The Benefits & Challenges Of E-Government

In the recent decades, various businesses have displayed a growing tendency toward service focus rather than product focus. In the early years, most manufacturing companies deemed the concept of the service merely as the post-purchase services, coupled with substantial expenses. However, during the recent years, services have emerged as a novel source of revenue as well as a means to enhance customer satisfaction and secure competitive advantage, on the rationale of which, several industries have attempted to increase their rates of service provision with regard to goods production.

The unfolding incremental tendency on the level of the society towards service provision, on the one hand, has led to the perception of the service quality as one of the important goals of the organizations as well as an effective determinant of improving the customer satisfaction, reducing costs, and increasing the profitability. On the other hand, it has facilitated Internet technology, as one of the major and essential factors of organizations, to provide a medium for the service provision through websites. Because a great deal of financial and time investments is required to maintain the quality of the websites, which represent the effort quality of an organization, the website evaluation seems essential in order to improve the customer satisfactory and resource optimization.

This has led to the recent interest of researchers and service-providing decision-makers in the evaluation of the websites in various areas, including the museum, usability healthcare web, aeronautical industry, hotel industry, hospital sector, job seeking. In the recent years, this need has been felt in the national sector. In this area, ICT-induced technological progress has offered new methods for governments to provide service for citizens, which is considered as one of the most important competitive factors. Therefore, governments have attempted to improve their service provision for citizens through e-government.

The benefits of e-government include reduction of the service provision and implementation costs and integration of services along with the possibility of faster request tracking. These benefits have encouraged the governments to instigate vast investments in the electronic service provision since 1990. One of the main issues of implementing and developing e-governments is creating web portals which enables citizens to have access to needed information and services and enhance their engagement. Today, the websites, as one of the most common communicational ways between citizens and governments, have allowed citizens to use the web technology in order to perform their governmental activities.

Notwithstanding mentioned benefits and applications, governments face various challenges on their way to elevate service quality and enhance governmental service functions (as an essential goal of e-government). Identifying and assessing these challenges and locating proper solutions is necessary to obtain customer satisfaction and improve the efficiency of e-governments. Accordingly, a considerable amount of past research has been taken into account in assessing the level of citizens' acceptance of e-government websites and measuring their satisfaction.

The quality of e-government websites can be evaluated regarding different dimensions, including content, usibility, security and privacy, services and performance, and accessibility. Disregarding any of these dimensions will engender numerous challenges for the respective organization. One of the most challenging dimensions, which has recently captured researchers’ attention, is the usibility. The usibility of the government websites boosts users’ confidence, which translates into their improved engagement in performing the tasks of the organization. Additionally, improving usibilty results in an increment in citicens’ satisfaction of e-government. The website usibility denotes possibility of fast learning of using the website,