E-Government Readiness Assessment Model

Abstract

This study presents a general framework model for E-Government Readiness Assessment. There are six necessary key factors to implement any E-government initiative worldwide. These factors represent the basic components to be assessed before launching the "e-initiative" to guarantee the right implementation in the right direction. The organization building blocks need to be assessed are: Organizational Readiness, Governance and leadership Readiness, Customer Readiness, Competency Readiness, Technology Readiness and Legal Readiness^[1]. In the Organizational readiness, bureaucratic nature of E-Governments, business process, long process delay and need for re-engineering will be discussed. In the Governance and Leadership Readiness, the importance of leadership and governance for the e-initiative, the importance of procedures, service level agreement, the way public officials perform, commitment and accountability for public jobs, all will be shown. In the Customer readiness, the main public concerns regarding accessibility, trust and security will be highlighted. In the Competency readiness, the lack of qualified personnel in the public sector and the different alternatives to overcome this issue will be discussed. In the Technology readiness, too many issues worth to be considered, such as hardware, software, communication, current technology, legacy systems, sharing applications and data and setting secure infrastructure to exchange services. The last factor is the Legal readiness where the adoption of the Jordanian Temporary law No 85 in the year 2001 "Electronic Transaction Law" ETL paved the road towards the big shift for e-initiative and privacy. Some of these will be discussed in detail. The need for this detail arises from the fact that all government activities are governed by law. For this reason, it is important to start from this key factor