critical factors facilitating online services delivery: a cross-country study
TRANSCRIPT
Critical factors facilitating online services delivery A cross-country study
Ngoc Anh Nguyen
Graduate School of Asia Pacific Studies, Waseda University
Tokyo, Japan
Abstract— E-services are those public services provided by
government in the form of electronic delivery. Successfully
implementing e-services brings huge benefits and opportunities
for social and economic development. However, online services
adoption is a complex multi-stage process in which contains a
huge amount of risks and challenges. In order to overcome the
barriers and fulfill the mission of electronic services, it is
obviously necessary to address determinants that affect online
services growth, not only from technical aspects but also from
organizational and environmental perspectives. The objective of
this research is to provide a more comprehensive outlook on
critical determinants of e-services delivery at national level. The
result of data analysis emphasizes the importance of management
optimization, government leadership and regulatory environment
to online services development; and implies that the different
level of ICT infrastructure between countries is not statistically
significant contributing to e-services delivery. The findings are
useful for policy makers in developing e-government
development strategy.
Keywords—online services delivery; technology-organization-
environment framework; e-services; management optimization;
government CIO
I. INTRODUCTION
The term of e-service (short for electronic service) or internet service, online service is defined as: ―the use of ICT by governments to deliver public services at national level‖ [1] or: ―deeds, efforts or performances whose delivery is mediated by information technology (including the Web, information kiosks and mobile devices). Such e-service includes the service element of e-tailing, customer support and service, and service delivery‖ [2]. Other scholars and organizations have their own definition for this concept, but the common theme in these definitions is the use of ICT’s advantages to enhance public service delivery. In the scope of this paper, e-services are those public services provided by government in the form of electronic delivery.
Online services are expected to reduce operating cost by providing information in time-saving and accurate fashion; enhance public services availability by allowing anywhere, anytime access; improve government’s transparency; and increase interactivity between governments and stakeholders by encouraging citizen and business to participate into government activities. Recognizing such benefits of e-services many governments worldwide have invested resources into
Fig. 1. Online services distribution [1].
building online applications. As shown in Fig. 1, by the year 2014, 100% of United Nation Member States have a website which reflects the movement towards a high level of online connectivity [1].
However, ICT adoption is not a straightforward way. The growth of e-government, in particularly e-services, has undergone a complex multi-stage process in which contains a huge amount of risks and challenges. In many scenarios, the user acceptance level of new adopted system may increases at first because of the presence of strong promotions and mandatory instructions but then fell down dramatically when changes are encountered in later stages [3]. Specifically, former researchers have claimed that not all e-government projects are successful. By examining 40 reports on e-government cases in developing countries, [4] has argued that only 15% of e-government projects were considered as successes. He has also contended that the high rate of failures is caused mainly by three kinds of gap, namely: hard-soft gap, public-private gap and country-context gap. According to [5], despite of several improvements in ICT infrastructure, most of developing and emerging economies are still lagging behind in leveraging ICT capacity for economic and social development. Until 2014, the majority of United Nation Member States remain at low or intermediate levels of e-services development, as demonstrated in Fig.1. Even in the case of high developed countries where advance ICT infrastructure has been implemented, moving to higher level of e-services is still coping with various issues such as security and privacy, high-level political support, regulatory environment, organization management, leadership commitment, and so on [1].
Technological •ICT Infrastructure
Organizational
•Government CIO
•Management Optimization
Environmental •ICT Legal Environment
In order to overcome the barriers and fulfill the mission of e-services, it is obviously necessary to address determinants that affect online services growth, not only from technical aspects but also from organizational and environmental perspectives. In addition, since there is no single e-government implementation model that would be able to apply for all countries, identifying the characteristics of e-services adoption process for each individual economy is crucial.
A set of different determinants of e-government development, in particularly e-services acceleration, have been evaluated in past researches and case studies. Concerning about e-government maturity, several cross-national studies have been conducted. By examining a 5-year panel data of 50 selected developing countries, [6] drew out a conclusion that availability of quality human resource, technological infrastructure, innovative capability, national income, regulation environment, and corruption levels are significant factors impacting to country’s e-government maturity level. A similar result has been found by [7] in their longitudinal study about the growth of global e-government. [8] has utilized the growth theory and the theory of complementarities to research about the impact of different aspects of governance including political, institutional and economic to the development of e-government. There have been also a number of studies focusing on several case studies which provided a picture about e-government adoption activities in a certain country: obstacles of e-government service delivery in Iran [9]; factors determining e-government success in Saudi-Arabia [10]; the effect of attitude towards adoption of e-procurement for public sector in Malaysia [11]; individual citizen’s intention to adopt e-services in Netherlands [12]; and so on.
