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Building a Tool to Extract Data from Users and Potential Users of E-Government

Asma A. Alhashmi1, Dr. Abdulbasit Darem2, Dr. Suresha3
  1. Research Scholar, DoS in Computer Science, University of Mysore, India
  2. Post Doctoral Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, University of Mysore, India
  3. Professor, DoS in Computer Science, University of Mysore, India
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Abstract

The demand to extract data about e-government users and potential users by the decision makers is increasing day by day. They need to know more about citizens‘ attitude, skills, and willingness to use e-government online services to segment citizens into different groups and build the citizens‘ profiles. Inspired also by the low rate of use of online government services, a tool was constructed and tested to address this gap. The tool is intended to extract the required data from the existing users and potential users of e-government. It will also determine the key factors with highest impact on e-government use and satisfaction, in order to select those elements that should be prioritized for improvement. The possible level of analysis and knowledge gained using this tool will also be shown. The tool focuses on: discovering the gap between interests in e-government (including attitudes, preferences and intentions to use) and actual use of e-government; the ability to use e-government; user satisfaction with e-government and future egovernment developments (motivators and barriers for future use). The tool showed a high reliability score. Moreover, the tool is clear, easy to use and cost effective. The results of analysed data showed that the extracted data was meaningful, current, and accurate. It will help the decision makers to understand the users‘ abilities and requirements, and improve the online services of e-government.





 

KEYWORDS
 
e-government, tool, user profile, potential users, online services
 

INTRODUCTION
 
This document is a template. An electronic copy can be downloaded from the conference website. For questions onpaper guidelines, please contact the conference publications committee as indicated on the conference website.Information about final paper submission is available from the conference website.
 
Extracting data about e-government users and potential users by the decision makers is increasing day by day. Theyneed to know more about citizens‘ attitude, skills, and willingness to use e-government online services to segmentcitizens into different groups and build the citizens‘ profiles. Inspired also by the low rate of use of online governmentservices, a tool was constructed and tested to address this gap. The tool is intended to extract the required data from theexisting users and potential users of e-government. The tool is aimed to extract the useful data directly from the targetcitizens. Extracting this kind of data from the social networks or the internet usage will not help in this situation. Thereason is that, most of the users registered in the social networks using fake data. In addition we cannot get a clearpicture of the user‘s skill or willingness to use e-government.
 
To understand the proper role of information systems in e-government field, we have to consider e-government asmany information systems integrated together. We should also realize that a good decision about releasing any egovernmentservice required data and information to support the design of e-government information system. One canthen determine how much the information systems are valuable tools to serve the citizens at different levels of their dayto day activities, and how these information systems should be organized. The decision makers need information aboutthe people whom they are serving. These information act as the nerve center for the organization, receiving the latest,most concrete, most up-to-date information and redistributing it to those who need to know more information aboutusers. Much work needs to be done in broadening the impact of systems on government organization and citizens‘ lives. One of the important necessities for designing any information system either for e-government or any other fieldis to develop the user profile.
 
A profile is a description of specific person or thing containing the most important or interesting facts 21. The purpose ofcreating user profile is to capture the needs, goals, values, expectations and habits of users into well-defined user groups.The purpose of getting user profiles is also different for the various areas that use them. In adaptive systems, the user profileis used to provide the adaptation effect, which is to behave differently for different users 2. In intelligent tutoring systems,the user profile or student model is used to guide students in their learning process according to their knowledge andlearning styles 7.
 
The content of a user profile varies from one application domain to another 21. For example, if we consider an onlinecalendar management domain, the user profile contains information about the dates and times when the user usuallyschedules each type of activity in which he is involved, the priorities each activity feature has for the user, the relevanceof each user contact and the user's scheduling and rescheduling habits. In other domains, personal information about theuser, such as name, age, job, and hobbies might be important 21. In knowledge management systems, the skills a useror employee has, the roles he takes within an organization and his performance in these roles are used by managers orproject leaders to assign him the job position that suits him best 22. In the context of e-government, user profiling givesgovernmental organizations tremendous possibilities for their e-government strategies. Fully personalized portals, forexample, provide citizens with specifically those services they need, thereby increasing citizen satisfaction levels 15. Ine-government domain, User profiling or audience analysis is figuring out who uses—or should use— your website,what information and services they need, which tasks they must complete, what are their abilities to use internet andwhat are their attitudes to access government information and service online. Any government agency should have thegoal of building the right e-services for the people who need it, not for stakeholders who may have other objectives. Toachieve the goal of providing excellent web services, one must learn as much as he can about citizens or users and whatthey do, and should be able to communicate this effectively to management. With the information gained fromaudience or user analysis, it is easy to develop a good and usable service. User profiling has also additional objectives;it gives those organizations offering electronic services the possibility to gain insight into the behaviour of individualusers and influence them at the same time 15.
 
