Exploring Factors for E-Government Innovation and Transformation in Tanzania

Abstract

This study explores factors for e-government innovation and transformation in Tanzania. It starts by examining the challenges and opportunities for e-government innovation and transformation in Tanzania. The government ambition to transform the administrative operations and to ensure transparency and accountability have grown over the years and now become evident. The efforts exerted for establishing an efficient framework for e-government in Tanzania are of great significance for the reason that it lowers the operating and production cost and increases efficiency and transparency for the better. The study begins by exploring the critical challenges and opportunities facing the central and local government, social network groups as well as private institutions that are struggling for online services using e-government platform. At the outset, the conceptual framework presented was synthesized with four factors and analyzed to explain the challenges and opportunities. The study uses the SWOT method to analyze internal weakness and the external threats that were critical during the initiation, selection, development and implementation of e-government. The author uses the principal component factor analysis to examine the interrelationship between the social, resources, technology and transformational drivers. Data were collected by way of focus group discussions, field observations as well as documentary review. The statistical software package SPSS version 22 was employed in this study to carry out the factor analysis for each item using Oblimin with Kaiser Normalization. The results drawn support the research questions. To be more precise, for the challenges, I have found five factors

for the opportunity, I have found seven factors and for the key drivers, I have worked out five factors. The analysis shows that the challenging factors made an e-government process stagnant, resulting in more corruption and conflict of competing interests, on the whole, and thus retarding the process of transformation. The opportunities and the key drivers are suggestive devices for playing a significant role in all spheres of contemporary societal changes within institutional setups and settings to concretize e-government materialization in Tanzania. An implication for governmental institutions, however, is strongly advised to view this e-government roadmap as a suggestion and embryonic dynamics to embrace e-government policy innovation that would enable the acceleration of e-government transformation process in Tanzania.