Igor Pihir, Katarina Tomičić‐Pupek and Darko Andročec
Our paper is organized as follows. Firstly, we examine related work of other authors in this field, the implementation of e‐services and their usage in EU and Croatia. We also analyse the strategy for increasing the readiness of population to use the provided e‐services. We try to focus on some events that may lead the mayor role in rapid increase of government e‐services usage and growth of e‐business in Croatia. On the end we present SWOT analysis and conclude our paper.
2. Related work
A great number of papers deal with factors that influence adoption of e‐Government services among citizens and businesses. Tung and Rieck( 2005) developed a theoretical framework and proposed that perceived benefits, management readiness, sensitivity to cost, external pressure, and social influences are positively related to the e‐Government services adoption decision among business organizations in Singapore. They tested the proposed framework using survey data from 128 Singaporean business organizations. Chan, Lau, and Pan( 2008) presented macro perspective of the various activities involved in the implementation of e‐ Government. They did an interpretive analysis of the various e‐Government‐related initiatives by the Singaporean government. The four main components in the implementation of e‐Government were identified: information content, ICT infrastructure, e‐Government infrastructure, and e‐Government promotion. Lean( 2008) investigated the factors that influence the intention to use e‐Government services among Malaysians. Structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 195 respondents from Malaysia. Lean concluded that trust, perceived usefulness, perceived relative advantage and perceived image has a direct positive significant relationship towards intention to use e‐Government service and perceived complexity has a significant negative relationship towards intention to use e‐Government service.
Horst, Kuttschreuter, and Gutteling( 2007) designed a study which aims to identify the role of risk perception and trust in the intention to adopt government e‐services in The Netherlands. The questionnaire on a sample of 238 persons measured perceived usefulness of e‐services, risk perception, worry, perceived behavioural control, subjective norm, trust and experience with e‐services. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data and this analysis showed that the perceived usefulness of e‐services is the main determinant of the intention to use these services. Gilbert, Balestrini, and Littleboy( 2004) examined the reasons individuals would choose electronic self‐service delivery methods over more traditional methods of service delivery for government services. The main result of their study is that willingness to use the e‐services will be present if organisations can develop trust relationships with users, assure them that their financial details are secure, provide information that is relevant, accurate and up‐to‐date, and save individuals time and money. Carter and Weerakkody( 2008) compared e‐Government adoption in the U. K. to adoption in the U. S. to determine if the same factors are salient in both countries. There are cultural differences in e‐Government adoption in the mentioned countries, e. g. ICT adoption barriers such as access and skill vary by culture.
AlAwadhi and Morris( 2009) investigated the factors that influence the adoption of e‐Government services in Kuwait using an amended version of the UTAUT model. Lee, Kim, and Ahn( 2011) concluded that the willingness to adopt e‐services increased when business users perceived high quality service provision in offline service channels. Shareef, Kumar V., Kumar U., and Dwivedi( 2011) found out that e‐Government adoption behaviour differs based on service maturity levels and indicated the critical factors that enable the adoption at different service maturity stages.
“ United Nations proposed a methodology for measuring e‐Government development index( EGDI) as a comprehensive scoring of the willingness and capacity of the national administrations to use online technology in the realization of government functions”( Matei and Radulescu 2011). Comparing the EGDI of Balkan countries( in this research Croatia is classified into the aforementioned group of countries) with EGDI for EU 15 EU 25 and EU 27, it results that all Balkan countries should improve their index to provide better e‐ Government services to both citizens and businesses( Matei and Radulescu 2011). In 2010 EGDI of Croatia was 0.5858, and EGDI of EU 15 was 0.7042. Other researches and statistical analysis( e. g. Eurostat data) also show that Croatia can in many ways improve e‐Government services and should motivate end users to use e‐ services.
Croatia started late in e‐services implementation, and has not yet reached a state of maturity. Croatia’ s full online availability is below the EU average, because Croatia now ranks 27th out of the 32 measured countries( EC 2010b). Sea Figure 1.
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