DOI
https://doi.org/10.25772/FG79-J196
Defense Date
2012
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
Information Systems
First Advisor
H. Roland Weistroffer
Second Advisor
Allen S. Lee
Abstract
As a result of the increasing development in the field of Information Systems (IS) in the last decades, new concepts have appeared to serve specific requirements and needs (Smith 2010; Almarabeh and AbuAli 2010). E-government is one of these concepts, which appeared in 1993 (Silva 2006) to become one of the main tools for governments around the world to enhance the services provided by governments and their agencies (Atallah 2001). Investigating the literature shows that there are common issues in all e-government implementation projects which can be summarized as follows: 1) e-government implementation projects in their nature are vast, and usually their success is critical for the country. 2) As the factors affecting the success of the implementation vary from different perspectives such technical, human, and political perspectives, many overlaps and contradictions may appear while maintaining the success factors (West 2006). 3). Despite this verity in the perspectives, e-government implementation project in general should be treated as one unit, and success factors from all perspectives should be considered together in order to have a successful project (Cater et al. 2004). 4) The size of e-government projects and the complexity resulted from perspectives verity have created the need not only for identifying the success factors related to the process of e-government implementation, but also for creating frameworks for managing the implementation process (Chen et al. 2009). In this research, a holistic framework for e-government implementation that considers the complexity of having several perspectives affecting the implementation process during its stages is proposed. We claim that this would solve the expected conflicts that may appear while considering different success factors from different perspectives, and it is supposed to be in compliance with the environment’s situation. Approaching this problem would be an added value to the literature of e-government implementation and the literature of the IS field in general because the claimed holistic framework for e-government implementation is not addressed as an academic research. Also, targeting this problem is distinguished from the sort of problem that a government agency or its consultants would themselves be working on by being a generic framework that fits all countries’ situations, and by considering all perspectives rather than focusing only on delivering the project requirements. In order to achieve this, three artifacts are proposed in this research using Design Science discipline as guidelines for designing these artifacts which are: 1) designing a model represents the success factors for e-government implementation as extracted from the literature, 2) creating a framework for the success process of e-government implementation, and 3) designing a physical instantiation for part of the project of e-government implementation in Saudi Arabia in order to evaluate the proposed framework. The findings of evaluating the proposed framework show tangible improvements in the implementation progress. Because e-government implementation projects are influenced by their environment, the results of this evaluation can be generalized only to other environments similar to Saudi Arabia, and determining the applicability of the proposed framework to other regions is left to future researches.
Rights
© The Author
Is Part Of
VCU University Archives
Is Part Of
VCU Theses and Dissertations
Date of Submission
April 2012