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Top1. Introduction
Electronic government (e-government) is generally referred to as the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for transforming public organizations to make them more accessible, effective and accountable. It can be used not only for improving the delivery of public services and enhancing the effectiveness of public organizations through increased their efficiency, accountability and transparency, but also for achieving various socially desirable outcomes such as improving the quality of life, providing better access to education and training, and bridging the digital divide (Karunasena & Deng, 2012). These potential benefits of e-government motivate various governments to adapt various e-government strategies and policies for making e-government more citizens centric with real value to citizens (Zhao, 2011). Therefore, e-Government has witnessed rapid development and huge capital investments all over the world in the past few years (Nasim & Sushil, 2010), to improve internal efficiency and provide better and quality services to the citizens. In view of this, researchers in the e-Government field are becoming increasingly concerned about whether e-Government is meeting the expectations of the citizens it is designed to serve in spite of the huge investments (Alshawy & Alhalawany, 2009; Helbig et al., 2009).
In order to improve service delivery, citizens’ feedback must be taken into consideration and this can only be done through evaluation (Jones et al., 2007). As explained further by Jones, Hackney and Irani (Jones et al., 2007), evaluating e-Government services therefore should be based on the experience and feedback of the citizens who actually use these systems. However, the most commonly used evaluation approaches have been the traditional ones which have mostly focused on return on investment, cost-benefit, payback period etc. (Alshawy & Alhalawany, 2009; Irani & Love, 2002) and have largely ignored the broader socio-economic and socio-political goals that characterize service delivery in the context of e-Government (Alshawy & Alhalawany, 2009; Grimsley& Meehan, 2008). In addition, several studies which have investigated the impact of e-Government have been from the government side with little emphasis on the citizens' side (Helbig et al., 2009; Reddick, 2005). To address these drawbacks, the public value approach, a concept originally introduced by Mark Moore (Moore, 1995) in his book “Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government”, presents a framework within which both tangible and intangible benefits of e-Government can be addressed (Omar et al., 2011). Public value has been described as “a comprehensive approach to thinking about public management and about continuous improvement in public services” [10: 9]. According to Kearns (Kearns, 2004), it refers to the value citizens get from government and can serve as a benchmark with which to evaluate performance of government.
From the review of literature, not much has been done in terms of empirical research to evaluate the impact of e-Government using the public value approach in Egypt. Therefore, this research is seeking to fill the existing gap in literature on the public value creation of e-Government from the perspective of citizens using the DeLone and McLean IS Success Model as theoretical background.