Capturing the profile of potential users of e-governments‘ services is important to understand the information needs ofthe target audience to help tailor online services for specific user groups. Not only the content of user profile differsfrom one domain to another, but also how the information needed is acquired. To build a user profile, the informationneeded can be obtained explicitly, that is provided directly by the user, or implicitly, through the observation of theuser‘s actions 21.
 
There are number of research methods used to gather information about audience and their interaction needs andpreferences. The investment required to implement these research activities will depend on time, resources, costs,scope, size and the risk profile of the website 8. Each of these methods can use formal and informal approaches.However it is vital that some investigations are done into who might use a website and what they might want to dothere. Table shows the user‘s research methodology to collect data about users and provides details of their strength,weakness and resource requirements. For the scope of present research it was decided to build a new data set that can beused for this study. In order to collect random primary data from the target population, a questionnaire tool was consideredto be the most appropriate primary survey instrument for this study, because it addressed the issue of reliability ofinformation by reducing if not eliminating differences in the way that the questions were asked 4 and facilitates thecollection of data within a short period of time from the majority of respondents 9. A questionnaire is a method (Method:this means that a questionnaire is a tool to be used rather than an end in itself or a work of modern art) for the elicitation(Elicitation: a questionnaire may bring out information from the respondent or it may start the respondent thinking or evendoing some work on their own in order to supply the requested information 11. In any case, a questionnaire is a device thatstarts off a process of discovery in the respondent's mind, recording, and collecting information. The questionnaire tool isinexpensive, less time consuming and has the ability to provide both quantitative scale and qualitative data from a largeresearch sample 13. It can also find subjective user preferences; provide countable data and high quality human responsefeedback 8.
 
The aim of the present work is to design a tool to extract data from citizens. This data can be used for many purposes likesegmentation and building the user profile of potential user of e-government, where there is no data set or other source ofdata available except the user himself.
 
In the present work initially a tool will be built which will help to:
 
 Establish the extent of access to computer and internet.
 
 Understand the web behaviour of the citizens, the internet usage and the ability to use the.
 
 Find out the purposes of using the internet among respondents
 
 Establish the level of awareness of e-government
 
 Establish the level of interest in using e-government.
 
 Identify the most desired e-government services.
 
 Identify the type of interaction with e-government.
 
 Discover the gap between interests in e-government (including attitudes, preferences and intentions to use) andactual use of e-government.
 

METHODOLOGY
 
Approaches like 201124were adopted to develop and test the tool. The approaches can be divided into two stages:proposing the important dimensions and item generation for each dimension. Each stage has several steps as illustratedin Table 2.
 
The first stage was started by proposing the important dimensions of information and recommended attributes that areneed to be captured during profiling. Hence four focus groups with experts from four different areas were done. Theproposed dimensions to experts from e-government area, e-commerce, computer science and management werepresented. The dimensions were reviewed and refined in four rounds to arrive at the final conclusion. The tool wasdivided into following seven dimensions: access; awareness; web behaviour; attitude towards the use of e-government;barriers of using government websites; demand of e-government services and demographic data. The dimensions andthe attributes to be captured are presented in Table 3.
 
