Electronic government or e-government provides great potential for citizens and governments to reduce information cost and maximize the speed of government-citizen interaction. Nearly all governments around the world use Web-based technologies to provide their citizens with access to government services, and to enhance the chances for e-participation in democratic institutions and processes. In Malaysia, the e-government implementation started in 1997 with the aim to deliver services and information effectively and efficiently, and to achieve a fully developed country in the year 2020. Nowadays, many governments of developing country have utilized Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to deliver their services to citizens, and there is also an increasing demand for successful implementation of e-government services within developing nations. It is therefore essential that citizens must be able to use the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in order to assure nation-wide e-participation besides improving channels and contents of public service deliveries on the part of the government. In view of this, the aims of this chapter are to present the current state of e-government in Malaysia, to discuss participation behavioral in the implementation of e-government services, and to highlight approaches that can be considered in enhancing the e-government services through this participation behavioral.
TopIntroduction
Governments around the globe are exploiting the capability of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to change the public sector as electronic government. Electronic government or e-government generally is government efforts to provide citizens or people with the information and services they need using ICTs. According to Curtin (2006), e-government is the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and its application by the government for the provision of information and public services to the people. The use of ICT in government is also expected to improve internal effectiveness. Thus, the aim of e-government is to provide efficient government management of information to the citizen, better service delivery and empowerment of the citizen through access to information and participation in public policy decision-making.
The concept of e-government beginning with an emphasis on improving efficiency and progressing towards a more customer-centric effort is now being recast to include the transition towards a participatory government that seeks to realize e-democracy (Young Suh, 2007). According to Young Suh, e-government plays an important role in government innovation, that is, the effort by a government to find an optimal solution to problems it faces by undergoing changes within itself. Many of the countries in the world are using e-government as a strategic tool for innovations in government operations and in services to the people.
The Vision 2020 in Malaysia of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) has gone through a period of rapid changed towards the information rich digital age and has become a major investor of ICT (Ambali, 2009). Hence, ICT causes a paradigm shift such as the age of network intelligence, reinventing business, government society and to individuals if the value of the ICT can find solutions to its problem (Gichoya, 2005). This technology eventually gave an outcome of growing of e-commerce and e-business transactions (Moon, 2002). With the extensive used of e-commerce and e-business on the ICT by the citizens, the government gradually improved the delivery services to the people in Malaysia and improve the process quality development which enables government to be more responsive to the needs of Malaysia citizens (Ahmad & Othman, 2007). Due to rapid use of ICT, the Malaysia government has developed e-government for the extensive reliance of the use of IT to improve the efficiency of government services provided to citizens, businesses and agencies (Carter and Belanger, 2005).
The Malaysia’s e-government initiative began in 1997 with the launch of the Multimedia Super Corridor’s E-government Flagship application to lead the country into the information age. It seeks to reinvent the public sector’s view of the needs of citizens and the private sector whereby the information flow and processes within the government then are streamlined (Salamat et al., 2011). In other words, e-government will assist the government to improve the convenience, accessibility and quality of interactions with citizens and businesses.
E-government in Malaysia serves as communication with the citizens, information access for the citizens, provides transaction services in a friendly and efficient way is the main objective of every e-government (Carenini et al., 2007). Hence, with e-government, Malaysia government has identified the new ways to deliver information and services via electronic channels through Internet as the service delivery alternative (D’ Agostino et al., 2011). E-government should be extended to include e-participation mechanism to get citizen’s views and input on government public policy and planning for better delivery of information. It is believed that e-participation can serve as two way communication between government and citizens. This two-way communication is such as government provides information to the citizens and whereas citizens can also incorporate input for decision making. As a result, most developed countries have implemented e-government projects to enable citizen’s involvement in the political decision making process through e-participation. Thus, exploitation of ICT in Malaysia government is expected to improve internal effectiveness and provide citizens with better information and services. In view of this, the aim of Malaysian e-government is for people in government, business and citizen to work together for the benefit of Malaysia and all of its citizens (MAMPU, 1997).