Evaluating citizen satisfaction with the quality of e-government information services provided by Southern African Development Community governments

Abstract

This dissertation reports on an empirical evaluation of citizen satisfaction with e-government information services provided by Southern African Development Community (SADC) governments, since citizens perceive service quality as an effective indicator of e-government shortfalls. Few studies have been conducted in SADC countries to empirically evaluate the satisfaction of regarding e-government services. An e-government satisfaction model was applied, which is a non-linear framework with interactive quality proxies. A total of 364 respondents was used for data collection. An analytic modelling technique of Partial Least Squares (PLS) was used to predict the factors that most influence citizen satisfaction with e-government information services provided by SADC governments. The resulting model fits the data with a high goodness of fit (GoF) of 0.62 and a model predictive power (R2) of 0.60 for the global model. In addition, the results of this study show that perceived quality is the most influential factor affecting citizen satisfaction with e-government information services, followed by citizen complaint handling and then citizen expectation. Finally, this study used PLS to rank the SADC countries involved in this study in terms of which country is offering the best level of e-government information services and customer satisfaction. The results indicate that South Africa was ranked highest and Tanzania lowest.