Customer empowerment: Does it influence electronic government success? A citizen-centric perspective

Electronic government (or e-government) initiatives are widespread across the globe. The increasing interest in e-government raises the issue of how governments can increase citizen adoption and usage of their online services. In this study, the fundamental argument is that citizens can be viewed as customers, and that e-government success can be measured by the extent to which customer net benefits are positively influenced. Hence, the key consequents of e-government success are customer-related, and the antecedents of such success have to be considered from the customer viewpoint. We advocate that government agencies must consider their customers' perceptions of empowerment as a key causal mechanism in deriving value from e-government systems. However, the literature appears to lack this perspective. This study aims to fill the gap by proposing a theoretical model and an associated evaluation tool that measures the e-government performance from a customer empowerment perspective. The model was validated by a survey method and analyzed using partial least squares. The results support our argument and show that all paths in the proposed model are significant. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.