On obtaining a stable vote ranking methodology for implementing e-government strategies

Abstract

Recently, a lot of studies have been conducted on what factors and strategies affect the successful implementation of e-government programs around the world. Most of these studies lack a clear plan for selecting strategies and setting their priorities for implementation and thus ensuring the success of such programs. In a previous study conducted by the same researchers, these strategies and their implementation priorities were defined based on the opinions of 20 government experts who were interviewed and asked to rank the strategies based on 23 factors resulting from the SWOT analysis that summarizes the context under study, specifically Jordan as an example of a developing country. However, there is a problem that still exists facing many of these countries, which is the divergence of opinions of government decision-makers in ranking their priorities for implementing various government strategies, including e-government programs, and thus affecting the quality of the strategic decision taken. Therefore, this study will address the problem by finding a new methodology that enables to obtain a stable ranking of strategies in order to make the best strategic decision to implement the e-government program in the context under study or other similar contexts in the region. This study assumes that we can obtain a stable ranking of strategies related to implementing e-government programs when we only use the SWOT factors that produce stable ranking votes. To validate this, three main experiments with a number of proposed scenarios were developed to aggregate expert rankings on the implementation of e-government strategies using some common vote ranking methods, namely, parametric methods such as Borda, Copeland and Maximin, and algorithmic methods such as Stuart and Robust Rank Aggregation (RRA). Then, to evaluate the results of the three experimental scenarios, two new measures were proposed, namely the Similarity Index measure and the Matching Index measure. The results confirmed the validity of the assumption regarding the importance of obtaining a stable vote ranking in selecting the best strategies to ensure success in implementing e-government program in the context under study or other similar contexts in the region.