Towards a user-centric mobile government in Jordan

Abstract

Mobile government (M-Government) is an evolving delivery channel for governments to provide timely information and services ubiquitously to residents, businesses and other government departments through mobile devices. Developing countries have a higher mobile penetration rate than the fixed-line Internet rates, which opens doors of opportunities for these countries to bridge the digital gap and gain a better reach through M-Government. Jordan has realised the potential of M-Government and launched the E-Government Mobile Portal on the 18th of April, 2011. This thesis uses a mixed-method approach comprising surveys, interviews, meta-analysis and focus groups. The findings show that the critical success factors for M-government from the users’ perspective are the following: user acceptance, security, privacy, trust, cost, mobile device limitations, usability, availability of services, broadband and content. The findings also show that there are ’high effect’ success factors in addition to the critical ones which are the following : mobile payment system, accessibility, awareness, education, reliability, legal issues and mobile penetration. Additionally, this thesis also proposes a success framework for M-Government that provides practical strategies to tackle each success factor. Furthermore, it recommends an M-Government user-centric road map with implementation stages aiming to assist the Jordanian Government and other governments in tackling each success factor in order to ensure a successful implementation of M-Government.