Role of National Culture on the Use of e-Government Services in Sri Lanka

Abstract

improvements will cause to attract and retain users for continuous use. Given the aforementioned evidences, the scope of this paper is to find an answer to the following research question. Research questionDoes national culture make impact on the use of e-government services in Sri Lanka?The rest of the paper is compiled as follows. The brief explanation on the background of the study and literature evidences are presented in section two, followed by the theoretical framework and the research model in section three. Research methodology and analysis is discussed in section four while section five is devoted to present the research results and discussion. Conclusion of the research, limitations and future research direction are brought in section six and seven. Background and Literature EvidencesApart from technical and management related factors, human factors which are related to cultural and social elements in developing countries are very much important for user behavioral decisions on the adoption and use of e-government services. Negligence of cultural traits will be acted as hindrances for adoption and use of new technological systems [10]. Hence, non-technological factors are very much important. However, few studies have been explored about the cultural influence on the adoption and use of e-government services [10,11]. Thus, culture makes remarkable influence on the acceptance and adoption of new technologies such as e-government services [14][15][16].Keywords: e-Government; Technology acceptance model; National culture; Structural equation modeling; Sri Lanka Introduction E-government means utilizing ICT facilities available in internet and web based technologies to offer government services to general public as well as to improve the government services [1][2][3]. To proper function the e-government initiatives, there should be IT savvy culture within government organizations as well as among the general public. Most of the governments around the world still are confronting the issues with regard to acceptance, adoption and use of e-government services regardless of the possible benefits of vast e-government projects [4][5][6] because issues are multi-dimensional in nature. The core issues of the e-government domain are from social side (user's demand) not from technical side [7]. Even though, some issues have been examined much more, still there are some other aspects which are yet to be explored [8]. These issues must be addressed not only from technical perspective but also social and cultural perspective [5]. The importance of culture for technology adoption and use in particular for the e-government services has been pointed out in prior studies [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. Culture represents how social groups interact with each other and how distinguishes societies, institutes, professions or even countries. At the same time, culture explains how people in social groups interact with new technological innovations. However, it has not been paid much more attention regarding this particular fa...

Exploring Determinants of M-Government Services: A Study from the Citizens’ Perspective in Saudi Arabia

“…This corresponds with findings by other studies in the literature, that revealed that social and cultural aspects were significant influences on Saudis' intention to adopt and use e-Government systems from both citizens' and employee's perspectives [22]; and that the main barriers to Omanis adopting e-Government were cultural rather than technical issues [23].…”