Extending the Technology Acceptance Model for Mobile Government Systems

Mobile government systems allow users, ranging from individuals to businesses and government institutions, to have convenient access to information and government services. However, being able to assess users' acceptance to mobile government systems is one of the challenges that faces the adoption of these systems. Systems providers need to know in advance that systems would be accepted by the intended users; otherwise all the development effort would be wasted. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) has been widely used to assess the acceptance of new technologies. However, this model needs to be extended in order to accommodate the special nature of the mobile government systems. This paper proposes an extension to the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) for mobile government systems based upon additional factors such as perceived ease of adoption, trust, and taking the system into use. The extended model also incorporates age, gender, education, mobile usage duration and profile as external variables in predicting system usage and acceptance. The paper also validates the model empirically based on a questionnaire that measures the constructs of the model and using a high fidelity prototype designed for Mobile-based Civil Registry System. The results showed strong positive correlations among all the studied constructs and therefore that all the constructs of the proposed Extended TAM (ETAM) are significantly positively related to predict users' acceptance of the mobile system. The results show furthermore that the most influential aspect on the future intention to use is the perceived value of the mobile system, and that the external variables of age and experience with the mobile system were proved not to be strong indicators of system use.