An empirical examination of e-government adoption in Indonesia
Creators: name: SABANI, Alvedi
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 460908
subject: Information systems organisation and management

description: Countries across the world have been implementing electronic government (e-Government) to improve the delivery of public services for citizens. Consequently, enhancing citizens' uptake of e-Government services has become a fundamental issue. As countries have reached different stages of e-Government development and maturity, the factors affecting its acceptance and usage might vary and have significant implications for adoption-diffusion strategies. However, investigations of these criteria are limited, particularly from the perspective of the citizens from developing countries such as Indonesia. Moreover, studies have reported inconsistent findings regarding the critical factors influencing the adoption of many technologies, including e-Government services. A reasonable explanation is that the adoption of e-Government has thus far been studied using models that do not fully capture the complexity of e-Government adoption from the citizens' perspective. This research develops a model, which posits that adoption does not depend on individual factors but on specific configurations of factors. Understanding the configurations and collective effect of the critical factors for the successful adoption of e-Government would have major theoretical implications and deliver a unique contribution to e-Government and technology adoption research.

A mixed-methods approach was adopted for this study. A research model was initially developed based on the literature, mostly from developing countries, underpinned by the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT). The research model was then revised with qualitative data obtained from a field study. Qualitative data were collected via interviews with 15 e-Government users in Indonesia. Along with some common factors, namely, performance and effort expectancy, the thematic analysis of the interviews identified two emerging factors that may influence citizens to use e-Government services: perceived transparency and government encouragement. Next, a survey of 314 Indonesian citizens was used to validate the revised model and its associated relationships between constructs. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to evaluate the significance of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, perceived transparency, perceived security, information quality, system quality, information and communications technology literacy and government encouragement in the adoption and use of transactional e-Government services from the perspective of citizens in Indonesia. The study proposes and evaluates several new moderation and mediation roles in the research model that have not been adequately discussed in the literature. The model explains 76.5% of the variance in the adoption of e-Government services, which is higher than the baseline UTAUT model.

Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) was applied to complement the findings from SEM in investigating why citizens accept and resist e-Government services. The fsQCA findings suggest three configurations that would lead Indonesian citizens to adopt e-Government and two that would lead Indonesian citizens to use e-Government services. These configurations have not been explored in previous studies. The results indicate an overall solution coverage of 84.5% for the intention to adopt and 82.5% for the use of e-Government. This suggests that a substantial proportion of e-Government adoption and use is covered by the proposed solutions. From the model proposition analysis, the research model for the adoption of e-Government shows 99.7% consistency, which is significantly higher than the 80% threshold for a research model to be useful and justify theory advancement. Further, fsQCA also provides two configurations that explain why Indonesian citizens are resistant to the adoption and use e-Government services, making a unique contribution to the literature.

The research contributes to e-Government research from both theoretical and practical perspectives. From the theoretical perspective, the UTAUT is extended by incorporating exogenous factors including information quality, system quality and information and communications technology literacy, as well as endogenous factors such as perceived transparency and perceived security. These factors are important for e-Government adoption and use in developing countries such as Indonesia. This study also identifies which factors are essential or non-essential for the adoption and use of e-Government and which combinations of factors are more or less important than others. In practice, this research offers governmental and public organisations with suggestions to improve the uptake of e-Government. This information can be used to formulate better strategies and policies for the continuous development of e-Government in Indonesia and other developing countries.

This research investigates the critical factors for the adoption and the of e-Government from the perspective of citizens. There are other stakeholders with different perceptions of the adoption of e-Government, such as businesses and public organisations. These stakeholders may have various thoughts, needs and expectations regarding the adoption of e-Government. Future research should consider the perceptions of these stakeholders to broaden the scope of the study to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the issues that affect the adoption and use of e-Government.