Adoption of High Impact Governmental eServices: Seduce or Enforce?

The adoption of high impact governmental e-services is not obvious. Especially small and medium sized companies hesitate to invest and adopt. Non-adoption endangers the realization of the 25% reduction objective within the EU’s Lisbon Agenda of the administrative burden of businesses by 2012. On the other hand governmental organisations gain from the use of these eservices. In several cases this is the underlying argument behind the legal enforcement of the use of governmental e-services. In the study reported in this paper we answer the question which factors influence the adoption of these high impact governmental e-services. The designed research model has been tested in an empirical business-to-government context. In contrast to several business-to-business studies we found that especially organisational readiness is a hampering factor for the adoption of these governmental high impact eservices. These findings question the effectiveness of governmental enforcement strategies.