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Top1. Introduction
Electronic government or e-government has provided a means through which governments can improve citizen interaction with their government and at the same time change the traditional model of government service delivery (Kraemer & Dedrick, 1997; Lenk & Traunmuller, 2000). The vital necessity of modernization of the way governments provide services to its citizens have been realized by governments through the world paving the way to the use of technology that allows governments to serve citizens in a timely, effective, and cost efficient way (Kraemer & Dedrick, 1997; Ho, 2002; Moon, 2002). Improvements in public service delivery are especially important for developing countries where services are often not provided in a sufficient amount and not delivery effectively.
E-government has been defined in many ways. For the purpose of this study, e-government is the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to promote more efficient and effective government, facilitate more accessible government services, allow greater public access to information, and make government more accountable to citizens (Traunmuller & Lenk, 2002). This definition focuses on citizens and their interactions with government through various available channels of service, the focus of this paper.
Two key reasons for public sector reform worldwide are due to increase the efficiency of government operations and to provide better and more versatile services to citizens and businesses (Ho, 2002; La Porte, Demchak, & de Jong, 2002). Local government, being closer to citizens and their interactions with the various levels of governments, has been the focus of a noticeable share of e-government projects. In addition, like many other countries worldwide, the local e-government initiatives were set off in Egypt to improve the capabilities of enhancing service delivery to their citizens. E-government in Egypt is especially important to study with the Revolution of January, 25, 2011, where citizens exercised voice in wanting a government to provide for more efficient and effective public service delivery. E-government systems are becoming an essential element of modern public administration (Torres, Pina, & Acerete, 2005), assessing the effectiveness of these systems is becoming a necessity in order to ensure successful implementation (Gupta & Jana, 2003).
Much of the e-government literature to date has examined the overall adoption of e-government in terms of its level of sophistication and breadth of information and service offerings. However, there is much less research that evaluates the effectiveness of e-government for public managers (Streib & Navarro, 2005; Reddick & Frank, 2007). Moreover, when comparing the adoption of e-government in developed countries with developing nations, their experiences are much different (Chen, Chen, Cling, & Huang, 2007). In African nations the status of e-government services are not as well documented compared to developed countries (Heeks, 2002; Rorissa & Demissie, 2010), the need for research that examines e-government experiences of these countries is vitally important.
This knowledge gap in the literature is where this study contributes to this growing and important body of knowledge. This study examines e-government effectiveness through a national survey of city officials (directors) in Egypt. As resources for e-government become increasingly scarce for city governments, this study attempts to address what impact e-government has actually had on city governments.
The following section provides some background information on the local e-government program in Egypt. This is followed by the literature review section demonstrating the model that is tested in this paper. The main part of this paper is devoted to the research methods and explaining the results of our statistical tests. The conclusion summarizes the main arguments of the paper.