There is a substantial body of literature about the adoption of e-government and e-services from the perspectives of technological, user behavior and attitude, government quality, strategy and policy and so on, however little published cross-country study has been done on the impacts of internal management process and government leadership issues on online services development. This limitation came from the lack of national-scope empirical data which could be able to measure these organizational aspects. In addition, there are very few studies on e-government which use rich sources of secondary data for cross country studies [13].
Base on the above discussion, the objective of this research is to provide a more comprehensive outlook on critical determinants of e-services development at global level. Two research questions need to be answered are: What are effects to the growth of online services delivery causing by different technological, organizational and environmental factors; and how these effects differ between developed countries and developing countries. To solve these questions, the author will employ the Technology - Organization - Environment framework to develop the research model and hypothesis, then a panel data of 38 countries in the period of 4 years, from 2011 to 2014 will be used for validation. The data sources used for this research are reliable secondary data from World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report and IAC-Waseda E-government Ranking.
The rests of this paper are organized as follow: the next section is about research development including research model, hypothesis; the research continues with methodology and data analysis; and finally conclude by discussion and future research suggestions.
II. RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT AND HYPOTHESES
The research is grounded on technology–organization–environment (TOE) framework with the intention of identifying various factors affect to e-services development process. The model was introduced in Tornatzky and Fleischer’s book namely ―The Processes of Technological Innovation‖ in 1990 which demonstrates how different elements have influences to a firm’s decision of technological innovation adoption. According to authors, those elements can be categorized into 3 broad contexts: technological, organizational and environmental. In general, these three groups demonstrate ―both constraints and opportunities for technological innovation‖ [14]. Most of studies employing TOE framework were conducted at firm level to evaluate the influences of technological, organizational and environmental factors on adoption of different information systems(EDI [15], e-business [16], e-commerce [17], and so on). Each researcher has produced his own set of parameters for the three groups depending on each study’s scenario. A few studies have been found examining on how TOE elements affect to the technological adoption process at national scope. A country can be seen as an organization of which its technological implementation level is achieved under the impacts of that country’s economic status, ICT infrastructure, human capitals, institutional, national policy and others factors which can be similarly found within firm context. Hence, this research will be extended to the national level which aims to provide a comprehensive investigation about how online government services are adopting in a country. The conceptual model for examining determinants of online services delivery is proposed and demonstrated in Fig. 2.
Fig. 2. Determinants model for online services delivery.
Online services development
The model consists of 3 domains impacting to online services growth, each of them is explained as below:
A. Technological context
The technological context refers to technologies relevant to firm which is currently adopting by firm (internal) or is available on the industry (external) [14]. When applying for
national scope, this factor identifies the country’s underlying ICT infrastructure that is ready for e-government services implementation. ―Internet connectivity, bandwidth capacity, secure servers, computers, etc. are all prerequisites for the successful implementation of e-government‖ [18]. Therefore, the first hypothesis is proposed:
H1: ICT infrastructure is positively related to online services sophistication level.
B. Organizational context
The organizational context is defined in term of firm’s characteristics and resources including managerial structure, firm size, internal communication process, human capitals and the amount of slack resources [14]. Past studies have emphasized the importance of several organizational inhibitors and facilitators of technology adoption such as organizational and management changes; cross-functional co-operation [19]; business process reengineering [20]; top management support [17]. There are two elements among these potential factors will be examined in this context:
Management optimization refers to activities carried out by government for enhancing the internal management process of government agencies [21]. Those activities should reflect the effort of strategy planning, information system integration, business reengineering, and cross-section cooperation. [22] has argued that in order to reach higher levels of online services, it is required to change the way governments are operating: it is necessary to have significant cooperation and communication among government agencies. The Australian Government Interoperability Framework is an example in building a collaboration platform which contains a set of standards, principles and methodologies to support multi organizations working together in order to provide seamless public services. There are also risks coming from the compatibility between new implemented e-government strategies and existing frameworks which then results to re-structuring or abandoning the whole system [22]. From above discussion, this study hypothesizes:
H2a: Management optimization is positively related to online services growth level.
