Citizen-centric evaluation framework for e-government systems in Kenya. The case of public service commission of Kenya Online Recruitment & Selection system

Abstract

E-government services is growing at a considerable pace, especially in developing countries as government seeks to make use of ICT to serve its citizens efficiently and effectively. E-government projects cost are enormous and therefore it becomes imperative for governments to continuously evaluate these projects with a view of identifying the benefits, justifying investment made and improving the quality of services they offer to the citizens among other reasons through constant evaluation to gauge the success of these projects. Like the evaluation of all other information systems initiatives, the evaluation of e-governments in both theory and practice has proved to be important but complex. The complexity of evaluation is mostly due to the multiple perspectives involved, the difficulties of quantifying benefits, and the social and technical context of use. Existing frameworks for e-government software projects evaluation were analyzed with the aim of developing a post-implementation evaluation framework for e-government systems with the citizens/clients as the central focus. The main aim of this study was to investigate the citizen's perspective in evaluating e-government systems and to propose a set of evaluating factors that can be used for evaluation of e-government systems. A survey of users of Kenya Public Service Commission of Kenya (PSCK) Online Recruitment and Selection Database System was conducted. The study used four constructs for evaluation of e-government system namely; financial, social, technical and delivery platform constructs. Furthermore, specific factors to measure these four constructs with a consideration of the level of e-government in Kenya were identified. The study found that about 74% of the respondents were satisfied with the online job application system of Public Service Commission of Kenya.