The advancements in the ICT and internet technologies challenge governments to engage in the electronic transformation of public services and information provision to citizens. The capability to reach citizens in the physical world via e-government platform and render a citizen-centric public sector has increasingly become vital. Thus, spending more resources to promote and ensure that all members of society are included in the entire spectrum of information society and more actively access government online is a critical aspect in establishing a successful e-government project. Every e-government programme requires a clear idea of the proposed benefits to citizens, the challenges to overcome and the level of institutional reform that has to take place for e- government to be a success in a given context. E-government strategy is fundamental to transforming and modernising the public sector through identification of key influential elements or strategy factors and ways of interacting with citizens. It is therefore apparent that governments must first understand variables that influence citizens’ adoption of e-government in order to take them into account when developing and delivering services online. Botswana has recently embarked on e-government implementation initiatives that started with the e-readiness assessment conducted in 2004, followed by enactment of the National ICT policy of 2007 and the approval of the e-government strategy approved in 2012 for dedicated implementation in the 2014 financial year. Significant developments have taken place around national and international connectivity including initiatives that offer connectivity to citizens such as the I- partnership, community run Nteletsa projects, post office run tele-centres and Sesigo projects that have been deployed on a wider Botswana. In spite of these remarkable initiatives there is no change management strategy in place and evidence to suggest that citizens cluster groups, government employees, key influential citizens’ stakeholders and other local government administrative governing structures at district levels have been appropriately informed, consulted, engaged and participated in the design, development and implementation initiatives. This position has contributed largely to low e-readiness indices for Botswana, low PC, Internet and broadband penetration levels, which do not commensurate with levels of connectivity initiatives already in place and operational. The strategy development, which is the viability business plan for the entire project has been initiated and concluded without the appropriate input of citizens, employees and local government structures at the districts. Considering that that e-government is new and narrowly researched in Botswana. There is non existing research on both the impact of strategy factors to e-government implementation success and citizens’ involvement and participation in the e-government design and implementation through to adoption and continual use. This study therefore explores and investigates empirically the key e-government strategy influential success elements and the how citizens’ involvement and participation in e-government development can be secured, supported and facilitated towards adoption and continual future use. This culminates in the proposal of both theoretically supported and empirically validated e-government strategy framework and citizen centric conceptual model. The study is crucial as it aims understand how can influences upon success in e-government project be better understood and citizens’ stakeholder adoption of e-government enhanced to facilitate successful development of e-government in Botswana and is also timely as it comes at the time when Botswana has not yet implemented her e-government strategy, hence factors identified are critical to both strategy re-alignment and design of the citizens’ involvement and participation change management strategy to support both implementation and citizens’ adoption of e-government in Botswana. The study utilises the mixed methods research, employing both qualitative and quantitative methods to address the research question and triangulated data collection approaches used to select survey sample for two questionnaire sets carried on opinion holders within government and non government structures and ordinary citizens, use of observations on operating tele-centres, interviews with key e-government strategic stakeholders and document analysis which included e-government policies and related documentations as well as extensive review of e-government published literature including applied implementation and citizens adoption experiences of developing and developed countries. In the analysis of data the multiple regression analysis has been utilised and multivariate analysis performed to ensure linearity, normality and collinearity. The linear regression has been used to test the hypothesis through the Analysis of variance (ANOVA) technique. Keywords E-government, strategy critical success factors, key influential elements, citizen centric conceptual model, strategy framework, Botswana.

This study focuses on the field of e-government. In the current literature, egovernment is defined as the use of information and communication technologies in the public sector. Evidence suggested a problematic e-government in Cyprus, and initially the study intended to investigate just that. Due to the emergent nature of the research, the study's scope was expanded, and it intended to explore the reality of egovernment, while expecting that private sector methods could be applicable and that a change strategy could possibly emerge. The philosophy driving the research was phenomenology, and a pure qualitative stance was adopted. Action Research was employed as the methodology for the study, based on its two-fold objective: to identify tools and ways in which e-govemment could be eased, and to apply those in the public sector of Cyprus, as a form of reflexive consultancy. Soft Systems Methodology was also flexibly used, and provided for the foundation of the research strategy. Further, the main theoretical foundations of the study have been the Learning Organisation and Systems Thinking. Amongst others, the investigations revealed that the e-government concept is itself problematic, and arguably indefinable, while the modernisation of public sector depends on the actions of few key people who could initiate and lead the change until its establishment. Also, the applicability of private sector theories out of context has been tested, and is seen as having valuable contributions for the public sector domain. Also, a change process appears to emerge, entailing concepts that can form basis for future research.

