E-government Strategic Plan Implementation in Tanzania: Learning from Challenges and Experiences from Kenya, Korea, India and Malaysia

Abstract

For the past two years, the implementation of e-government strategic plan in Tanzania has been in a mixed approach resulting from lack of conceptual understanding: firstly, is the lack of a conceptual framework as a baseline for e-government strategic plan implementation. Secondly, is the mixture of understanding the two concepts, the institutional accountability and institutional ownership. The failure to understand these two concepts obscures the institutional process efforts to implement the e-government strategic plan. The study pointed out that such complexities continue to disrupt the institutional efforts in dealing with competing conflicts of interest, corruptions and delays between institutions process. resources and the enhancement of guidelines factors. Thirdly, is the idea that the implementation of the e-government strategic plan can be explained in view of mono-tasking; in a sense that tasks of developing the e-government strategic plan focusing on the guidelines, the institutional process, and enhancing the resource factors are reduced into a single task. In additional, the failure of e-government strategic plan was regarded as a linear timeline factor: for instance, there is a persisting lack of guidelines, resources and institutional process framework in the development of the specific sectorial guidelines. The aim of this research is twofold: First, is to identify factors that affect the successful implementation of the e-government strategic plan. Second is to suggest a conceptual framework for implementing the e-government strategic plan in the context of Tanzania. To do so, the current study examines these factors using a descriptive cases drawn from four countries: Kenya, Korea, Malaysia, and India. The study analyzed different models from these cited countries and suggests a spectacular method on how the e-government conceptual framework can be established within their effort of achieving the e-government strategic plan. The study concluded that a conflict of interest, IT/e-government system ownership and accountability, within the institutions and the private sector were the stumbling block to forward the implementation of the e-government strategy plan. For the success of implementing the e-government strategic plan more efficiently therefore, ties with guidelines, resources and institutional process that should be monitored by e-government task force to eliminate barriers and forge ahead to results oriented. The proposed conceptual framework is inevitable to address the problems that a parasite to the implementation of the e-government strategic plan in Tanzania.