An Empirical Analysis of the Policy Makers Preferences towards e-Government Adoption

Abstract

Over the last several years, advances of Internet and networking technologies (especially e-Government) have pushed the boundaries forward and attracted the attention of governments in developed and developing nations. Government organizations, particularly in the developing world, have realized that the world is changing at an incredible pace because of these technological changes. This realization has led to a strong desire and ambitious vision to empower new technologies in their reform processes. Thus, governments should develop and formulate national strategies and policies to promote information economy and achieve socioeconomic benefits. In doing so, governments can attain a more efficient operations reform and enhance productivity and transparency. To this end, implementing an e-Government system is considered essential to attaining this goal.

The process of innovation in government sectors is still a major challenge for many developing governments. Yemen is a third-world country that is trying to implement a new electronic government system in public agencies

however, as seen in other developing countries, Yemen has faced many failures due to several reasons, most importantly, the high rate of resistance to change by employees in government sector. To this extent, the goal of this research is to investigate the preferences and opinions of various government staff (normal employees, technical staff, and decision makers) toward e-Government system implementation. Policy recommendations are driven based on this aim in terms of e-Government adoption promotion with specific empirical analysis in Yemen. To date, no study, experimental or otherwise, has been conducted in this field. As such, this research will provide valuable insights for the government and expert policy makers concerning research on e-Government in developing countries. This research used quantitative and qualitative methods and applied two recent methodologies to achieve that goal. The first method was Conjoint Analysis (CA), based on Discrete Choice Modeling (DCM) and Random Utility Theory (RUT), with rank-ordered mixed logit model. The second methodology was an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), based on Multi-Criteria Decision Making method (MCDM), to examine government officials opinions in ranking successful factors in the implementation of a robust e-Government in Yemen. To build a policy setting, this study also included heterogeneity into the mixed logit model via a random coefficient setting and the interaction of the identified e-Government attributes with demographics and respondent characteristics. The attributes involved for the conjoint analysis study are e-Government Strategy, Legal framework, Government Electronic Administration Office (GEA), Portal language, Privacy as a proxy of security, Training, and Operational Cost as an annual budget for the e-Government system. Moreover, the factors tested for the analytical hierarchy analysis are Governing factors including (administrative and legislative factors), Organizational factors including (organizational structure and technological factors), and External factors including (citizen-centric and economic factors). The result of the analysis of the conjoint study proved that the privacy of government and personal data clearly exerts the greatest impact on preference structure, followed by a strong legal framework for the implementation of e-Government. However, there was evidence for the cost sensitivity that policy makers experience in this field. Government officials should address this issue through electronic obligation policies for penetration of e-Government. Additionally, respondents preferred implementing the e-Government system with a clear and tailored long-term strategy that outlined different stages of the implementation. The findings of this study are imperative to create policies for enhancing e-Government implementation in Yemen, which should include strengthening the government to adopt the system in government agencies, generating and enabling an environment that supports user access, and expanding e-Government capabilities with reliable and fast online services for citizen. Based on the quantitative findings of the CA and AHP, this study applied a qualitative research method to supplement the empirical results by interviewing decision makers within the Yemen government. The researcher then applied priority settings for policies to drive the Gap Analysis and identify reasons for the mismatch found between the researchs perceptions and realities in Yemen. Ultimately, this study anticipates warranting the need for a supply-based analysis of e-Government adoption by government officials in developing countries, thus, increasing the rate of adoption and reducing the rate of resistance to change to this electronic system of government.