Abstract

Previous research on information quality and organizations performance focuses on private sectors and pays little attention to governments and public organizations. To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, e‑Government success literature has rarely investigated information quality as a contributor to the success of e‑Government initiatives in Kuwait. This paper aims to understand the factors that may influence or hinder for enabling e‑Government strategic benefits in Kuwait. Data were collected from 31 employees through one‑on‑one interviews at three e‑Government Kuwaiti agencies namely, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Finance and Public Authority for Civil Communication. The study findings revealed that several themes (i.e. information quality, strategic benefits, and institutional values) were observed to achieve better e‑Government Benefits. The research also reveals some new drivers (Cost saving and customer satisfaction) and barriers (e.g. Nepotism and Wasta) to improving organizational performance. These results and their implications to both theory and practice are described.

Keywords: Information Quality, Organizational performance, E-government, Qualitative research, Kuwait, Arab World.

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Journal Article

Bringing Light into the Shadows: A Qualitative Interview Study on Citizens’ Non‑Adoption of e‑Government pp98-105

Bettina Distel

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Abstract

Despite the growing availability of e‑government services, citizens are still reluctant to use them. Prior research has mostly focused on investigating reasons for e‑government use. Why individuals refrain from using these services seems to be of less scientific interest. The present study sets out to reveal what barriers to e‑government adoption citizens perceive. A qualitative and explorative interview study was conducted with 18 citizens in Germany to better understand how citizens perceive e‑government and what keeps them from using it. The study yields twelve different barriers to e‑government adoption among which no need to use/rare usage of public services, no personal counsellor, and perceptions of convenience are the most important. The results suggest that the characteristics of the services themselves are highly influential for the decision to not use e‑government. In contrast, technological shortcomings like data security or a lack of usability only play a subordinate role.

Keywords: Adoption, non-adoption, channel choice, citizens, Germany, qualitative research

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Journal Issue

Volume 15 Issue 2 / Mar 2017 pp57‑154

Editor: Carl Erik Moe

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Editorial

Chief Editor

Dr Carl Erik Moe is a Professor of Information Systems at the University of Agder, Norway. After serving as Head of Department (HOD) for a number of years, he is back to research and teaching. As HOD he took a leading role developing graduate programs in both Information Systems and Health Informatics, and PhD program in Information Systems as well as promoting and generating research collaboration with local government and industry.

Carl Erik has served as Program Chair of IFIP EGOV 2012. He is an active reviewer for several academic journals. He was one of the founding members of the Scandinavian Workshop on e‑Government, of which he is still very much involved and he has served as leader of the Norwegian Council for Information Science.

Carl Erik’s current research interests include e‑Government covering issues such as Procurement of IS and Policies and Strategies for Digital Government including Open Government and ICT4D, and it includes e‑Health covering issues such as IS in Social Work, Telecare and Information Systems in Integrated Care.

Carl Erik served as Associate Editor on EJEG for several years before taking over as Editor. He welcomes both empirical and conceptual work and case studies with practical implications, and he encourages work on emerging topics and open and smart government. His ambition is to keep up the good academic quality of the journal at the same time as encouraging work in progress and establishing a case section in the journal.