E-government Skills Identification and Development: Toward a Staged-Based User-Centric Approach for Developing Countries

Abstract

One of the prominent challenges of e-government identified in developing countries is low level of ICT literacy and skills of e-government users. For those countries at the nascent stage of e-government development, it is crucial to identify and provide e-skills needed from the demand side. However, prior research has mostly focused on the supply side of e-skills, ignoring the consumption side of e-skills. In addition, no user centric approach for e-skills identification and development for e-service consumption, with respect to the stages of e-government development, have been proposed and validated. The purpose of this article is thus to: 1) Identify skills required for e-services utilization by all participants-citizens, public, and private sector employees-involved in G2C, G2B, and G2E e-government relationships respectively; assuming they are consumers of e-government and to 2) Propose and validate an user-centric approach for e-skills identification and development based on stages of e-government utilizing the Delphi method. As a result of the study, a comprehensive list of e-skills (N = 81) was generated. We found that e-skills required for e-service consumption are not merely technical; they include a wide variety of related skills that can be applied to enhancing e-skills. Therefore, the findings can serve as a standard curriculum for training and educating both citizens and government employees in developing countries. Moreover, the findings of this research may also facilitate international organizations in indentifying and measuring citizens’ readiness for e-government in terms of e-skills.