Despite the considerable potential and significant efforts to use information systems to improve public administration, their implementation remains a challenging task, especially in developing countries. This research addresses the difficulties of implementating information systems at the local government level to achieve administrative reform within the People's Republic of China. Giddens's structuration theory is used to provide a conceptual framework to understand the interaction between the administrative reform policies at the central government level and the rich social contexts at the local level. In the Chinese context, the reform objectives include: changing from an all-round government to a service government; from respect for authority to respect for law; and from extreme egalitarianism to a performance-based reward system. The framework is used to analyse a case study of the implementation of a computerised personnel and salary management system in Foshan, a middle-sized city. This Chinese central government initiative was aimed at solving the "ghost worker" problem and improving transparency and efficiency in personnel and public finance management by the use of information technology. The study shows the difficulties of inter-organisational co-operation between local government stakeholders during system development. In the existing literature, national policy is often seen as a factor independent of the local context or as less important than local social factors. Our study suggests a strong link between administrative reform policies and local information systems implementation. It shows the need to understand such reform policies and their impacts on local stakeholders. It also shows that conflicts involving local stakeholders reflect national problems of administrative reform. The implications of the findings for local and central government in China, and for governments of similar transitional economies, are discussed. The contributions and limitations of structuration theory for understanding the interaction between national and local contexts are also discussed.

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. Electronic Government (e-government) - described as the strategic use of ICT to transform the public sector - is presently recognised as a driver and a key enabler of citizen-centric, cooperative, and seamless modern governance. E-government implementation implies not only a profound transformation in the way government interacts with the governed, but also a reinvention of its internal processes and how public organisations carry their business both internally as well as externally while interacting with the other segments of the community. Based on the literature, it is frequently claimed that the availability of an effective E-Government Readiness (EGR) assessment framework is a necessary condition for advancing e-government proper implementation. Most e-government appraisal models address the Electronic Service (e-service) dimension of e-government that focuses on the services provided by the government to the citizens on the Internet. This gives a very narrow perspective to e-government ignoring a key dimension: the Electronic Administration (e-administration), that highlights the importance of modernising the public sector, increasing government productivity, and transforming its internal processes. Furthermore, developed models assess E-Government Readiness (EGR) on a country as a whole without conducting an in-depth assessment on a public organisation scale. In addition, the majority of these models do not take into consideration the opinion of the civil servants involved in such e-government programs, a key stakeholder that affects their success. The objective of this thesis is to develop a framework that assesses EGR focusing on e-administration within public organisations through obtaining its employees‟ feedback. The suggested framework investigated the internal factors affecting EGR categorised into four dimensions: (i) strategy, (ii) people, (iii) technology, and (iv) processes. A number of measuring constructs are identified under each dimension. The framework components, relationships, and hypotheses were derived from the literature on Electronic Readiness (e-readiness), EGR, Information Systems (IS) and Electronic Commerce (e-commerce) success. In order to test the proposed framework, the thesis examined the relations and interactions of these components in an emerging e-government environment using four case studies of different characteristics to represent public organisations in Egypt. These organisations cover municipalities, investment, tax payment, and health sectors. Quantitative data collection method was through distributing a questionnaire to a sample of employees in each organisation. Data obtained from the questionnaire in each organisation was triangulated with data gathered from other sources of evidence: (i) interviews with top management, (ii) documentations, (iii) archival records, and (iv) observations. Findings of the empirical research were evaluated against the framework suggested in the beginning leading to a final framework that assesses EGR of public organisations. Findings revealed that framework's hypotheses were all confirmed. Concerning Egypt's EGR assessment, results proved that processes, technology, and people have a high effect on EGR, whereas strategy has a modest impact on it. This reflects that strategy is not given a high value in terms of e-government and that top management need to further promote e-government within public Egyptian organisations. Findings revealed also the modest impact of strategy on the two dimensions: technology and processes compared with its high effect on people. The research highlighted also the different measuring constructs that have the highest weights in each of the four dimensions. This helps in understanding e-government environment of public organisations in Egypt, showing the main components that affect EGR. The thesis though provides a rich insight into investigating e-administration within public organisations especially in a developing country such as Egypt, and presents a systematic approach to assess EGR of public organisations based on the four e-government building blocks: (i) strategy, (ii) people, (iii) technology, and (iv) processes. Therefore the thesis contributes to research areas in the literature related to assessments of information systems, e-commerce, e-readiness, and e-government readiness.

