M- g o v e r nme n t f o r d e v e l o p i n g c o u n t r i e s Commonwealth Governance Handbook 2014/15 31 important because they safeguard government information during processing and transmitting. Some legal issues include: conducting business electronically; electronic exchange of documents; electronic payments; and verifying identities (Fasanghari et al., 2010; Al-Omari and Al-Omari, 2006). A favourable regulatory and legal framework has a positive influence on m-government readiness • Partners’ readiness is concerned with the mobile readiness participation of all players in supporting m-government. These partners include private and public sectors, donors and central governments (Zhu et al., 2003; Tornatzky and Fleischer, 1990). Some partners are prepared to accept and embrace new technological innovations in their organisations and, as a result, technology infiltration in a society can increase (Zhu et al., 2003) • Economic and political readiness refers to a favourable environment that enables m-government readiness (Tornatzky and Fleisher, 1990). Competitive economic and political pressure that embraces innovative technologies motivates organisations to be m-ready (Crook and Kumar, 1998), which results in mgovernment readiness Finally, confidence in the availability of reliable mobile network providers to support mobile readiness and the establishment of mgovernment (Fasanghari et al., 2010) is required to provide users with confidence in their operations to meet the average levels of mobile technology services that are predictable and reliable (Jazic and Lundevall, 2003). Task suitability and applications The broad categories of the tasks are informational, transactional, operational and managerial processes (Norris and Moon, 2005). Sheng and Trimi (2008) describe these categories of transactions as follows: • Informational processes include information publication, updates and alert communications through emails or SMS, online broadcasting and dissemination to end-consumers • Transactional processes allow customers to interactively conduct transactions such as procurement, licence renewals, voter registration and online financial payments through mobile devices • Operational processes are internal to government operations, such as co-ordination across government organisations while working in the field – for example, policemen could remotely access a database for information. The suggested tasks are quite comparable to most international, widely used applications of mgovernment (Mengitsu et al., 2006) • Managerial processes are the internal and external links of government organisations, which are sustained with ICT devices to improve agility and co-ordination. An example would be the use of MTs for monitoring internal and external financial transactions and administrative processes (Gebauer and Shaw, 2002) Typical tasks (or application spaces) for m-government in an LDC would include education, health, agriculture, disaster administration, security warnings, passport renewals, tax returns, inventory, procurement, tourism, management issues and financial transactions. Control factor: Specific country context In addition, specific or unique country contextual variables at the national level are stipulated to be independent factors that control theme variations that are likely to change from country to country. These include competency, access, awareness, culture and affordability at national (or local) level. Alternatively, some researchers may prefer to classify these under ‘environmental factors’. The framework outlined in this article lists themes found in the particular case of Malawi. The elementary themes for other national or local governments may well be different. Decision-makers in government should be aware that readiness assessments do not ensure success, even when carried out with the best of intentions, full commitment and dedicated effort. Any Key terms M-government is the provision of electronic government (egovernment) services by means of mobile technologies. Some view mobile technologies as just another access channel, thereby relegating m-government as a special instance of egovernment. However, mobile technologies allow for significant additional contextual information (for example, location-based services) and thus offer unique opportunities for m-government applications. Additionally, in many developing countries where e-government has been hampered severely by the lack of a universal fixed-line communication infrastructure, m-government allows a leap-frogging of ICT maturity within government and can also serve as a catalyst to radically transform traditional government processes. These capabilities warrant m-government research as a separate area of investigation, even though it is closely related to general egovernment research. TOE framework is a research framework used in the analysis of (mainly information and communication) technology readiness, adoption or success/failure within an organisational context (Tornatzky and Fleischer, 1990). It looks at factors within three dimensions: technology-specific factors, such as the maturity of the technology and technology characteristics; organisational factors such as employee skills and organisational culture; and environment factors, such as the industry characteristics or the legal and regulatory framework. Mobile technologies refers to mobile ICTs such as notebook computers, tablet computers, handheld computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and different generations of mobile telephones. However, in least developed countries, the incidence of mobile computers is relatively low due to their cost, thus, the focus tends to be on mobile phones. To provide meaningful local (also known as client or end-user) processing capabilities, the mobile phone must be a feature phone or, ideally, a smartphone. However, most processing should be done on the server or the internet cloud. It is the authors’ opinion that mobile phones will, for the foreseeable future, remain the primary information processing and computing devices accessible to the vast majority of citizens living in LDCs.
CEP template 2012
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