Government e-service delivery identification of success factors from citizens' perspective

Abstract: The successful adoption of new technologies helps governments achieve efficiency in their implementation and delivery of public services to citizens. The objective behind various e-government initiatives has shifted in recent years towards establishing services that cater more to citizens' needs and offer greater accessibility. As a result, it is necessary to develop a well-founded theoretical framework to measure the success of such initiatives. The purpose of this thesis is to identify the success factors behind governmental e-service delivery from a citizen viewpoint. This research identifies and discusses three theoretical perspectives in approaching the research problem: IS and e-commerce success, success variables, and e-government success evaluation. A theoretical framework was developed to evaluate e-service delivery success. Initially, DeLone and McLean's IS success model (1992) was used as the base model for this research. Additional variables were incorporated into the model from several disciplines (IS, e-commerce, and marketing), and re-specifications and extensions were made to develop a proposed success model for government e- services. Citizen satisfaction was proposed as a measure of e-government success, and its relationships were hypothesized with e-government system quality, information quality, e-service quality, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and citizen trust. Fourteen hypotheses were formulated to test the proposed research model. To test the proposed model, government e-tax services in Sweden was chosen as the application area, and a quantitative approach was deemed better suited to test the developed research model empirically. The Web site of the Swedish Tax Authority, Skatteverket (http://www.skatteverket.se) was selected, since in addition to serving as a site at which citizens can file their taxes; it also provides a number of other tax-related services. An online survey was conducted among users of the Web site, and data was collected from municipalities in all regions of Sweden. The prerequisite for qualifying a survey respondent was experience and familiarity with the Web site. Multivariate analysis and structural equation modeling were chosen as the statistical analysis techniques. The analytical results confirm most of the proposed relationships within the model. These results indicate that several theoretical components from Information Systems (IS), e-commerce, and marketing theory are applicable in the context of government-to-citizen (G2C) services, and specifically, the delivery of government e-tax service. The study's results further demonstrated that perceived usefulness of the e-tax filing system is the most important variable among the determinants of citizen satisfaction. A key finding is that no direct relationship was found between system, information and e-service quality and citizen satisfaction, indicating these quality criteria are not directly determining satisfaction with e-tax services. Information quality was found to have a direct relationship with perceived usefulness which in turn affects citizen satisfaction. It was also found that there is a very strong positive relationship between system and e- service quality with perceived ease of use; and between perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. A direct and positive relationship was also found between perceived ease of use and trust; and trust has an impact on both perceived usefulness and citizen satisfaction. The results further indicate that a degree of overlap exists between system and e-service quality in the context of e-tax services, a situation that warrants further exploration.