The second stage started by generating a pool of items relating to each dimension based on literature review, focus group,
expert‘s opinions and brain storming. At this stage, the dimensions‘ items were generated and tested to assess and refine thetool. There is a range of scales and response styles that may be used when developing a tool. These produce different types or levels of data and this will influence the analysis options. Therefore, when developing a new measure, it is important tobe clear which scale and response format to use. Frequency scales may be used when it is important to establish how often atarget behaviour or event has occurred 19. Generally Likert scale, multiple choices or dichotomous yes/no response optionsare offered. For research Likert-type or frequency scales are most commonly used. The closed format questions are usedlimiting individual responses to multiple choice answers. These were done by using close-ended multiple-choice questionsin the tool in order to obtain a high response rate. This is intended that the respondents preferred to answer close-endedquestions within the non-interactive, self-administered tools 6. Prior to distribution of the final tool, a pilot study wasconducted in order to determine the response rate and to find out whether any discrepancies are present in the questions.This was intended to know whether the format of the tool and questions are appropriate. The generation of items during tooldevelopment requires considerable pilot work to refine wording and content. To assure face or content validity, items can begenerated from a number of sources including consultation with experts in the field, proposed respondents and review ofassociated literature 18. In addition, a key strategy in item generation is to revisit the research questions frequently and toensure that the items reflect these and remain relevant 114. Minor changes based upon the responses were incorporated tothe final design of the tool and finally tool was developed. Responses received from the pilot study were also included in thefinal analysis 6. Two data sets one from Yemen (DataSet1) and the other one from India (DataSet2) using online methodwere extracted. The collected data sets were analysed using SPSS version 22.It is essential that the reliability of developingquestionnaire tool should be demonstrated. Reliability refers to the repeatability, stability or internal consistency of aquestionnaire tool 10. The reliability of questionnaire tool is the ability of the questionnaire to give the same results whenfilled out by like-minded people under similar circumstances. Reliability is usually expressed on a numerical scale fromzero (very unreliable) to one (extremely reliable). One of the most common ways to demonstrate the reliability is usingCronbach‘s statistic. This statistic uses inter-item correlations to determine whether constituent items are measuring thesame domain 1310. If the items show good internal consistency, Cronbach‘s should exceed 0.70 for a developingquestionnaire. Testing of the inter-item correlation and reliability of the tool was done using Cronbach‘s reliability test.Items with a poor Cronbach‘s a, i.e. (<0.7) should be considered for removal 12. Alternatively, if respondents fail tocomplete an item it conveys that the item may lack clarity. Items should be retained if they are deemed to be theoreticallyimportant even if they do not meet the above criteria. The developed tool recorded a good score when Cronbach‘s reliabilitytest was applied in both data sets. Table 4 shows the result of Cranach‘s reliability test. The correlations between itemsusing inter-item correlations was also measured. High inter-item correlations (>0.8) suggest that these are indeed repetitionsof each other (sometimes referred to as bloated specific) and are in essence asking the same question 512. Hence all itemsthat recorded inter-item correlations score of more than (0.8) were removed.
 
Validity refers to whether a questionnaire tool is measuring what it purports to 3. The validity of a questionnaire tool is thedegree to which the tool is actually measuring or collecting data that you think it should be measuring or collecting dataabout. While this can be difficult to establish, demonstrating the validity of a developing measure is vital. There are severaldifferent types of validity 1713. Content validity (or face validity) refers to expert opinion concerning whether the scaleitems represent the proposed domains or concepts the tool is intended to measure. The conducted content validity was testedwith five experts. Few items were replaced and two were deleted based on experts‘ opinion.
 

RESULTS
 
The ability of the proposed tool to extract the right data that can help to establish the level of access to internet and webbehaviour, the level of awareness of e-government, the level of interest in using e-government, identify the most desirede-government services and type of use is presented here. The tool focused on: identifying the gap between interests ine-government (including attitudes, preferences and intentions to use) and actual use of e-government; the ability to usee-government; user satisfaction with e-government and future e-government development (motivators and barriers forfuture use). It should be remembered that this data set is based on sample, but not on the entire population. In consequence, all results aresubject to sampling tolerances, which means that not all differences are statistically significant. However, the sub-groupdifferences mentioned in this work are all statistically significant at 95% confidence level.
 
