An Empirically-Derived Taxonomy of eGovernment Challenges

The progress of eGovernment(eGov) initiatives involves focused and contextual practices that address the requirements and concerns of multiple involved stakeholders. This article investigates the state of the practice in eGovernment challenges, assessing some eGovernment projects delivered by ten areas world over, and propose a taxonomy for eGovernment challenges. The taxonomy comprises of three (level-1) dimensions: economic, technological, and social challenges, and sixteen (level-2) dimensions: legal/regulatory, institutional/operational/environmental, political, financial, quality, process, structural, organizational, development, technical, managerial, contextual, policy & training, data & information, stakeholder, and other issues and challenges. The proposed taxonomy contributes to assistance in guiding the concerns by classifying a range of eGovernment challenges, providing how the challenges occur, to whom does it affect. Moreover, the study discusses the usage settings of the taxonomy by Government professionals, vendor organizations, researchers and IT staff. Furthermore, the researchers can also use this taxonomy for further development of the field. Such identification of a list of critical government challenges can also be beneficial to IT professionals in planning and executing the eGovernment projects.