Adoption of e-government services in Ukraine

Abstract

E-Government, defined by author as a new way of organizing the governance of society, which implies openness and transparency, and effectiveness and competency in developing and providing governmental services for all entities of society, where “e” refers to ICT as a means of supporting this effort. Despite being identified as one of the top priorities of the Ukrainian government, the implementation and adoption of e-Government services in Ukraine are facing numerous challenges and barriers, which need to be known, considered, and treated carefully for the new developments to succeed.

The reviewed literature suggested the absence of research on e-Government in Ukraine, thus the main goals of this study were, by reporting on the perceptions of eready citizens regarding the adoption of e-Government, to identify the factors that affect this adoption and to make my own contribution to the development of knowledge in the field of e-Government in the country. In order to do so, a survey questionnaire and case study interviews were used to collect the research data from 409 e-ready Ukrainians. E-ready citizens were defined as the legal-aged Internet users, the potential recipients of the government and public services provided in electronic form over the Internet. As a result of the triangulation of findings from the quantitative and qualitative phases of the mixed methods (MM) research design employed in the study, eight factors that affected the adoption of e-Government services in Ukraine were identified, namely: awareness, computer literacy, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived public value, the individual culture value preference of uncertainty avoidance, trust in the government, and trust in the Internet.

Research has also reported on the high rates of the behavioral intentions of eready citizens to use e-Government services and, at the same time, it points out the low rates of the actual use of those services. As a result, the adoption of eGovernment services amongst e-ready citizens in Ukraine, defined as a superimposition of its actual use onto the behavioral intentions to use e-Government services, was reported to be slightly higher than average or 56.5%. Accordingly, the adoption rate amongst all legal-aged Ukrainians was just 23.6%. Overall, the level of development of e-Government services in Ukraine was found to be low.

veloped for this study, the extended TAM model could explain 42% of the variance in the behavioral intentions of e-ready citizens toward the use of eGovernment services and only 2% of the variance in the actual use. Eight out of ten hypothesized relationships of the research model were accepted.

In the conclusion of the study, the researcher proposes a comprehensive model in order to study the factors affecting the adoption of e-Government services.

In order to improve the rates of the actual use of e-Government services, the researcher has proposed a set of recommendations for those involved in the planning, development, and implementation of e-Government in Ukraine. Particularly, greater attention needs to be paid to increasing the awareness and improving the design of eGovernment services. It is also be necessary to improve the computer literacy especially of older Ukrainians.