Egypt Local Government Websites Maturity: Current Status

Egypt Local Government Websites Maturity: Current Status Hisham Abdelsalam1, Hatem ElKadi2, and Sara Gamal1 1 Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University, 5 Ahmed Zewail St., Orman, Giza 12613, Egypt [email protected] 2 Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, Giza 12613, Egypt [email protected] Abstract. This paper investigates the maturity of Egyptian local e-government websites. The paper develops a model that fits a developing country context and is based on Quirk's Maturity Model and the Municipal e-Government Assessment Project (MeGAP) Model. The model is used to carry out a detailed content analysis of 22 governorates' web sites in Egypt. The results show a significant variability in websites’ maturity in various spaces of the model. Information features have proved to be dominating, while features related to eservice and e-commerce are the least available on the local government websites. Keywords: Egypt, local e-government, Quirk model, maturity, content analysis, MeGAP. 1 Introduction Government bureaucracy is often held to be inefficient due to the lack of incentives to please its customers. Moreover, the potential customers, the citizens, have no alternative service provider available [1]. Electronic government or e-government has provided a means through which governments can improve citizen interaction with their government and at the same time change the traditional model of government [2]. In fact, the vital necessity of modernization and the introduction of enhanced business models that replace traditional ones have been realized by governments through e-government worldwide [3-4]. Technology allows governments to serve citizens in a timely, effective, and cost efficient way [1]. The key reasons for this public sector reform are to increase the efficiency of government operations, strengthen democracy, enhance transparency, and provide better and more versatile services to citizens and businesses [3, 5]. Local government, being closer to citizens and their interactions with the various levels of governments, is in a unique position to inform the public with the direction of future policy and to reflect the government's new vision and strategy. Like many other countries worldwide, the local e-government initiatives were set off in Egypt to improve the capabilities of enhancing service delivery to their citizens. R. Popescu-Zeletin et al. (Eds.): AFRICOMM 2010, LNICST 64, pp. 102–112, 2011. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2011 Egypt Local Government Websites Maturity: Current Status 103 Broadly defined, e-government is the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to promote more efficient and effective government, facilitate more accessible government services, allow greater public access to information, and make government more accountable to citizens [6]. E-Government systems are becoming an essential element of modern public administration [7]. Assessing the effectiveness of these systems is becoming a necessity in order to ensure successful implementation [8]. This paper presents the results of a content analysis of 22 websites of Egyptian governorates. Following the introduction, the rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a brief introduction providing the context of Egypt egovernment. The research methodology is presented in Section 3, followed by results in Section 4 and, finally, conclusions in Section 5. 2 Context 2.1 Egypt Local Government The Arab Republic of Egypt (ARE or Egypt) lies in the south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean, mainly in Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula in Asia, separated by the Suez Canal. The majority of the country is desert across which the river Nile flows from the south to the Mediterranean in the north forming a Delta. Egypt has been a unified country for over five thousand years, mainly due to the river Nile. Egypt area is 1 million square kilometers, with a population of around 78 million living on 5 % of the total area of Egypt. Ninety-seven percent of the population lives in the Nile valley with up to one-third of the population living in either Cairo or Alexandria. The United National Development Program (UNDP) has calculated that 46.8% of the economic and social establishments are in the governorates of these two cities, and that 23% of the labor force is in the same area. Most of the power is held by the central and not the local government. Egypt is a unitary country that comprises of 29 administrative sections, called governorates (or municipalities), each of various sizes, populations, and resources. Governorates are administratively further divided into cities and districts which are, in turn, divided into smaller entities called neighborhoods in cities and villages in the districts. The local entities have a certain degree of administrative freedom. Nevertheless, they are financially and politically managed by the central government. Local governments – represented in governorates – manage their operations based on rules, regulations and legal requirements created by the central government. However, they have autonomy in how they provide their service to citizens and how they manage their processes. Consequently, governorates might be organized in different ways. They have a degree of administrative autonomy, which when properly used can result in good administration, totally depending on the personality and abilities of the governor. 