EVALUATE THE USAGE OF E-GOVERNMENT SERVICES IN SRI LANKA: A CITIZEN’S PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Information Communication Technology (ICT) has become a key factor to decide all activities in society. It has changed the shape of organizations, societies, and services across the world. According to that, information and communication technology for public administration has led the way to e-government. It makes an easy platform for citizens to find information effectively while saving its accuracy. Sri Lankan government has introduced the “E- Sri Lanka National Development” project in the year 2005 and the Sri Lanka government web portal was the central place of the same implementation. The research was focused to identify the factors that are affecting the usage of e-government services among citizens in Sri Lanka. The main objective of the study was to identify the citizens’ current usage of e-government applications in Sri Lanka.

The sample of the study includes internet users of Sri Lanka and the sample consisted of 384 individuals. Both qualitative and quantitative methods have been employed in this research and data was gathered by distributing printed and online questionnaires. The result of the study shows that usage of e-government service was not at a satisfactory level and awareness of e-government service had a direct impact on its usage. Moreover, lack of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions and citizens' attitudes also had a direct impact on the usage of e-government services. The study was able to identify major challenges for citizen participation in egovernment

services such as the absence of proper awareness, trust, insufficient infrastructure, information literacy skills, slow internet connections and attitude based issues. In this context, the study proposes three types of suggestions which can be categorized into citizens’ related suggestions, technical suggestions, and organization related suggestions . E.g.: Conducting systematic awareness programs and workshops, re-engineering e-government web portal, improve computer literacy skills and improve service quality to build positive attitudes on e-government services. Conclusively it was evident that e-government services can be further developed in the context of Sri Lanka to get the maximum utilization among citizens.