Task complexity and different decision criteria for online service acceptance: A comparison of two e-government compliance service domains

Inspired by ever evolving information technologies and the myriad of successful business cases that reap the benefit of new technologies, many governments around the world have jumped on the bandwagon of electronic government (e-Gov). However, there has been little academic research regarding the types and conditions of e-Gov services that are acceptable to the public. This paper synthesizes a model of e-Gov compliance services acceptance by critically integrating prior research along with the distinctive characteristics of the online government services context. The study posits that different levels of task complexity involved in various e-Gov compliance processes can lead citizens to use different decision criteria and empirically examines the differing acceptance decision patterns of potential e-Government service users in two compliance service domains. The results reveal that citizens do adopt different decision criteria for different levels of task complexity, suggesting that functional usefulness of e-Gov services becomes a more important criterion for online services that involve difficult tasks. In contrast, the service provider's competence in online operations becomes a more important factor for simple tasks. Several other findings and future research directions are also discussed.     

高绩效政府网站的潜在安全威胁浅析

高绩效政府网站通过扩展终端设备类型、客户端与服务器交互方式以及系统功能等获得了灵活、快捷等满足大众获取政府信息需求的高绩效特征的同时,也为原本脆弱的政府网站引入了许多新的潜在安全威胁。本文主要从网络层、应用层以及数据层等三个关键层面对这些安全威胁作了初步分析,为提出恰当的安全策略提供设计指南。     

How does e-government use affect citizens’ trust in government? Empirical evidence from China

Although much literature has discussed the potential of e-government for improving citizens’ trust in government, the question of how e-government use affects citizens’ trust in government remains underexplored. To investigate the driving mechanism of the effects of different types of e-government use on trust in government, this research develops a conceptual framework based on the institutional-based trust theory, the process-based trust theory, and the expectancy-disconfirmation model. Based on data collected from 1668 citizen users living in five cities in China, the study verifies the proposed mediated moderation model and then tests the robustness of the results using process analysis. The results reveal that citizens’ use of e-government revitalizes their trust in government indirectly, via influence on citizens’ evaluation of government integrity, performance, and responsiveness from the experience of using e-government, while the mediating effects of citizens’ evaluation of government on relationship between e-government use and public trust are diminished by citizens’ expectations for their government. The analysis also offers strong support for the conclusion that the effects of different types of e-government use on public trust are differentially distributed among multiple levels of governments in China.     

Do-it-yourself services and work-like chores: on civic duties and digital public services

Doing civic duties is neither paid work nor leisure: it is a private, work-like activity. Digital services enrol customers in doing work tasks. Also digital public services delegate work to citizens, but there are important differences between automation for citizens doing their civic duties and services that customers choose to use. In this paper, we discuss how digitally automated services remove some tasks but also introduce new work tasks for citizens and how citizens handle these. We present a study of citizens’ calls to a public service provider (the tax authorities) requesting help carrying out their civic duties. The analysis of citizens’ problems with doing their taxes is a basis for suggesting an alternative design of digital tax services that can increase citizens’ mastery and autonomy when doing their taxes. We suggest an approach for designing coherent tasks for the citizen, and how doing one’s civic duties can be seen as work—and as a part of life. We argue that designing for automated public services need to apply a citizen-centric perspective in order to maintain a basis for citizens to participate in democratic processes in society.     

Does government effort or citizen word-of-mouth determine e-Government service diffusion?

Ranked best in the world for e-Government Readiness in 2002, 2004, and 2005, second in 2006 and third in 2007, Taiwan's experience in promoting e-Government services could provide governments worldwide with practical knowledge for planning and implementation. In general, e-Government services can be seen as innovations for citizens to adopt. This study uses the tax e-filing system (TEFS) in Taiwan as an example and investigates the determinants of citizens' adoption of such an innovative e-Government service. Three diffusion models – the external, internal and mixed influence models – are employed to reveal whether the diffusion of the TEFS in Taiwan is affected by government promotion efforts, interactions among acquaintances or a combination of both. Findings indicate that the influence of acquaintances is the major predictor of Taiwan's TEFS diffusion and the mixed influence model is the best fit. ‘Source-Strategy Fit’ implications are proposed based on this study's findings.     

