E-Value Creation in a Government Web Portal in South Africa

Abstract

By the end of 2005, an emerging era of e-government had arrived in South Africa with the promise to transform public service delivery and the relationships between government, business and the citizens. E-government has been perceived as the second revolution in public management after the new public management of the 1980s (Saxena, 2005; Teicher, Hughes, & Dow, 2002). The advent of e-government information and services globally has brought increasing focus on the need to develop user-oriented quality Web portal services. Prior to this time, governments paid little attention to citizen service quality issues (Teicher et al., 2002). The emergence of ICT-enabled capacity for service delivery has increasingly forced governments to adopt a customer-oriented focus in the provision of public services. Service quality issues have traditionally dominated Web site development in the business arena simply because of the huge potential to affect the size of the customer base. Prominent among these has been the emergence of e-banking and e-travel Web portals (Bauer, Hammerschmidt, & Falk., 2005). As governments acquire growing customer base with e-service delivery, the associated development and maintenance ‘sunk costs’ has forced them to look at the means to transform service delivery to gain increased benefits. They are finding that government Web portals can support new opportunities to transform traditional government service delivery for societal benefits. This article focuses on e-value creation for government Web portals. It uses South Africa’s Cape Gateway Portal as a case study for promoting e-value in public service delivery to “customer citizens.” In this article, e-service quality and e-value are used interchangeably. The article starts with a background on government Web portals and it establishes a conceptual definition of Web portal e-value. It then provides a framework for assessing e-value creation for a government portal. Based on the literature and South Africa’s experiences, it identifies and describes the prime movers for e-value creation in a government Web portal.