Establish the level of access to computer and internet
 
To establish the level of access to computer and internet, it is necessary to know the percentage of people who have access tocomputer and internet at home or in the place of work among the internet users. The results are presented in Table 5.Although the target population was the internet users, it can be seen that some respondents (30.5% and 50.5% in both datasets) do not have internet facility at home or in their work place. They are accessing the internet either at the browsing centreor using friend‘s internet access. Moreover, we can link these results to the demographic data to know the distribution ofcomputer and internet access among the male and female, among the age group, education level, job and level of income. Byusing the cross tab analysis between access to computer and demographic data, and between internet and demographic data,we can find who access more or less. Based on these results we can understand if any category of citizen needs enhancementin the level of access. The level of access to internet is not enough as we expect. These results will give the decision makersan idea as to how to improve the level of access. In such cases the decision makers have to plan a policy to provide low costcomputers and internet access or provide community centres facilities where citizens can access the internet free of charge.Many solutions can be found for this problem.
 
Understand the web behaviour of citizen( the internet usage and the ability to use internet)
 
Table 6 shows that most of the respondents in data set 1 access the internet daily (59.5%). Most of the respondents inData set 2 access the internet monthly (38.6%). We can go deep in the analysis to know which category of respondentuse more and which category use less by using cross tab analysis. Also we can find if there is any significant differencein use between different categories of respondents. Based on this level of analysis, we can address the category thataccess internet less and develop a plan to find the problem for less access and encourage them to access internet more.
 
The finding in Table 7 shows the skill to find information in internet. Most of the respondents in Data set 1haveexcellent skills. In Date set 2, most of the respondents have good skills. Still 29.5% in Data set 1 and 16.7 % inData set 2 need improvement in skills to use internet. These results need to be linked to demographic data to explorewhich groups need more training to improve their skills.
 
The ability among the respondents to find information or services through internet is quite good if we consider thisability to be used to access e-government; this will help in empowering the society. Some citizens could see thebenefits of being able to access e-government services. In a small number of cases citizens are already looking at theways of actively promoting and increasing the usage of such services. The government agencies would provide supportand guide people in finding information they need, encouraging them to do this on-line rather than having to access theservices of various departments face-to-face or over the phone.
 
Find the purposes of using internet among respondents.
 
To find the interest of internet users, decision makers have to find the purpose of using the internet.The respondents usethe internet for different purposes like e-mail, chat, searching for government or non-government information, andmaking purchase or for payment through internet. Table 8 illustrates the different purposes using internet. It is assumedthat the internet users know the benefit of internet in saving time, money, and effort; then they can use it to deal withgovernment to get information or services. In contrast, we find the low level of searching of government informationamong the internet users.
 
Establish the level of awareness of e-government
 
One of the important issues that decision makers should know is the awareness of e-government. It is presumed that the levelof awareness of e-government among the internet users is of high order. Table 9 shows the awareness of e-governmentamong the internet users. The level of awareness is very low in both data sets.
 
Moreover, the source of awareness comes from T.V more than any other sources. It indicates that government organizationdid not spend enough effort to spread the awareness among citizens using different channels.
 
Establish the level of interest in using e-government.
 
To explore the way as to how the respondents communicate with or contact the government, it is assumed that theinternet users like to interact with government through internet rather than interacting either face to face or throughcommon service centers. The results in Table 11 show what most of the respondents like to interact with governmentonline rather than inline. Some of them still fear to use it by themselves online; therefore they prefer to use egovernmentthrough common service centers to reduce the risk. Only few respondents, who still like to use the legacysystem, may be due to bad experience with e-government or lack of awareness about e-government.
 
As evident from these data, there is fairly high demand for e-government and it is especially encouraging that greatmajority of both the samples that is 70% and 83% believe that the Internet can make government more approachable.There is clearly overwhelming agreement concerning that having government information on the Internet would makethe government more accessible.
 
Identify the most desired e-government services.
 
In case government wants to make its services accessible online, then which are the one that will be most likely to beused by citizen? Tableillustrates several services that are likely candidates for e-government services and which ofthem the public is ready to accept. It gives a clear idea about what citizen need the most.
 
Identify the type of interaction with e-government.
 
It is assumed that this important point will affect the perception of respondents toward e-government. This assumption issupported by the results in Table 13 where 63.2% of the respondents in Data set 1 like to have full interaction withgovernment online compared to 39.9% in Data set 2. On the other side, 63.3% of respondents in Data set 2 like to have oneway interaction more than 77.5% like only to search. Moreover, 77.5% of respondents in Data set2 prefer to search onlycompared to 21.2% in Data set 1.
 
Discovering the barriers of e-government from the citizens’ point of view.
 
