Government e-services delivery requires citizens awareness: the case of Brunei Darussalam

This study examines citizens awareness and usage of government e-services. Governments use Web-based Internet applications to enhance their citizens access to government services. However, in a case study in Brunei Darussalam, it was found that the government s initiative in providing e-services in last few years has not been as successful as it could have been as the services have not been citizen-centric. This was due to the availability of e-services being unknown amongst the citizens and that a silo-based approach existed for each government ministry. One notable finding was that although the ICT literacy of Brunei citizens has rapidly improved, this has not been reflected in the citizens interaction with government. There are several challenges for citizens awareness and use of government e-services that occur on e-government initiatives. Failure in managing such problems, results in a high probability of these services becoming a white elephant , with inefficiency, wastefulness and cost overruns on e-government projects. E-government management agencies still do not have an organized citizens awareness strategy approach to managing knowledge in e-government initiatives. The proposed Government e Services Citizens Awareness Strategy (GeS-CAS) framework, incorporating communication, management and education strategies, can effectively be used to enable e-government agencies to deal with e-government projects problems and risks in an organised and efficient way. It is concluded that e-government initiatives management can be improved if the knowledge dimensions of the problems are well understood and are conveyed to the right people, at the right time and the right place, and are appropriately managed. This research has developed an integrated citizens awareness strategy Knowledge Management framework that provides a structured approach to achieving this which is easy to understand and put in to practice by e-government agencies, and can be used to solve citizen awareness problems, explore opportunities and make decisions