A suggested framework for assessing electronic government readiness in Egypt

Governments have become more and more interested in embracing Information and Communication technology (ICT), and have made a remarkable progress over the last few years. eGovernment is presently recognized as a driver and a key enabler of citizen-centric, cooperative, and seamless modern governance implying not only a profound transformation in the way government interacts with the governed but also the reinvention of its internal processes and how organizations carry their business both internally as well as externally while interacting with the other segments of the community.
Several developing nations, including Egypt, having witnessed the benefits realized by eGovernment in developed countries, took eGovernment initiatives and achieved different success rates. In order to reap the best benefits of eGovernment, the strategy of the eGovernment program in Egypt was set up taking into consideration the best practices from different countries with an attempt to adapt them to a local context.
Based on the literature, it is frequently claimed that the availability of an effective eGovernment readiness assessment framework is a necessary condition for advancing eGovernment proper implementation. Most eGovernment appraisal frameworks address the Electronic Service dimension of eGovernment (eService) that focuses on the services provided by the government to the citizens on the Internet. This gives a very narrow perspective to eGovernment ignoring a key dimension: the Electronic Administration (eAdministration) that highlights the importance of modernizing the public sector, increasing government productivity, and transforming its internal processes. Moreover developed frameworks assess eGovernment readiness on a country as a whole without conducting an in-depth assessment on a public organization scale. In addition, the majority of these frameworks do not take into consideration the opinion of the civil servants involved in such eGovernment programs - a key stakeholder which affects their success.
The objective of this article is to develop a framework that assesses eGovernment readiness in Egypt focusing on eAdministration within a public organization through obtaining its employees’ feedback. The suggested framework investigates the internal factors affecting eGovernment readiness such as people, technology, processes, and strategic planning. The article examines the relations and interactions of these components in an emerging eGovernment environment using a case study on an agency affiliated to the government of Egypt as a primary step in the process of testing the framework presented.

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