An Evaluation Framework for Saudi E-Government

E-government supports the integration of technology into the social structure to transform administrative procedures to achieve a more effective form of government. Technological advances and the miniaturization of Information and Communication Technologies provide tools to enhance the diffusion of information and services to form part of an intellectual society serving citizens, customers, and professionals. Global e-government evaluation reports, such as the Brown University global e-government report, ranked the Saudi e-government at 72 in 2005, 98 in 2006, and 89 in 2007, while Saudi e-government jumped in the UN global ranking from 70 in 2008 to 58 in 2010. The purpose of this research was to assess the current state of the Saudi e-government by evaluating its ministries’ web sites using a citizen-centered e-government approach. An interactive services e-government framework circumvents the limitations of existing evaluation frameworks examined in the literature while simultaneously building on their strengths. This study’s framework quantitatively assesses stages of the Saudi ministry e-government web site and its problems. It was found that 8 (41%) of 21 ministries did not implement the main features of an e-government web site. In addition, 10 ministries (45.4%) were completely or partially in the first stage (web presence); 3 ministries (13.6%) were in the second stage (one-way interaction); and 6 ministries had no online service at all. These findings clearly demonstrate that the evaluated ministries were not citizen-centered e-government web sites and lacked transactional services, resulting in citizen dissatisfaction and frustration.