Visualization of E-Gov Adoption Models in a Developing Region: A Review of the Predictors in Empirical Research

Introduction

Thanks to the advancements of information and communication technologies, many governments around the world have already shifted a vast portion of their operations and service delivery from the conventional environment into the online environment (Choudrie et al. 2018). This shift has created a phenomenon known as electronic government (e-Gov), which refers to “the use of information technology to enable and improve the efficiency with which government services are provided to citizens, employees, businesses and agencies” (Carter and Belanger, 2005, p.5). The benefits of e-Gov to citizens, firms, and governments are enormous such as, fundamental communication cost reduction, speed enhancement, increased transparency and efficiency, to name a few (Klabi et al. 2016).

However, in spite of all the aforementioned advantages of e-Gov implementations, the engagement of citizens and other users with new e-Gov systems and processes still need to be thoroughly comprehended in order to understand the difficulties they might face when using such systems (Meijer, 2015). Unfortunately, technology adoption literature lacks systematic and comprehensive studies on this subject (Rana et al. 2015). Although researchers have given a great attention to the provision of various e-Gov services in general, they did not show a similar interest in investigating the genuineness and reliability of the different theoretical approaches being applied to e-Gov adoption studies (ibid). This becomes even more obvious in the adoption literature pertaining to developing countries where there is no published study, as yet, investigated the various constructs and factors being used to establish trends in terms of e-Gov adoption.

It is true that the literature of e-Gov adoption and technology adoption in general contains some systematic review studies on developing countries (see for example Wahid, 2012; Alryalat et al. 2012; Nkohkwo & Islam, 2013; Mustafa et al. 2020; Baheer & Lamas, 2020; Alkhowaiter, 2020); however, there is no comprehensive review done to methodically establish and visualize the relationships, weights and strength of the various constructs and models applied to e-Gov adoption research. Therefore, this study will attempt to fill the gap in related body of knowledge by facilitating a robust identification of the overall performance of the most used constructs in e-Gov empirical adoption research in developing countries. This will pave the way for a better understanding of how users behave and perceive e-Gov systems by providing diagrammatic representations that show the relationship between constructs and their effect on each other in order to acquire the greater picture of the situation, allowing researchers to point out possible patterns and gaps.

This study will perform a review of existing empirical research in The Co-operation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC), which consists of six countries, namely Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar. The selection of GCC countries was based on the numerous similarities they share in terms of political, cultural, economical and religious aspects (Pillai & Al-Malkawi, 2016). This homogeneity among the GCC countries will allow investigating users adoption of e-Gov systems under comparable contexts, resulting in coherent and more reliable outcomes. As for the structure of this paper, the next section provides an overview of the methodology applied in terms of the search strategy and data analysis, followed by the findings of the conducted review. Findings include an overview of the synthesized studies, a meta-model representation of the various variables and lastly the results of the weight-analysis technique. This is followed by a discussion of the findings and its implications as well as the research limitations and possible future directions.