2.2 Egypt Local Government Development Program Egypt has established its ICT strategy in 2001 in what has been known as the Egyptian Information Society Initiative (EISI). EISI was built on seven pillars; one of 104 H. Abdelsalam, H. ElKadi, and S. Gamal which was e-Government. This initiative was put into action and, hence, the egovernment program in Egypt started in 2001. In 2004, program ownership was transferred to the Ministry of State for Administrative Development (MSAD), where the former e-Government Program Director (Dr. Ahmed Darwish) was appointed as the minister. This reflects the Egyptian understanding of e-Government as a natural component of administrative development and reform. Thus, the e-government program in Egypt became one of the two mandates of MSAD, the other one being the public administration institutional reform. Initially, the e-government program consisted of four main subprograms among which came the Egyptian Local Government Development Program (ELGDP). In turn, ELGDP has three main projects: (1) service enhancement in municipalities which includes automation of services provided to citizens; (2) development of web portals for the governorates; and (3) citizen relationship management (CRM) systems. 3 Research Methodology Many attempts have been made to establish models of e-Government maturity [9]; e.g. the United Nations [10] outlined a five stage model used to benchmark government web sites at a national level and other models have been presented in [1113]. Local e-Government, however, needs to offer more than electronic replication of existing information and services as it provides an opportunity to offer new and enhanced services to the public, to increase the involvement of communities in policy making and improved service provision [9]. Some potential shortcomings in the stage models’ capacity to capture the drivers and evolution of e-government [14] have derived alternative suggestions that appeared later [15-16] to show that governments mature in various spaces rather than in distinct linear stages. This section presents the local e-government assessment methodology and its implementation procedure. The section starts by stating research questions and proceeds to detail different aspects of the methodology used. 3.1 Research Questions The focus of this investigation was on two principal research questions: (1) What is a well suited model for assessing local government websites in the Egyptian context? (2) What is the status of local government websites in Egypt? To what extent have Egyptian governorates implemented more matured e-government services? Most, if not all, available maturity models and assessment frameworks were designed and implemented in developed countries. The focus of the first research question will be on determining the applicability of two well developed models (Quirck’s and MeGAP-3) in a developing country such as Egypt. Being closer to citizens, local governments have the majority of interactions between government and the civil society. Their websites, thus, are expected to provide – effectively and efficiently – different service needed by their citizens. The second research question applies an assessment framework to examine how sophisticated (mature) these websites are in Egypt, providing insights that will help Egypt and similar countries improve the services provided via local e-government. Egypt Local Government Websites Maturity: Current Status 105 3.2 Model Used Quirk’s [15] model will be the corner stone of the research methodology of this paper. This model has been selected for this research as being of the widely accepted and used in the world [17], and because it emphasizes the disparate range of functions provided by local governments [18]. As the inappropriateness of a staged model approach to describe e-local Government was recognized in literature [16, 18], Quirck’s model [15] uses the term ‘spaces’ to describe the maturity level approached rather than using a linearly ordered stages. The original model uses five spaces. As outlined in [15], they are: (1) eManagement: improved management of people (2) e-Service: interface with customers, (3) e-Commerce: cash transactions (4) e-Decision-making: better informed public interest decisions and (5) e-Democracy: political dialogue citizen and community. Published work, however, merges the last two spaces into one (e.g. [17]). In this research, the original five spaces model will be used. To assess the level of maturity of various governorates’ websites on each of the five spaces, a content matrix was developed and used to examine the presence of a number of features. These features were extracted from three sources: (1) application of the model on Australian municipalities [18], (2) MeGap-3 [19], and (3) the authors (research team) of features of Egyptian municipal websites. This step extended the implementation framework presented in [18] by merging it with the MeGAP model. This research used the third version of the MeGAP (MeGAP-3) which has 68 distinct web performance dimensions (features). Features in MeGAP-3 that did not fit with the Egyptian