Governments around the world are tapping on the potential of information and communication
technologies (ICT) to transform the public sector, a phenomenon broadly known as e-Government. EGovernment refers to the public sector’s use of ICT with the aim of improving information and service delivery, encouraging citizen participation in the decision-making process, and making governments more accountable, transparent and effective. Leading
governments such as Singapore are providing a variety of e-services to citizens. As their political mandate requires them to serve all sections of the public, governments would be concerned that not all sections of society are able to use the e-services being provided and not everyone is satisfied with their use. Based on this motivation, one objective of our research
is to investigate how to improve e-service delivery to citizens. For this purpose, we aim to develop models of citizens’ acceptance of government-provided eservices to gain an understanding of what drives greater usage and satisfaction with the services.

While improving information and service delivery is important, as e-Government efforts mature, governments are further interested to use ICT to enhance citizen participation. E-Participation initiatives refer to governments’ efforts in employing ICT for disseminating policy planning information and oliciting citizens’ inputs in planning. While it is clear that these initiatives may offer a number of dvantages over offline channels of citizen participation, to date there is a lack of knowledge of how ICT can be exploited to better achieve different objectives of e-Participation. Also, little is known about the factors that are responsible for motivating individuals’ e-Participation behaviour. Therefore, the second objective of our research is to investigate how to enhance e-Participation for the purpose of facilitating e- Government. To this end, we seek to develop models that integrate participation antecedents and relevant ICT features for the understanding of what motivates citizen e-Participation.

The two objectives will be addressed by modelling and deriving best practices of e-Government based on previous literature, case studies, and surveys of such initiatives. This interdisciplinary project (deriving from information systems and public administration disciplines) will contribute academically by developing and testing frameworks and models for e-service acceptance and e-Participation that can serve as a foundation for future research. Also, the objectives are practically relevant for improving the reach and satisfaction of government e-services as well as enhancing e-Participation.

The faculty members involved in the electronic government research are:

• KANKANHALLI, Atreyi
• PAN Shan Ling