电子政务软件可靠性评测方法初探

电子政务已经成为政府工作自动化和智能化的重要手段。近年来,中国电子政务软件市场获得了前所未有的发展机遇。随着电子政务软件的飞速发展,软件可靠性成为了建设电子政务的重要指标。软件可靠性测试是保证软件可靠性的有效方法。目前,国内对于电子政务的可靠性研究才刚刚起步,其可靠性测试一般都交给第三方机构。分析当前电子政务软件的可靠性测试特点,基于Musa和Nelson两种可靠性模型提出了一种电子政务软件的可靠性评测方法,从可靠性的评估测试和验证测试两方面具体分析阐述了方法的流程,并使用工具实现。最后用具体案例对方法进行了分析说明。     

An international look at virtual citizenship

Comprehensive strategies in India and Europe guide the movement of government services online. There is no question that the quantity and quality of e-government programs are rapidly increasing. They promise a means to deliver better service at a lowered cost. But no matter how brilliant the idea, it is worthless unless citizens adopt it as an alternative method of transacting with the government. E-government has moved beyond the hype phase. Valuable services are available and citizens are using them. Citizenship might soon be more a matter of your IP (Internet Protocol) address, rather than your physical address.     

The utilization of e‐government services: citizen trust,innovation and acceptance factors*

Abstract. Electronic government, or e‐government, increases the convenience and accessibility of government services and information to citizens. Despite the benefits of e‐government – increased government accountability to citizens, greater public access to information and a more efficient, cost‐effective government – the success and acceptance of e‐government initiatives, such as online voting and licence renewal, are contingent upon citizens’ willingness to adopt this innovation. In order to develop ‘citizen‐centred’ e‐government services that provide participants with accessible, relevant information and quality services that are more expedient than traditional ‘brick and mortar’ transactions, government agencies must first understand the factors that influence citizen adoption of this innovation. This study integrates constructs from the Technology Acceptance Model, Diffusions of Innovation theory and web trust models to form a parsimonious yet comprehensive model of factors that influence citizen adoption of e‐government initiatives. The study was conducted by surveying a broad diversity of citizens at a community event. The findings indicate that perceived ease of use, compatibility and trustworthiness are significant predictors of citizens’ intention to use an e‐government service. Implications of this study for research and practice are presented.     

Investigating the impact of citizens’ trust toward the successful adoption of e-government: A multigroup analysis of gender,age, and internet experience

This research particularly aims to investigate how the individual differences in gender, age, and internet experience influence citizens’ trust in e-government’s adoption. The findings of the study revealed that females are confident and have a more positive evaluation of online services compared to males. Interestingly, this study found that old people display greater trust in e-government as compared to the levels of trust reported by younger people. The results also show that internet experience influences citizens’ trust positively.     

Police message diffusion on Twitter: analysing the reach of social media communications

Social media are becoming increasingly important for communication between government organisations and citizens. Although research on this issue is expanding, the structure of these new communication patterns is still poorly understood. This study contributes to our understanding of these new communication patterns by developing an explanatory model of message diffusion on social media. Messages from 964 Dutch police force Twitter accounts are analysed using trace data drawn from the Twitter^? API to explain why certain police tweets are forwarded and others are not. Based on an iterative human calibration procedure, message topics were automatically coded based on customised lexicons. A principal component analysis of message characteristics generated four distinct patterns of use in (in)personal communication and new/versus reproduced content. Message characteristics were combined with user characteristics in a multilevel logistic general linear model. Our main results show that URLs or use of informal communication increases chances of message forwarding. In addition, contextual factors such as user characteristics impact diffusion probability. Recommendations are discussed for further research into authorship styles and their implications for social media message diffusion. For the police and other government practitioners, a list of recommendation about how to reach a larger number of citizens through social media communications is presented.     

Adoption of e-government services in Turkey

This research aims to investigate underlying factors that play role in citizens' decision to use e-government services in Turkey. UTAUT model which was enriched by introducing Trust of internet and Trust of government factors is used in the study. The model is evaluated through a survey conducted with Turkish citizens who are from different regions of the country. A total of 529 answers collected through purposive sampling and the responses were evaluated with the SEM (Structural Equation Modeling) technique. According to the results, Performance expectancy, Social influence, Facilitating conditions and Trust of Internet were found to have a positive effect on behavioral intention to use e-government services. Additionally, both Trust factors were found to have a positive influence on Performance expectancy of e-government services, a relation which, to our best knowledge, hasn't been tested before in e-government context. Effect of Effort expectancy and Trust of government were found insignificant on behavioral intention. We believe that the findings of this study will guide professionals and policy makers in improving and popularizing e-government services by revealing the citizen's priorities regarding e-government services in Turkey.     