context – e.g. pets’ licenses – were excluded. The list of features is provided in Appendix A. 3.3 Scoring and Sampling To evaluate the websites, each feature is given a score of: ‘1’ if it is fully implemented; a reduced score of ‘0.5’ if the feature is partly implemented; or ‘0’ if the feature does not exist. Then, the score for each space equals the total scores of its features divided by the total number of features – in this specific space – and multiplied by 100 to give a percentage. Assessment was made by a group of eight postgraduate students (evaluators) from Information Technology and Political Sciences majors. They received/attended two training sessions in order to effectively use the assessment model. For each governorate, assessment was conducted by each evaluator independently and then, results from different evaluators were compared and discussed in groups to reach a consensus upon scores. Out of the 29 governorates, 22 (76%) had a working website at the time of assessment (July 2010). Data was collected from a content analysis of the 22 governorates’ websites. This sample represents 100% of available websites. 4 Results This section presents the result of the assessment of local government websites. First, a comparison of the total scores is presented followed by the scores of different spaces, and finally the frequencies of most common and uncommon features. 106 H. Abdelsalam, H. ElKadi, and S. Gamal 4.1 Score Comparisons We start with discussing the findings of the aggregated level; the 22 evaluated websites. Figure 1 presents the total score per governorate, and governorates are ranked in a descending order. As the figure shows, the scores range from 6 to 65 with an average of 38. Surprisingly, the capital city (Cairo) came third with 62.5 while the highest score was for Matrouh – a less developed governorate on the western borders of Egypt. Another surprise was the score of the second capital of Egypt (Alexandria) which scored 36. It is noteworthy that Alexandria witnessed the first and most famous Egyptian e-government project that involved automating services in all of its councils. That project was referred to later on by e-Alexandria and became the role model for subsequent projects. Upper Egypt governorates – which are far less developed – achieved the lowest five scores. Such result was also expected due to the specific conservative nature of these governorates. It equally indicated the relatively low attention given by the central government for improving these governorates. 100 80 Score 60 40 20 Matrouh Menoufia Cairo Ismailia Port Said South Sinai Dakahlia Aswan Behera Menia Sharkaya Alex Assiut Fayoum Red Sea Suez Damietta Beni Suef Suhag Luxor New Valley Qena 0 Governorate Fig. 1. Evaluation results by governorate total score ranked in a descending order Figure 2 shows a comparison of scores of the 22 governorates with the population on the x-axis, which range from 150 thousands (South Sinai) to 7.8 million (Cairo) [20]. In line with [21], the figures depict an important point; “it is not necessarily the case that the most populous municipalities, and presumably those with the largest IT expenditures or the greatest need to offer services and functions to large and diverse populations, have the most extensive e-government solutions.” As shown, the figures fail to prove the existence of a correlation between the population of a governorate and the sophistication of its website. Matrouh and Ismailia governorates have scored higher than governorates with much larger population such as Cairo and Alexandria. Egypt Local Government Websites Maturity: Current Status 107 100 Insignificant correlation; coefficient .168 90 80 70 Matrouh Ismailia Score 60 50 40 30 20 Port Said Menoufia Aswan South Sinai Fayoum Suez Suhag Luxor New Valley Menia Cairo Dakahlia Behera Alexandria Sharkia Red Sea Assiut Beni Suef Damietta 10 Qena 0 0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 Population (thousands) 7000 8000 9000 Fig. 2. Governorate total score vs. population 4.2 Spaces Comparison Governorates’ scores in each of the five spaces are shown in Fig. 3 through Fig 7. As expected, all websites scored in the e-management space (Fig. 3) are those intended to include features that assist citizens’ navigation through the website. This space is also the first means to attract citizens to use governorate website rather than face-to-face or phone conversations. Out of the 22 governorates, 7 (32%) has a score more than 75% and 13 (59%) has a score more than 60%. While all websites provide services, Fig. 4 shows a great deal of variability in scores with respect to the e-services space. Some provide only information about different services and necessary requirements and documents, while others provide downloadable forms and enable the citizen to obtain the service online. This space includes features which assist citizens to find information regarding different services provided by the local government. For the Egyptian context, this space has an increased importance as it provides information related to housing projects carried out by the government for low-income citizens and young families. Scores of the third space, e-commerce, are shown in Fig. 5 revealing that only 41% of the websites have features related to e-commerce. This space covers the transaction