Recently, many governments have started to change the ways of providing their services, so they permit their citizens to access services from anywhere, without the necessity to visit the place of the service provider physically. Mobile government (M-government) is one of the techniques which fulfils that goal and has been adopted by many governments. M-government can be defined as an implementation of Electronic Government (E-Government), where mobile technology is used, with the aim of improving service delivery systems to citizens, businesses and to all government agencies. Although m-government services have emerged several years ago, the adoption rate of these form of services have been considered to be below that of the expectations in the Arabian gulf countries in general, and at Saudi Arabia in particular. Therefore, many governments around the world started to conduct research on e/m-government adoption. While plenty of research on e-government exists, there is a research gap on m-government adoption, particularly in the Arabian gulf countries. The aim of this research is to explore the attitudes and perceptions of citizens towards the acceptance of mobile government (m-government) services in Arabic gulf countries, namely Saudi Arabia. This research study has also developed and validated a quantitative model. This developed model uses TAM (Technology Acceptance Model), expanded by additional variables including perceived service quality, perceived trustworthiness, perceived mobility, and user's satisfaction. I have used mixed research methods including numeric questionnaire with an open-ended question added, focus groups, and interviews. The developed model has been validated by over 695 participants at King Saud University and Imam Muhammed Bin Saud University using the Structural Equation Modelling technique (SEM). The findings support the supposition that both the measurements and the structural models are a good fit to the data. This research also has shown that all theoretical and research constructs satisfy the criteria of reliability, convergent and discriminant validity. They hypothesis testing shows that ten relationships are significant, while the remaining two are not. The participants in the focus group and the answers that they have provided to the open-ended questions identified several factors influencing the citizen's acceptance of m-government services within Saudi Arabia. These factors are trust in mobile network, trust in government, ease of use, usefulness, citizens' satisfaction, citizens' awareness, digital divide and service quality. The interviewees were also able to identify several challenges confronting the implementation of m-government such as change management, legal issues, technical issues, lack of support, collaboration issues, and absence of guidance on the practical steps to implement m-government projects.
Date of Award | 14 Sept 2017 |
---|
Original language | English |
---|
Awarding Institution | - University Of Strathclyde
|
---|