Does public service delivery through new channels promote citizen trust in government? The case of smart devices*

ABSTRACT

From the government’s perspective, it is important to understand the factors that influence effective utilization of new service channels, particularly the use of smart devices. Furthermore, how the utilization of a new channel affects trust in the government is an important performance factor whose linkage mechanism also needs to be investigated. This study collected 417 questionnaires from Korean citizens who communicate with the government via smart devices; the questionnaires were analyzed using structural equation analysis. This research indicates that in order to maximize trust in government, service delivery via smart devices must be designed with a clear understanding of the three significant components of such communication, namely the service, channel, and citizens. The service selected must be appropriate to the characteristics of the channel, and service reform may be necessary, beyond using the channel simply as a service means. Citizens’ ability to utilize the channel must also be fully considered. In order to increase the efficacy of new channel utilization, fast implementation is less important than understanding how to satisfy citizens’ needs regarding use of the public service via a smart device.     

A meta-design approach to the development of e-government services

This paper describes a meta-design approach to the development of online services for citizens of a government agency. The goal is to transfer the development of government-to-citizen services from professional software developers to administrative employees, without forcing employees to acquire any programming skills. The approach encompasses two main phases. The first phase analyzes the different perspectives of the stakeholders involved in service creation and usage – employees, citizens, software developers and human–computer interaction specialists – in order to derive a meta-model of e-government services. The latter applies the meta-model to design and develop an end-user development environment that properly supports employees in creating an instance of the service meta-model, which is then automatically interpreted to generate the service pages for citizens. A pilot application of the proposed approach is illustrated with reference to a specific class of e-government services offered by the Brescia Municipality, even though the approach is general enough to be applied to different kinds of e-government services and application domains. The results of the evaluation with a group of municipality employees provide initial feedback from the government field and show how to proceed along this research direction.     

Channel choice and the digital divide in e-government: the case of Egypt

This paper examines channel choice and the digital divide in Egyptian electronic government or e-government. Citizens have access to a variety of service delivery channels when they initiate contact with their government, ranging from e-government to more traditional channels such as the phone and in-person visits to a government office. This paper examines the extent of use of both contact channels for citizens and the impact of the digital divide on channel use. A public opinion survey of Egyptian citizens was analyzed, and the results showed that there was a digital divide in the use of e-government by citizens. The digital divide also extended to other contact channels such as the phone and when citizens used multiple contact channels for public service delivery. The results of this study imply that for the development of e-government, especially in the context of a developing country such as Egypt, policy-makers need to understand that e-government is one of many channels that citizens can use when they initiate contact with their government. The results of this study should encourage policy-makers to recognize the importance of public service delivery in a multichannel environment. Shirin Madon is the accepting Associate Editor for this article. View all notes     

Application of experiential locus of control to understand users' judgments toward useful experience

Recently, innovative products and services have been changing the way people live their lives. Human–computer interaction (HCI) plays an important role in the development and design of such products and services. However, prior studies did not fully explain how people evaluate their experience when they use a product and service. The research goal of this study is to propose a conceptual model that explains the judgment of experience quality and the judgment criteria. This study suggested two research questions: First, how can we understand users' judgment of good experience? We will suggest a theoretical model that is based on the concept of locus of control (LoC) for explaining users' evaluation of their experience, including the use result and the use process. Second, what are the representative system factors to affect users’ judgment? This study validates the representative system factors that affect the determinants through verifying the conceptual model. Through a pre-study, the representative system features affecting each determinant were derived and hypothesized for the main study. The results showed that experiential LoC was affected both internally and externally by the two determinants. In addition, each of the determinants was affected by the dimension or level of the system features.     

