Technical Factors Affecting the Adoption of E-Government

Abstract: As a major step to development, countries try to implement e-government and encouraging the public to use e-services instead of traditional ways. It is obvious that adoption of e-government has increased in many countries over the world, but the rate of adoption varies from country to country, and also the factors which are affecting the adoption of e-government differ from developing countries to developed countries. The purpose of this research study is to identify and describe the technical factors affecting the adoption of e-government from the management prospective of e-government projects in turn, to enhance the e-services of those projects and to improve the development process of e-government adoption by illustrating the level of importance for technical factors in the current e-government stages. This study has considered Oman government as an example as it hopes to be helpful for other governments which are at the similar level of e-government stages and close circumstances with Oman. This study has found four technical factors that affecting the current adoption of e-government initiative in six government agencies in Oman. Those factors are ICT infrastructure, IT security, IT standards and technical expertise. Moreover, it found that each one of them has a different level of importance in the management process. The most important factor that Oman government needs to be considering in the current stages of e-government is ICT infrastructure. Furthermore, it found two non-technical factors that support these four technical factors to be functioning appropriately which are IT Governance and citizens‘ awareness. This study has brought up different ways of managing these technical factors in order to accomplish the adoption of e-government through these factors which affect the adoption. These different ways are: set a unit as a coordinator to guide the management of these factors to fasten the adoption, with centralized the e-government initiatives the implementation should be decentralized upon the agency itself, setting up framework for example ICT infrastructure framework and security frame work to standardise the processes in a way that assist to speed up e-government adoption, and the last one is to gain experience from pioneers and other consultancy offices. In addition to that, the management of those factors could be affected by external pressures like internet facility in the country, government regulations, the private sectors attraction for technical expertises and citizens‘ awareness about security issues.