handling involved in placing orders for services provided through the website. So, since the scores of the e-service space are already low, features related to order handling are not significantly present. Figure.6 shows that a significant majority (95%) of websites have features belonging to the e-decision making space. The highest score, however, is 44%. This space provides information related to governorate operations on strategic and other managerial levels. Finally, the scores of e-democracy space are shown in Fig. 7. Surprisingly, a significant majority (73%) of websites have features belonging to this 108 H. Abdelsalam, H. ElKadi, and S. Gamal space and with average score higher than e-decision making space. Features that provide means to interact directly with the citizens seem to have a good deal of attention from the governorates. Fig. 3. E-management scores Fig. 4. E-service scores Fig. 5. E-commerce scores Fig. 6. E-decision-making scores Fig. 7. E-democracy scores 4.3 Features’ Frequencies among Governorates Tables 1 and 2 partially list the different features and the number of governorates’ websites supporting each feature. The percentage figures reflect a percentage of the total number of governorates. While Table 1 lists the most widespread features, which are supported by at least 60% of governorates’ websites, Table 2 lists features found in few (0-30%) websites. Egypt Local Government Websites Maturity: Current Status 109 Table 1. Most Common Features Feature Basic information Tourism Website navigation Information for Businesses and investment News and coming events Hierarchy Ownership of Content Contact details for the governorate Links to other organizations/businesses Emergency Management GIS maps Searchable Directory Sense of community Job opportunities and training Community information Space E management E Service E management E Service E management E management E management E management E Decision making E management E Service E management E Democracy E Service E Decision making N 22 22 21 21 20 19 19 18 18 17 15 15 15 14 14 % 100.0 100.0 95.5 95.5 90.9 86.4 86.4 81.8 81.8 77.3 68.2 68.2 68.2 63.6 63.6 N 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 2 3 4 5 6 6 % 0 0 0 0 0 4.5 9.1 9.1 13.6 18.2 22.7 27.3 27.3 Table 2. Most Uncommon Features Feature FAQs Online payments Email payment/ordering Economic indicators Budget Report Council minutes Online support Information Requests Job application Service tracking Transaction handling Strategic Plan Forums Space E Service E commerce E commerce E Decision making E Decision making E Democracy E Service E Service E Service E Service E commerce E Decision making E Democracy Of the 15 features listed in Table 1, 11 features fall under the e-management space, 2 in the e-decision making space, 1 in each of the e-service and e-democracy spaces, and none falls under the e-commerce space. In other words, the most common functions concentrate on informing. However, e-service begins to penetrate the Egyptian community where tourism information and information for investment are among these features which reflect the attention given by local government to self revenue generation rather than solely depending on the national budget. As shown in Table 2, the bulk of e-service, e-commerce, and e-democracy features implemented totally fall under this table. This can be due to the belief that citizens would still prefer requesting local government services in person rather than online. 110 H. Abdelsalam, H. ElKadi, and S. Gamal 5 Conclusions This paper investigates the maturity of Egyptian local e-government web sites through content analysis of 22 governorates' websites. The results show a variation in maturity levels of different governorates. Results reveal that Egyptian governorates' web sites are still in the first stage of maturity; cataloguing information [13]. This stage involves presenting information about government and its activities on the web available 24/7 to facilitate saving time and reducing cost. 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Gamal Appendix A: Model Features No. Space Features 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 EManagement Basic information Web site navigation Contact details for the governorate News and coming events Hierarchy Ownership of Content New features in the website Searchable Directory Directions to Offices/Facilities Emergency Management Multiple languages Service details GIS maps Transportation Schedule Education Information for Businesses and investment Tourism Service support/tracking FAQs Online support Tenders and auctions Information Requests Housing Building Permit Process Business License Vital Records Job application Job opportunities and training Transaction handling Online payments Ordering facility Email payment/ordering Community information Links to other organizations/businesses Bulletin boards Economic indicators Budget Report Strategic Plan Streaming Audio of Meetings & Hearings Streaming Video of Meetings/Hearings Sense of community Forums Scheduled E-meetings Council minutes E-Service E-Commerce E-Decisionmaking E-Democracy Source Legend Q: Quirck’s [15, 18] M: MeGAP-3 [19] Source Q M √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ R √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ R: Authors (Research Team)