The use of state secrecy by liberal states to obfuscate certain decisions and behaviours has become almost unremarkable in the 21st Century. Intuitively, liberal thought as the champion of open government would be conceptually inimical to state secrecy. Yet there is no settled definition of state secrecy reflecting its actual practice today by states like the UK. Nor is it clear how liberal thought which prime facie values accountability and transparency in political decision making can accommodate state secrecy without inveigling its proponents and citizens. This thesis asks first, how can state secrecy be understood and second, whether there is a tension between state secrecy and liberal thought, and if so, what kind of tension it is. There is no cohesive legal and political theory scholarship on either the concept of state secrets or state secrecy in the UK. Methodologically, this question is at the boundary of political theory and public law. Three elements of this research will produce an original contribution to scholarship. First, the research conceptualises state secrecy through a contextual examination of the practice of state secrecy in the UK. It delineates three distinct ways of understanding state secrecy in the UK: esoteric, operational and efficient. Second, the examination of the spectrum of liberal thought through the classical Lockean, Sidgwickian Utilitarian and Rawlsian political perspectives will suggest the latent elitism in early liberal thought allowed state secrecy to become commonplace. Third, it finds evidence of an inconsistent, but nonetheless evident, tension between state secrecy and liberal thought. Liberal thought's wilful blindness to this contradiction at its centre limits its ability to provide a practical guide to political thought. Examining this problem also provides new questions for liberal political theory.

User-centricity is a pre-requisite for a truly transformational e-government strategy. This goes beyond visual design and appeal, and ties down to a rudimentary measure of how far people are willing to go to enrol for and use e-government services. Enrolment can have a serious impact on the success of online government services. Different services require different levels of identity assurance, and different enrolment processes are put in place to deliver them. But from the citizen's perspective these processes often require a disproportionate amount of effort, producing hurdles that affect user acceptance and ultimately service adoption. When enrolling to high-effort services is not mandatory, take-up is low; when it is compulsory, it causes resentment, and neither is desirable. Despite existing work on the impact of security and identity processes on end users there has been little work on how these contributions could be operationalised and adopted by practitioners and policy makers as part of the requirements development process. Research in HCI provides techniques to help practitioners design systems that are within general human capabilities, however such techniques are too generic to approximate use-time behaviour across user groups and within different contexts of use. This thesis proposes Calibrated Personas, a user modelling technique that accumulates knowledge on user behaviour to model and fine-tune tolerance levels for workload and its impact on e-government service adoption (1) across user groups, (2) e-service types and (3) contexts of use. A user group calibration protocol was devised to facilitate data collection and model generation for user behaviour in enrolment-specific use cases. These models are in turn used to approximate user reactions towards design alternatives, reducing the gap between design-time knowledge (upon which decisions are made) and use-time knowledge. To facilitate this activity this work presents Sentire ('to listen'), a requirements and design framework that combines industry-strength practices with user feedback simulations (referred to as UX-analytics). These simulations in turn inform the requirements development process with actionable feedback as part of an iterative design process. This thesis considers tool support for Sentire as central to the investigation in order to facilitate adoption by practitioners and to encourage knowledge sharing and re-use within the e-government domain. For this reason, an online collaborative computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tool was developed and evaluated throughout the various real-world interventions carried out for this thesis. Sentire was applied to two new national e-services and also in the evaluation of an existing one. User-studies and expert evaluation were instrumental to the evolution and validation of the main contributions and deliverables arising from this thesis.

Participation in government activity is compulsory and is needed on one level or another for activities across multiple fields including politics, economics, education, health, planning and others. E-Participation is a growing area of research. It is dynamic, complex in both nature and execution and has multiple dimensions. The aim of this research is to better understand the role of technology in the participation processes available, focusing on the education and planning fields in the UK and Indonesia. The Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has been used as a theoretical lens through which to analyse the in-depth comparative case studies presented in the UK and Indonesia. Both countries are separated in different parts of the world, which may have both similarities and differences regarding their respective socio-cultural influences, politics, the economy, history and other contextual backgrounds. This cross comparison between a set of case studies with a different context provides the base from which to explore the participation processes and to capture any generic attributes that arise. The research includes a novel-structured literature review of 612 papers. Also included are four sizeable case studies that took around six months each involving field visits to Indonesia and similar field work in the UK. This research provides contributions, such as a suggested new method for exploring e-participation and a literature review, new models and definitions of e-participation that covers schools and planning which were not well covered in the previously existing literature. Finally, it will contribute a base theory of e-participation.

