Towards the development of a citizen-centric framework for evaluating the impact of eGovernment: A case study of developing countries

Abstract

eGovernment has emerged as one of the innovative ways of providing information and delivering services to citizens. It is providing governments with new opportunities of bringing services closer to the citizen in cost-effective, efficient and transparent ways. In spite of the implementation of e-government, there is little research that has been conducted in the context of developing countries to benchmark and appraise the impact of e-government on the target groups. Assessment of impact is important to justify public fund expenditure and inform future projects. Most studies on assessment of e-government have been done in developed countries where the context is different from that of developing countries. Therefore, there is need to develop frameworks that are suitable in the context of developing countries. Studies on assessing impact have been done at macro, meso and micro levels. These studies are largely based on supply-side and a few on demand-side with little focus on outcomes and impact. In this paper, we perform an analysis of various proposed e-government assessment frameworks with the aim of identifying and recommending the adoption of a framework that is suitable in the context of a developing country. We propose the adoption of a hybrid framework that amalgamates the frameworks developed by Bhatnagar and Singh and Verdegem et al due to their contextual suitability and citizen-centric approach. This is an exploratory study that lays foundation for further research in the development of an appropriate framework using the proposed approach.