A Cross‑Cultural Study on e‑Government Services Delivery

Abstract

Abstract: Considering e‑Government services provision as one of the top priorities in the national agenda, governments worldwide have allocated resources into online applications development. However, despite of huge resource investments, the adoption rate of e‑government initiatives over the world is far from expectations. By the year 2014, a large number of UN member states remain in the bottom third of the Online Service Index (OSI). There⠒s still a huge difference in OSI between countries sharing similar national income and telecommunication infrastructure levels. These evidences suggest that apart from technical aspects, non‑technical aspect such as social and organizational factors as well as the heterogeneity between countries such as national culture should be taken into consideration when implementing e‑government. Given the challenges discussed above, questions have been raised concerning what determinant might influence to the discriminant in e‑service provision among countries. Most of previous studies found in the literature either utilized primary data in which the results was constrained to a specific case study, or employed secondary data sources which can be criticized for lacking of explanatory power due to omitting important factors. In order to bridging this gap, this paper employs Technology ⠍ Organization ⠍ Environment (TOE) framework cooperatively with Hofstede⠒s national culture dimensions to provide a comprehensive insight about e‑service adoption process. For validating above hypotheses, this study utilizes secondary data from different sources: the culture dimension scores from Hofstede et al. (2010)⠒s survey; the World Economic Forum (WEF)⠒s Global Information Technology Report; and the IAC‑Waseda E‑government Ranking. Different methods were used to analyze data sample. The result suggests that management optimization process, government IT leadership, ICT legislation framework and national culture have influences to the e‑service provision. The development pattern of online service is different across countr