Smart services are advocated to enable institutions to provide a not only continuous, but also ubiquitous support to their users, with the aim to reduce the time and effort required from both parties from the establishment to the finalizing of any transaction. Nonetheless, the adoption of Smart Services could face different obstacles including those related to infrastructure, legislations, usability when accessed through mobile phones and the lack of standardization. Furthermore, one of the main obstacles relates to users perceptions of smart services, their ease of use as well as the usefulness. On the other hand, in order to change people behaviour and attitude, such services can be designed to embed certain persuasive techniques and would need to be introduced in a way that makes them accepted by present and potential users. Consequently, this thesis addresses this problem and proposes design principles and processes for augmenting smart services with persuasive elements, and also for the introduction of such services in a way that take full advantage of the motivation of the anticipated users. Nonetheless, motivation and persuasion can be significantly affected by the socio-cultural framework of the users, therefore the thesis focused on the UAE as a hosting environment. In addition, e-government smart services are the main domain of applications to investigate in this thesis. As a matter of fact, the thesis is built on two main models: - Fogg’s eight steps process for designing persuasive technology - Technology Acceptance Model and proposes amendments. Additionally, the thesis is adding additional considerations to the two different models based on the investigation and the data analysis that took place during the study. Moreover, the thesis followed an empirical approach and involved key stakeholders, including present users as well as experts from various domains that are linked either directly or indirectly to the topic of discussion, through a series of empirical studies. As a result, the proposed process and design principles were validated with key informant and, accordingly, it was concluded that the proposal is both valid and useful for supporting the decision making and process of designing and introduction of smart service in a persuasive and motivational style.

The aim of this study was to explore the attitudes and perceptions of citizens towards the adoption of e-government services in developing countries. This is deemed of value at a time when e-government initiatives are still emerging in many developing countries and many government departments and units have put a wide range of materials from publications and information about government services online for use by citizens. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model was adopted in this study to identify factors that determine the adoption of e-government services. The use of a theoretical model allowed for formulating hypotheses governing the relationship between the different variables. Mixed research methods were utilised to fulfil the aims and objectives of this study. The quantitative and qualitative methods used included a questionnaire survey, which incorporated the amended version of the UTAUT model and which was completed by more than 800 students at Kuwait University, as well as usability testing, focus groups, interviews and open-ended questions. The study found that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, peer influence and facilitating conditions were direct determinants of usage intention and behaviour while Internet experience and type of academic course moderated the impact of the determinants on usage intention and behaviour. The results also showed that the general attitudes towards adopting e-government services were positive. The study identified a number of factors that positively influenced the attitude of respondents regarding the adoption of e-government services. These factors were related to reforming bureaucracy, usefulness, eliminating the importance of connections (wasta), facilitating government-public communication, reducing gender differences, and including all people in society. However, negative attitudes identified towards adopting e-government services related to fears and concerns about issues of technology, such as privacy and security. Other issues were related to lack of awareness, increasing unemployment rates, lack of faith in government, the belief that face-to-face interaction would add value to dealings with government, and most importantly, lack of capacity building. The evaluation of the Kuwait e-government website, as supplemental information, also identified a number of strengths and weaknesses that contributed to an increase or decrease in the potential adoption of e-government services. All adoption findings identified in this study were modelled through the use of a systemic approach which provided some insight into and understanding of the factors underlying the adoption of e-government services in developing countries. Based on the results and conclusions of the research, recommendations were made to officials responsible for the e-government project and ideas for further research were identified.

Development is an essential need for any society. ICT can be considered as important contributing factor towards this development. Utilising ICT activities for development requires several factors to be taken into account such as preparing technical infrastructures and developing human resources. Technical challenges, organisational issues, user training, trust and its related issues and the digital divide are some of the obstacles in the way of utilising ICT activities in a society. All these factors must be considered and addressed if sustainable development is to be achieved as missing out a few factors and only addressing some of them will lead to a waste of resources. At the national level, government is the first strategy maker and thus is the most influential actor in utilising ICT capabilities. Electronic government has the potential to improve government relationships with citizens, businesses and government employees. Successful implementation of electronic government has the potential to increase accountability, effectiveness and efficiency of government agencies at both local and national levels. Unfortunately in some developing countries, 85 per cent of electronic government initiatives have failed totally or partially because of the mismatch between the then current and prospective systems. Underestimating the importance of cultural, economic and physical differences between software designers and the location of electronic government projects is considered as having played a role in this mismatch. This research looks at literature, existing models and experiences in the field of electronic government in order to identify common reasons for failure. It also identifies the importance of putting citizens' views and requirements - as well as concentrating on service provision - in the centre of attention for developing electronic government program. There are a number of barriers which keep citizens away from electronic government participation. Identifying these barriers plays a major role in exercising successful e-government practice. Having identified the the shortcomings, this research proposes a model which aims at addressing and overcoming the existing limitations. The contribution of this research is to propose a framework for developing electronic government in developing countries which addresses the existing shortcomings of the Layne and Lee (2001) model of electronic government. The proposed model in this research has been evaluated against several case studies and best practice approach. As a result, an electronic government application was developed for the municipality of Yazd in Iran. Based on the evaluation of the model - with the help of the five-case studies, the best practice approach and practical development of an interface -a number of limitations in the proposed model have been identified and considered for future research.