Improving Implementation of e-Government Services in Rwanda: An Organisational Perspective

Abstract

As part of realising development programmes faster, developing countries have been adopting, from developed ones, modern ICTs and implementing e-government towards better public services. However, efforts of implementation of e-government services have been often resulting in unsatisfactory outcomes and even total failures. This is a big challenge particularly for Least Developed Countries which have fewer resources. Such outcomes are partly due to the lack of addressing organisational issues associated with implementations.

This thesis addresses the question: How can the implementation of e-government services be improved from an organisational perspective in the context of Rwanda?

The thesis adopts a socio-technical perspective and uses both qualitative case study methodology and a literature review approach. Two cases of implementation of e-government services were studied. The first case, an Enterprise Content Management system concerns the sharing and working on digital documents within government agencies. The second case, the onestop e-government is for providing online services by the central and local government agencies to the general public via a single portal, ‘Irembo’. This thesis shows that implementation of e-government services has been focusing on digitalisation of services superimposing ICT over existing structures with less attention to organisational change issues related to processes, organisational structure and policies. The thesis also identifies a deficit in implementation processes in terms of lacking clear goals and formal monitoring in the local government. Those insights on the implementation of e-government services of an LDC pinpoint a need for optimisation between technical and social aspects. This thesis makes an empirical contribution by bringing forth those insights. In order to help tackle a number of challenging issues found, a comprehensive model for improving the process of implementing e-government services, called Plan-Do-Evaluate-Resolve (PDER) was developed as a theoretical contribution based on a literature analysis.