Towards t-government in Malaysia: Investigation of citizen's willingness to participate in democratic services and information privacy concern

The concept of t-government was started by the UK Government in 2006 and was construed as the enactment of three perspectives; (i) citizen centricity, (ii) shared service culture and (iii) professionalism. Their aim is to integrate information systems technologies (IST) that enables citizens' participation in the initial stages of policy development and the process of reengineering public services. Malaysia aims to be a developed nation and pushing its public service towards the realization of the t-government. After claiming success with several e-government applications that range from information provision to transactional services, currently it overlooks the essential aspect of the t-government that involves citizens' participation in the early stage of policy development as an exemplary of democratic practice. As a developing nation the existence of the digital gap between urban and rural citizens may hinder future plans for implementing t-government. To support future work towards participatory aspect in t-government we seek to gain some understanding of the needs of Malaysian citizens relating to citizen information privacy and citizens' participatory aspects of t-Government. We conducted a survey on 350 respondents from urban areas of Kuala Lumpur and the state of Selangor and also the rural areas of Selangor. The result of the survey showed a strong concern for personal information privacy and willingness to participate for both urban and rural citizens. The result of this study will be a basis for developing the privacy framework in the t-government.