When it was tried to know, as to why internet users did not use the e-government to communicate with the government,then different types of answers were received although most of the respondents gave almost the same type of answers.The answers included poor infrastructure and connectivity (41 percent) and lack of proper security or privacy throughinternet (26 percent).
 

DISCUSSIONS
 
The tool helps to extract data that can help the decision makers to take the right decision. The citizen is the key elementin making any technological tool to succeed. So, the citizen plays a major role to make any technology tool useful ornot, through fully utilizing this technology. Since e-government is one of the most important information technologytools available in our day to day lives, it is essential that the citizen should have a full knowledge about it. Anytechnological tool will be useful only when it is known how to use it, in terms of goals achieved and how they areutilized. To make the citizens aware of e-government‘s applications and how to use and get maximum benefitsprovided by these applications, the following points are very important:
 
1. The familiarity with the technology used by the e-government, like computer and internet.
 
2. Development of skills required to deal with e-government
 
3. Understanding and full awareness of how and when to use e-government
 
The study recommends that governments should use the best practices to adopt e-government. It also needs to reorientits delivery mechanisms to address the ICT capability and information gaps identified in this study. Along with thequality, improvement brought by information technology revolution and internet and with speeding up the delivery ofservices to citizens round the clock, this put governments in a race to execute and apply this vital project, which helpthe government to extend services to its citizens through a single window. Governments‘ departments also promise toextend best services and achieve best results while attempting to eliminate all aspects of corruption.
 
This work offers essential contribution to different stakeholders including the government agencies who requireadopting e-government to improve the relationship with citizens. That is, from the results of this research thegovernment agencies could have better understanding in a simpler and detailed manner, about the problems of lowadoption. This could allow the formulation of a strategy that promotes awareness and diffusion. From the results of thestudy, it is clear that there is a demand to use the government services online at the same time a number of other keyproblems faced by citizens with regard to e-government adoption and use were identified. These can be grouped intotwo categories: technology related and awareness related.
 
In terms of technology, the most important concern was fear of technology. Citizens frequently encountered operationalproblems with their ICT especially when they deal with financial issues like money transactions, so they depend onothers to do the job to avoid the risk. This dependency on consultants and professionals was often cited as a majorproblem. The other issues like the governments‘ websites are not usable because they are not user friendly, out of dateand poor design should be considered seriously by government agencies. It is very important to build a good website tomake it usable by everyone.
 
Turning to awareness issues, the study suggests that most of the citizens (internet users) not aware of the e-governmentservices and also sometimes they get these services somehow through counters, but without knowing that they may beavailable online and he/she can do it himself; here the government can play a major role to disseminate the informationabout its services and how they can be used.
 

CONCLUSION
 
The aim of this work was to show a comprehensive tool to measure citizens‘ ability to use ICT, satisfaction derived byusing e-governments, transformation to e-government, and the impact of e-government on the public. The study also sought to assess, users‘ interest on the services offered, the obstacles and problems that prevent them from using theseservices, and the extent of general satisfaction derived from e-government services. The data collected using this toolshow that there is an emerging need for improving the governmental strategies, policies, applications, and websites topromote the use of e- government services online.
 
The proposed tool can be used to extract useful data directly from e-government users or the potential users. The resultsshowed that the tool can be very useful in two primary ways: it can capture the important feature about user profile of egovernmentwebsite, and it is cost effective. The extracted data can help the decision makers to understand the users andplan for a better online service. The extracted data set provides flexibility and accuracy to conduct different statisticalanalyses. It can be used for frequency and descriptive analyses to interoperate the data. The reason for using frequencies andpercentages was due to the fact that previous Information Systems (IS) researchers were employing the earlier statedanalysis tools to analyse and present research findings which involved using response frequencies, percentage 23means andstandard deviations Ошибка! Источник ссылки не найден.. It also can be used with t-test, ANOVA test, PostHoc Tests, and Chi-square test to find the significance and association among the factors. Cross tab can be used as a methodto segment the respondents to different groups. The study recorded greater attitude towards using e-government servicesonline.
 

Tables at a glance
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Table 1 Table 2 Table 3 Table 4 Table 5
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Table 6 Table 7 Table 8 Table 9 Table 10
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Table 11 Table 12 Table 13 Table 14
 

References