Government Initiatives Case study: Dubai e-Government Initiative

  • Aisha Butti Bin Bishr

Student thesis: Phd

Abstract

World-over, E-Government has been recognised as a tool for radically improving the way governments interact with their citizens. While the obvious benefits of E-Government include providing convenience and easy access to customers thereby resulting in improved services to citizens, reduction of costs (by re-deploying resources from back-end processing to front-end customer service); providing easier access to information, increasing transparency and communication between government departments and with the public, the long term benefit of E-Government is also to make it easier for people to conduct their daily lives and business in the nation, thereby making it an attractive location to attract global talent. On the other hand, introducing E-Government requires a transformation in the way the government structure functions - thereby requiring a change in the organisational culture, managerial styles, systems and procedures apart from large financial investments towards technology upgrades. In order to ensure that e-Government is actually bringing about the changes that are desired (via the benefits) it is vital that strict performance measures be instituted on a continuous basis to check the effectiveness of e-Government. This study investigates 8 government departments employing e-Government in Dubai through a case study method and seeks to identify the challenges faced by each department in providing their services to their customers, the performance measures that have been instituted by these departments to evaluate the effectiveness of their e-services and the benefits that they have derived there from. The key challenges and performance issues have been studied and how these challenges could be managed effectively has been analysed. The study utilised the case study method by interviewing key members from each of the 8 departments studied. Important documents were reviewed and the researcher made personal observations from visiting the websites and portals of each of these departments. The results show that while the e-Government initiative in Dubai is quite advanced in comparison with the similar initiatives in countries across the world, there are several challenges faced by these departments. These include - no clear and standardised performance measures being used across the board, lack of technological knowledge and education initiatives for department staff and perhaps not enough organisational learning to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the e-Government Initiative.
Date of Award31 Dec 2013
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • The University of Manchester
SupervisorKate Barker (Supervisor) & Ian Miles (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Dubai
  • ICT
  • e-Government
  • Initiative

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