Government Chief Information Officer (GCIO) is defined as ―the expert who has mandate to align management strategy with ICT investment in order to achieve a balance between the business strategy, organizational reform, and management reform‖ [21]. [23] has claimed that CIO’s business and IT knowledge is a significant factor of technology assimilation. Following the fact that the chief information officers duties are no longer restricted around technical facets but are extended to handle more complicated responsibilities such as policy planning, budget management, ICT investment...government CIO has been considering as a critical
factor for the success of any e-government project. Hence, it is hypothesized:
H2b: In a country, government CIO is positively related to online services growth level.
C. Environmental context
The environmental describes the environment in which firms business is operated: industry characteristics, regulatory environment, competitors, relationship with governments, and so on [14]. Various elements in this context have been examined in previous TOE studies: unresolved legal issues [17]; public institutions environment [13]; competitive environment [19]; and so on. Among those elements, regulatory environment appeared to be the most referred issue by former researchers. [16] has emphasized the important role of government regulation on facilitating e-business adoption especially in developing country where market environments are characterized by immature institutional structure. Lack of supporting business law and legal protection are confirmed in the findings of [24] as significant barriers to e-commerce use. Climbing to higher stages of online services as transactional or connected level typically requires robust data protection and online payment system [1]. This raises awareness about improving ICT legislation system for adapting with that evolvement. These evidences lead to the last hypothesis:
H3: The more comprehensive of ICT legal framework is, the higher sophistication level of e-services could be achieved.
III. METHODOLOGY AND DATA ANALYSIS
A. Data
For validating above hypotheses, this study utilizes secondary data from two sources: World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Global Information Technology Report series and IAC-Waseda E-government Ranking. To maintain a strongly balanced panel data, 38 countries appearing in both reports during the period 2011-2014 were selected.
B. Constructs and measures
As shown in the conceptual model (Fig.2), there are five constructs in this research: Online services, ICT infrastructure, management optimization, government CIO and ICT legal environment.
Online services construct is taken from the Online services/Applications indicator of IAC-Waseda E-government ranking survey which measures the degree to which government leverages ICT to enhance public services delivery ability to different stakeholders. IAC-Waseda survey evaluates the sophistication level of five online applications: e-tax, e-custom, e-health, e-procurement and one-stop shop. Different levels of sophistication of online services applications mentioning by the survey are: no plan; no online presence; static website; one-way interaction; two-way interaction; and online payment enabled.
ICT infrastructure was constructed based on the Infrastructure and Digital Content pillar of WPF’s Network Readiness Index. This indicator ―captures the development of ICT infrastructure (including the
mobile network coverage, international Internet bandwidth, secure Internet servers, and electricity production) as well as the availability of digital content‖ [5].
Management optimization is taken from IAC-Waseda E-government Ranking. This indicator is measured by taking into consideration three components namely: optimization awareness - assessing the presence, scope, timeliness and targets of the national e-government strategy; enterprise architecture - measuring the existence of national government centralized network, enterprise architecture system, interoperability framework and national metadata standards; administrative and budgetary systems – qualifying the appearance of a centralized or shared administrative system such as electronic financial management information system (FMIS), budgetary system, human resource management system, or a document management system.
Government CIO is another construct delivered from IAC-Waseda E-government Ranking survey. In a country scenario, the level of government CIO is measured not only by the presence of a CIO in different levels of government but also by the existence of legislations, regulations and policies which were promulgated in order to explicitly mandate and identify the role of CIO [21]. This index is evaluated based on GCIO presence – whether or not a CIO is appointed at national and local government; GCIO mandate – is there any law or regulation enacted to identify the role and responsibility of CIO position; CIO organization – is there any CIO association in the country; and CIO development programs – is there any CIO training program, CIO course and CIO institution available in the country.
ICT legal environment is a pillar directly taken from the Political and Regulatory Environment pillar of WPF’s Network Readiness Index. This indicator reflects ―the extent to which the national legal framework facilitates ICT penetration and a safe development of business activities, taking into account general features of the regulatory environment (including the protection afforded to property rights, the independence of the judiciary and the efficiency of the law making process) as well as more ICT-specific dimension (the passing of laws relating ICT or the software piracy rates)‖ [5].
C. Data analysis and findings
For empirical analysis, the author employs the Hausman-Taylor estimator to find out the probable effects of both time-variant and time-invariant factors to the online services growth of a specific country at a particular time. The Hausman-Taylor estimator is preferable in this study because this method overcomes the limitations of random-effects and fixed-effects methods. The pretest for endogeneity of random-effects model has supported for this choice.
