A Review of the Factors Affecting User Satisfaction in Electronic Government Services

Introduction

In the last decade the influence of the Internet and evolving Information and Communication Technology (ICT) innovations has changed the field of public administration as never before. Following the success of e-business, governments across the world are clutching at digital reforms to broaden services for their citizens and enhance efficiency of public services through e-government (Kamal et al., 2011; Luna-Reyes and Gil-Garcia, 2011). Lau et al. (2008) argue e-government as the process of associating citizens electronically with their government to access information and services provided by public agencies. E-government also refers to the use of information technology (IT) by governments to augment access to and conveyance of its information and services to citizens, business partners, professionals, other organisations, and even public entities themselves (McClure, 2000; Symonds, 2000; West, 2004).

It has been argued that previous e-government literature has paid more attention to e-government service adoption from the supplier side (Lee et al., 2011; Reddick, 2005a) or fundamentally investigating public administration based supply of information and services (Medaglia, 2007; Coursey and Norris, 2008). However, the user’s perspective (e.g. citizen or business) has been almost overlooked (Lee et al., 2011; Reddick, 2005b) and very little has been explored from the citizen’s perspective (Moon and Welch, 2005; Thomas and Streib, 2003, 2005). It has been realised recently that ‘supply side’ driven development might not result in the widely proclaimed outcomes where user expectations and satisfaction are much higher on the priority list (Kunstelj et al., 2009). Over the years, many studies (e.g. Carter and Bellanger, 2005; Chen et al., 2010; Fu et al., 2004; Kunstelj et al., 2009; Lee et al., 2003; Morgeson et al., 2011; Verdegem and Verleye, 2009) on e-government research have emphasised the need to measure user satisfaction. However, there has not been any effort to comprehensively analyse such literature. For these reasons and a lack of knowledge in this area, this study undertakes a comprehensive review of e-government satisfaction and adoption research to explore more about the predominant factors in such research. In doing so, the study aims to introduce researchers performing research in this area to the various methodological and theoretical aspects. A comprehensive weight- and meta-analysis performed for the variables used in this research might serve as guidelines to identify relevant factors suitable to consider for such research.