EMUSIM: an integrated emulation and simulation environment for modeling,evaluation, and validation of performance of Cloud computing applications

Cloud computing allows the deployment and delivery of application services for users worldwide. Software as a Service providers with limited upfront budget can take advantage of Cloud computing and lease the required capacity in a pay‐as‐you‐go basis, which also enables flexible and dynamic resource allocation according to service demand. One key challenge potential Cloud customers have before renting resources is to know how their services will behave in a set of resources and the costs involved when growing and shrinking their resource pool. Most of the studies in this area rely on simulation‐based experiments, which consider simplified modeling of applications and computing environment. In order to better predict service's behavior on Cloud platforms, we developed an integrated architecture that is based on both simulation and emulation. The proposed architecture, named EMUSIM, automatically extracts information from application behavior via emulation and then uses this information to generate the corresponding simulation model. We performed experiments using an image processing application as a case study and found that EMUSIM was able to accurately model such application via emulation and use the model to supply information about its potential performance in a Cloud provider. We also discuss our experience using EMUSIM for deploying applications in a real public Cloud provider. EMUSIM is based on an open source software stack and therefore it can be extended for analysis behavior of several other applications. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Citizens’ Adoption Behavior of Mobile Government (mGov): A Cross-Cultural Study

This study aims to address the paradigms of consumers’ adoption behavior for mobile government, posits the factors which pursue citizens’ intention to adopt mobile government services, and reveals the impact of cultural dimensions in perceiving driving factors of mobile government adoption. The mobile government adoption model was developed and tested among users of three different countries, namely Bangladesh, Canada, and Germany. The finding suggests the rationale that cross-cultural differences impact consumers’ perception of mobile government adoption behavior.     

Open innovation and public administration: transformational typologies and business model impacts

Extant research demonstrates that e-Government initiatives often fall short of achieving innovative forms of government and governance due to a techno-centric focus that limits such initiatives to minor improvements in service delivery. While it is evident that innovation is central to modernising and transforming governmental organisations, and that the co-creation of services by public authorities and community groups is an essential component of realising the benefits of investment in information and communication technology, there is little research focusing on the nature of innovation in transforming governmental organisations and services. Addressing this gap in the literature, this paper explores how open innovation strategies can transform public administration by examining how a network of municipalities in Sweden transforms value creation and service delivery by collaborating with each other and with external parties to accelerate the creation and exploitation of innovation. Using a case study with embedded units of analysis, four emerging typologies of governmental transformation based on open innovation are identified. The paper illustrates how these open innovation typologies (i) transform the organisation of the municipalities and (ii) help them deliver high quality co-created services to citizens. By examining the strategic and operational aspects that facilitate such activities, the analysis reveals the impact of open innovation on the business models of public authorities. The paper concludes that open innovation practices represent a more radical manifestation of transformational government than previously envisaged; signalling not only fundamental change in the nature of value creation and service delivery by public authorities, but potentially in the nature of their organisation.     

Key success factors for the launch of government social media platform: Identifying the formation mechanism of continuance intention

Social media has flourished recently, and government agencies across different levels are experimenting with launching government social media (GSM) to socialize government services, processes, and data. Both researchers and practitioners are focusing on understanding the key success factors related to the launch of GSM. This study aims to identify the key success factors by exploring the formation mechanism of individuals' continuous usage intention. Through the theoretical lens of the uses and gratifications theory (UGT), we identify the gratification factors (i.e., information seeking, social activity, content consumption, collective intelligence, and network externality) that stimulate users' continuance intention toward GSM. Furthermore, we draw upon the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) framework to develop a model for exploring the effects of gratification factors (as stimulus in the SOR framework) on individuals' online experiential states (i.e., flow experience and sense of belonging) and, subsequently, their continuance intention. The results of our survey of 336 government microblogging residents indicate that usage continuance intention is in part determined by gratification factors. Furthermore, the associations among gratification factors and users’ continuance intention can be mediated by the sense of belonging and flow experience.     

Senior citizens on Facebook: How do they interact and why?

This study investigated why senior citizens use Facebook and how they participate in specific activities on Facebook in order to gratify their needs. An online survey of 352 senior citizens over 60 years old revealed four primary motivations for using Facebook: social bonding, social bridging, curiosity, and responding to family member requests. The analysis of the relationship between senior citizens' motivations and their participation in activities on Facebook indicates that social bonding is a major motivation for participating in most activities on Facebook. In addition, data reveal that using message-based interactivity features on Facebook (i.e., posting on other people's wall and Facebook chatting with others) leads to greater Facebook use. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of senior citizens' Facebook use as an emerging communication tool.