Citizens' readiness for e-government in developing countries

E-government could simply defined as “the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in improving the activities and services of government” (Heeks, 2004). Its remarkable benefits encouraged most governments in both developed and developing countries to launch egovernment projects (Liikanen, 2003). However, few of them have succeeded in achieving their set targets. In developing countries, Heeks (2003a) reports in his survey on 40 e-government projects that 35% totally failed as they were terminated or never used by users, 50% partially failed to achieve their goals and only 15% succeeded. Furthermore, the failure rate of e-government projects worldwide is identified by Gartner Group (2002) as 60%. The cost of failed e-government projects is high, including not only tangible costs such as wasted project expenditure and employee time, aBstract