The increasing use of the Internet over recent years has forced governments and individuals to utilise Information & Communication Technology (ICT) in the form of electronic government (e-government). However, the success of e-government delivery is dependent on usage generally but also on growing concerns about perceived social influence and prior experience of e-government service usage; this is in order to ensure better utilisation of ICT investments by retaining current users. Few studies have investigated the influences of perceived social influence and prior experience on personal factors, such as self-efficacy, personal outcome expectation and satisfaction, towards intention to the continual use of e-government systems. To fill this gap, the present research develops a conceptual framework by associating it with citizens' prior experience. A conceptual framework of six constructs is developed by integrating Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) and Expectation Confirmation Theory (ECT). Theoretically, the present study extends the roles of pre-adoption and post-adoption by offering a self-regulating process through self-efficacy as a physical ability. Further, the study reveals the importance of social influence and prior experience as well as personal outcome expectation and satisfaction as cognitive factors that represent personal goal assessments.
Top1. Introduction
Nearly all government agencies at all levels launched their electronic government (e-government) programmes in the late 1990’s (Wang and Liao, 2008). The increasing use of the Internet over recent years has forced governments and individuals around the world to utilise ICT in the form of e-government. There are many definitions of e-government; for example, the United Nations (2004: 15) defined e-government as “the use of information and communication technology (ICT), and its application, by government for the provision of information and basic public services to the people”. Although previous definitions have focused on the outcomes that e-government can deliver and on the potential of e-government for the citizen, few of these definitions have considered the capacity or the role of citizens (and also of business) when implementing e-government (Van-Deursen et al., 2006). Recently, there has been a great deal of interest among researchers and practitioners in the factors that influence the pre- and post-adoptive process of ICT in the private sector (Bhattacherjee, 2001a/b; Hsu et al., 2004; Park et al., 2012) and also in the public sector (Venkatesh et al., 2011). However, e-government is a diverse and complex field (Bollettino, 2002).
Previous studies have focused on how to deploy e-government within various public and private bodies (e.g., Chu et al. 2004), including online tax-filling (e.g., Carter and Bélanger, 2005; Hu et al., 2009), and online revenue services (Connolly et al., 2010). Indeed, e-government practice can be used as an umbrella that covers many diverse applications that utilise the Internet for delivering government services, based on UN/ASPA (2002). However, a further point regarding e-governance is that it is distinct from other ICT adoptions (e.g., e-commerce), in that it can be made mandatory rather than just voluntary (Chan et al., 2010; Warkentin et al., 2002). An example of mandated e-government use is the requirement to present smart cards for personal identification in order to gain access to the public sector (Smith, 2005). In this vein, prior research has argued that e-government can shift existing public services through harnessing the uses of ICT as a social technology to bring about more interactivity in the information era (Tapscott and Agnew, 1999). However, research on individual-level uses of ICT has now reached maturity through adoption stage research, based on Venkatesh et al. (2007). On the other hand, others argue that the post-adoptive process is a new phenomenon that needs further investigation (Venkatesh et al., 2011; Kim, 2012).