E-government services involve many stakeholders who have different objectives that can have an impact on success. Among these stakeholders, citizens are the primary stakeholders of government activities. Accordingly, their satisfaction plays an important role in e-government success. Although several models have been proposed to assess the success of e-government services through measuring users' satisfaction levels, they fail to provide a comprehensive evaluation model. This study provides an insight and critical analysis of the extant literature to identify the most critical factors and their manifested variables for user satisfaction in the provision of e-government services. The various manifested variables are then grouped into a model consisting of four main constructs: cost; benefit; risk and opportunity (COBRA) and a measurement scale is developed, tested, refined and validated on a sample group of e-government service users in Turkey. A structured equation model is used to establish relationships among the identified constructs, associated variables and users' satisfaction. The results confirm the COBRA model as a useful tool for evaluating the success of e-government services from citizens' perspective.
Keywords: E-government service assessment; Citizen Satisfaction; Structured equation modeling; Scale development
Final version is published in Government Information
INTRODUCTIONE-government services influence many stakeholders including citizens, government employees, information technology developers, and policy makers. Each stakeholder has different interests and objectives that may have an impact on the success and take-up of egovernment services . In the literature, there have been a large number of models and frameworks to evaluate e-government service success for different purposes or from different perspectives (Jaeger and Bertot, 2010). Although, these models aim to help policy makers and practitioners to evaluate and improve the provision of e-services, little effort has been made to develop a holistic model to evaluate e-government services and their interactions with users (Wang, Bretschneider and Gant, 2005). However, the success of egovernment services is a complex concept, and its measurement should consider multidimensional factors (Wang and Liao, 2008;Irani, Elliman and Jackson, 2007; Irani, Love 3 and Jones, 2008;Weerakkody and Dhillon, 2008). Therefore, in this study, a new conceptual model to measure e-service success from diverse stakeholders' perspectives is proposed.The model development methodology follows a grounded theory approach in which an extensive literature review on existing e-service assessment models is conducted to identify the various fragmented success factors (or key performance indicators, KPIs). The identified KPIs are then classified into four main groups: cost; benefit; risk; and opportunity.Accordingly, users' satisfaction is measured in terms of the cost-benefit and risk-opportunity analysis for engaging with an e-service. This analysis has its ...
