Service Quality between e-Government Users and Administrators

Abstract

Governments worldwide increasingly apply Internet technology to enhance and leverage their services to citizens. Taiwan has a strong ICT (information and communications technology) sector, and thus its government strives to improve its service quality and reduce operational costs by adopting advanced information technologies [1]. Taiwan has previously put many public services online through the MyEGov (www.gov.tw) portal built in 2002 by the Research, Development and Evaluation Commission (RDEC). The MyEGov portal is intended to be the entry point for all online public services, and is designed to provide a focal point for collecting government information and services. However, since different government agencies provide information and services independently on MyEGov, the scattered services cannot fulfill citizen demand for high quality e-Government service. Even though more than 80% of Taiwanese people are aware of this government website, only 8% of them ever use it to access services. Therefore, building quality services that encourage citizen uptake is becoming a major challenge for administrators of the MyEGov portal. This study addresses the e-Government issue and explores the quality divide caused by perceived differences between users and administrators of the MyEGov portal. To understand how governments can successfully implement comprehensive government service relevant to citizens, a survey of both users and administrators is performed to review the MyEGov portal service quality. The investigation instrument is based on the conceptual model of service quality proposed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry [2,3]. This work develops a model to assess user intention of continuing to use the MyEGov portal by identifying major service quality variables of the website, and analyzes the impact of these variables on user intention of continued use of the MyEGov portal. This study also provides a valuable reference for governmental officials and practitioners to understand and improve website practice by identifying the major perceived differences (gaps) between the users and administrators of the e-Government portal that cause low website usage.