E-government: a new vision for success.

One of the most important emerging applications of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is e-government. Perceived as providing benefits to the community by overcoming the complexity of bureaucracy, increasing the efficiency of the economy, reducing services' time, and permitting businesses and citizens to connect to government information, it is likely to become a part of life for citizens and businesses. However, the initial push to implement e-government projects resulted in a number of projects that failed, either partially or completely (Heeks, 2003a). A major reason offered for these failures is that governments were applying the conventional ICT project formula to e-government, without consideration of other features that are particular to e-government. E-government has its unique combination of features and characteristics that should be taken into consideration at design and implementation stages to determine its success. The primary aim of this paper is to identify the main characteristics of e-government in order to assess the range of aspects that are likely to affect the success or failure of an e-government project. We begin by setting out the concept of e-government, and its importance in an esociety. Noting the failure rate of e-government projects, we follow with a discussion of Critical Success Factors (CSF’s) – i.e. aspects that must be taken into account to ensure the success of a project. We identify the range of aspects of e-government, and align these to CSF’s. Finally, we argue that current CSF’s in e-government do not take into account the full range of characteristics that apply to this sector, and that new e-government CSF’s are needed in order to improve the success rate of e-government projects.

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