use e-government services based on a critical realist process of retroduction (Saxena, 2019)
We presented an overview of 38 empirical papers studying the usage of e-Government services by businesses

Summary

Introduction

In the information systems (IS) field, the adoption of technology is an area that has received wide attention. Various models have been proposed and validated within several contexts and towards the usage of different technologies. The public sector has been using information and communication technologies as part of digital transformation (Eggers & Bellman, 2015; MacDonald, 2017; Mergel et al, 2018) to improve service delivery and its own internal efficiency, often under the e-government initiatives. There is a growing body of academic literature on e-government and on the adoption of e-government services. Since the success of any digital transformation initiative strongly relies on its usage, governments devise strategies to increase the usage of e-government services. The supply-oriented approach in the design and implementation of electronic services seems to be still dominant, which is believed to affect the usage of public e-services (Scholta et al, 2020)

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