TABLE I. THE ESTIMATION RESULT USING HAUSMAN-TAYLOR
ESTIMATOR
a. TV refers to time varying; TI refers to time invariant.
b. *, **, and *** indicates significant level of 1%, 5%, and 10% respectively.
To maintain the consistency of data through years and avoiding the effect of measurement error, three indicators of IAC-Waseda survey are re-calculated based on percentage scale. For measuring the difference between developed and developing countries, a dummy variable is included which receives value 1 if a country is developed and 0 otherwise. Country classification is based on The Standard Country and Area Code Classifications (M49) of United Nations Statistic Division [25]. The underlying equation model is:
onlsrvit = β1 + β2*ictinfrit + β3*ictilegalit + β4*gcioit + β5*optmit + β6*devi + ui + eit
In which:
onlsrvit: The online services development score of country i at time t.
ictinfrit: The basic ICT infrastructure development score of country i at time t.
ictilegalit: The ICT regulatory environment of country i at time t.
gcioit: The Government CIO score of country i at time t.
optmit: The Optimization Management score of country i at time t.
onlsrv
Number of observations: 152
Number of groups: 38
Observations per group: minimum: 4, maximum: 4,
average: 4
Coef. Std.Err. P>|z| [95% Conf.
Interval]
TV
exo
gen
ou
s
ictinfr 1.504677 1.507629 0.318 -1.450222
4.459576
TV
en
dog
en
ou
s
optm .1241106 .0691709 0.073*** -.0114619 .259683
ictlegal 7.114112 2.882469 0.014** 1.464577
12.76365
gcio .2408537 .0836136 0.004* .076974 .4047335
TI
exo
gen
ou
s dev -1.006001 5.707328 0.860
-12.19216
10.18016
_cons 7.349902 11.70321 0.530 -15.58797
30.28778
sigma_u 11.819055
sigma_e 12.05949
devi: The dummy variable indicates whether a country i is developed or developing one.
ui: The random-effects error.
eit: The random error.
The potential endogenous explanatory variables in this model are: ictlegal and gcio since they can be correlated with other unobserved individual characteristics such as political pressure or organizational culture which are included in the random-effects error. The analysis result is demonstrated in TABLE I.
The result supports for hypothesis H2a (management optimization), H2b (government CIO) and H3 (ICT regulatory environment) but not for the first hypothesis (ICT infrastructure). In general, the result suggested that management optimization process, government IT leadership and ICT legislation framework have influences to the growth of online services. This result is consistent with previous studies in other areas. Also, the insignificant coefficient of the dummy variable dev states that the difference between developed and developing countries is irrelevant to online services growth level in a country.
Surprisingly, ICT infrastructure contribution is not as significant as it has been expected. ICT infrastructure is highly related to national income, however, as claimed by [1], national income does not alone guarantee the development of e-government. Many countries have not reached the same level of e-government development as have others in same income group [1]. Therefore, rather than absolutely deny the role of ICT infrastructure on ICT adoption; the result implies a new direction for e-services development strategy: more efforts need to be put on other enablers of online services delivery such as improving regulatory environment and upgrading the quality of government leaders.
IV. CONTRIBUTION AND CONCLUSION
Understanding the barriers and facilitators of e-government development is essential. This research conducted an empirical investigation on the major determinants of e-services development in a country. The result emphasizes the importance of management optimization, government leadership and regulatory environment; and implies that the different level of ICT infrastructure between countries is not statically significant contributing to e-services delivery. The finding will encourage policy makers and CIOs in developing countries where relatively low level of ICT infrastructure presents since they now have more choices in planning strategy for e-government development: rather than continuously investing into ICT infrastructure development, they should optimize their business process, develop leadership quality and improve the ICT legislation framework.
There are several limitations of this research. Firstly, this research does not capture heterogeneity between countries such as several social and culture effects which are believed having important influences to technology adoption. Secondly, it is useful if the research could measure the contribution of above factors to the change of online services growth through years. This requires another methodology such as growth latent model
or random coefficient analysis. Finally, using secondary data sources gives opportunities to examine the issues in a global level. However, the consequence of this choice is the author could not include several countries which are missing in one of data source using in this study. A more comprehensive data set in future researches will bring a more precise result and prediction.
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