E-government Initiative in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia has adopted the concept of e-government believing that e-government will cause a significant impact on the country’s economy. According to Bawazir (2006), e-government was implemented initially in the early of 1995 as a project for the Ministry of Labor called Saudi Electronic Data Interchange (Saudi EDI). This project aimed to help the government to interact with businesses online.

However, this application of e-government initially failed to provide online services to the public. This failure is due to the government’s lack of the awareness of the challenges it may face the implementation of e-government, such as the management of the process, technology as well as the management of people.

As a result, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology developed long-run strategic

16 plans for the implementation of e-government as an initial step to change the processes of administering services and to provide better government services online. The first plan was implemented in 2005 by establishing the e-government program of “Yesser” from five-year period (Yesser, 2006). Then the second plan was launched in 2012 with improved vision and objectives (Yesser, 2012). These two strategic planes will be discussed in following section.

2.4.1 E-government Strategies in Saudi Arabia

As mentioned previously, the biggest action that Saudi Arabia have taken toward improving e-government services was when the joint Ministry of Information and Communication Technology and Ministry of Finance created the e-government program of “Yesser” in 2005. The establishment of this program comes under the first action plan of five-year duration (2005-2010) that Saudi Arabia has put to improve e-government (Yesser, 2006; Yesser, 2012). The vision of this plan is to digitize government interactions through adopting ICT system. This plan aims to achieve this vision by providing better services and enhancing the productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness of e-government services in addition to increasing the revenue of investments (Yesser, 2012). The e-government framework of the Saudi Arabia action plan consists of three projects; 1) infrastructure project: concerned with constructing a strong and reliable infrastructure that enables to make integration and data exchange between government agencies.

2) E-services project: concerned with providing government online services, such as employment service, expatriate labor request service, work permit service, and payment order service, to citizens, businesses, and other stockholders (Yesser, 2012). 3) National projects: concerned with providing major cross-departmental applications, such as e-procurement, government correspondence, government databases, to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of government (Yesser, 2012). This plan has been achieved in 2010.

As a result of the implementation of the first plan, Saudi e-government ranking has significantly increased to 41^st out of 190 countries in 2012 according to e-government development index of the United Nations (2016). Despite the progress that Saudi Arabia’s e-government has made compared to its previous ranking, the acceptance and the use of e-government in Saudi Arabia is considered to be low compared to the rest of the world. According to the UN/DESA (2012), only 60% of the government services in Saudi Arabia can be completed online via e-government services, which means the other 40% of government services are not implemented or still in the early stages of implementing online services. Therefore, the Saudi government moved to the second plan to continue its project to improve e-government services.

17 In 2012, the Saudi government started its second plan as an extension of the first plan. The second plan rolled to be implemented over a five-year period (2012-2016). Not like the first action plan which focused more on laying the foundation for the technological side of e-government, this plan focuses more on improving the efficiency of the services and the interaction with citizens. The vision of this plan is to enable citizens to use effective and secure government services in an easy way and through multiple electronic channels (yesser, 2012). This plan continues to invest in the same three projects of infrastructure, e-services, and national projects seeking to achieve the same objectives. In order to ensure that the above objectives are achieved, the second plan focused on applying four strategies: creating a sustainable workforce, enhancing citizens’ experience in the interaction with government agencies, increasing cooperation and innovation, and enhancing the efficiency of government services.

2.4.2 Saudi Citizens and E-government

Saudi Arabia has started to recognize how adopting new technology significantly changes its economy.

As mentioned earlier, in order to improve the performance and the participation of e-government, Saudi Arabia has established two strategic plans, each plan includes a five-year duration. These plans caused an increase of Saudi e-government ranking according to UN index. However, despite the main objective of these plans is to provide better government services to citizens that match their expectations, the acceptance of e-government among citizens is still a big challenge. The Saudi government focused on improving its performance through developing the infrastructure, adopting new technologies, and implementing strategic plans, but neglected the citizens’ needs and attitude toward online interaction with governments.

Educating citizens about the benefits of e-government, as well as understanding their expectation, needs, and the influence of their decision to use government is very important for the improvement of e-government performance and then its diffusion afterwards. In other words, citizens’ awareness is the key driven for e-government diffusion. For example, if we take a look at the history of the electronic services initiatives in Saudi Arabia, e-commerce and e-banking initiatives have been one of the very first implementations of e-services. However, these initiatives have encountered several difficulties. It is clear that the citizens’ acceptance of these services was not very promising. One of the reasons is the lack of trusting in the security of websites. Alyabis (2000) discusses the relationship between the commerce and e-banking in affecting citizens’ trust in online transactions in Saudi Arabia. He argues that if the trust of any of those two services is missing, then the other service will be affected, which means that both e-commerce and banking directly affect each other. Such a case affected the online interaction in general and put

e-18 service in a critical situation. With the respect to e-government, users’ lack of trust in one service may affect negatively their acceptance of other services, which poses a threat to the successful diffusion of e-government.

Nevertheless, the continuous evolution of technology led to a significant improvement of the Internet security and websites protection and led to the emergence of laws regulating the Internet, and protecting users’ privacy. Thus, electronic interaction, including e-commerce and e-banking, is no longer a threat as it was before. Still, the Saudi government is facing problems in convincing citizens to conduct online transactions especially through its online services. On the other hand, Saudi citizens are facing difficulty to accept online services in general, including e-government services. The reason is their lack of trust in Internet security, lack of Internet and computer education, and lack of Internet services knowledge (Sait et al., 2004).

Therefore, despite the efforts exerted by the Saudi government in developing e-government services, it is necessary to direct this effort to studying the citizens’ behavior and the factors the influence their acceptance of the e-government. Saudi government needs to understand that technology development may not be the main solution for convincing citizens to adopt e-government.

In order to better understand the citizens’ behavior and the factors that affect their acceptance of new technology, which will help us to develop a conceptual framework for this study, the next section will highlight the main theories of the acceptance of new technology by individuals and discuss their roles in e-government adoption and diffusion research.