Suggesting e‐Service Quality Model for e‐Governance Service Delivery in Saudi Arabia
Gopikrishna Vasista Tatapudi and Mohammed Ahmed Turki AlSudairi Vice‐Rector Office for Business Development, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia tgkvasista @ gmail. com gtatapudi @ ksu. edu. sa mas @ ksu. edu. sa
Abstract: No doubt that government leadership and provision of service quality are crucial to gain the country’ s competitive edge. But a paradigm shift towards E‐Governance does to not only engage citizenry in government in a usercentred manner but also help to develop quality government services and delivery systems that are efficient and effective. This paper highlights the aspects of evaluating e‐governance through service quality and new service design & development towards achieving one of the Saudi nation’ s service quality objectives i. e. service fulfillment. It is believed that public value lies in Service fulfillment and can be achieved by empowering individual service user by focusing on selfservice aspects and user‐driven innovation in public sector in Saudi Arabia. At the initial phase Lovelock and Wright Model is considered for proposal in order to satisfy the customer fulfillment factor of service quality because it promotes a suitable service quality classification scheme that focuses on customer contact during service fulfillment and does not differentiate it against customer contact for service specification. In this regard, it is argued and suggested that maintaining coherence among the factors of proposing service quality framework and its underlying theoretical models is important in a typical research context.
Keywords: e‐service quality model, e‐governance service delivery, Lovelock and Wright model, public services management, referential adequacy, service design and development
1. Introduction
In the trend of globalization, government leadership and provision of service quality are crucial to country’ s competitive edge besides knowing how they can influence the government performance( Hsiao and Lin 2008). Regardless of whether a company’ s core offerings are products or services, superior service quality is essential for excellent performance on an enduring basis. The rationale behind this conclusion is that service quality is much more difficult for competitor to copy than product quality and price( Parasuraman and Grewal 2000).
A shift towards global alignment of business processes and the international benchmarking of standards, facilitating by new technologies has been becoming a trend of adoption by countries aspiring to manage public based on knowledge based economies( Brown, Lauder and Ashton 2008). For example, European Commission has approved a list of 12 public services to citizens as guidelines for benchmarking( Torres, Pina and Acerete 2005).
A key measure of good governance however is through the public sector that is in‐charge of delivering transparent and quality services( Naz 2009). It means public sector institutions are required to play a good role in implementing customer oriented services with innovation. It is because public sectors, apart from enforcing public authority, shall provide service quality in compliance with people demand( Hsiao and Lin 2008). The area of service quality and measurement in the public sector has been less well considered. The bulk of service quality literature tends to originate in private sector in profit oriented contexts. The motivation and outcomes in such contexts are often more easily measured. But the introduction of service quality rhetoric in the public sector is a more recent phenomenon that can be traced to new public management movement( Buckley 2003). Though there are implications( Vasista 2012), E‐Governance will be able to streamline bureaucratic procedures to make operations more efficient. E‐Governance can improve public service delivery( Naz, 2009). The promise of E‐Governance is to engage citizenry in government in a user‐centred manner and contribute to the development of quality government services and delivery systems that are efficient and effective. Key issues to be considered in E‐Governance are the discovery of citizen desires and perceptions and the preparation of a comprehensive plan that can describe the specific citizen‐centred strategies for implementing user‐centred E‐Services delivery design( Bertot, Jaeger and LcClure 2008).
Saudi Arabia’ s commitment towards providing quality services to public is evident from its declarations and discussions held in Dubai during 2007 about e‐government, where it is declared speed, accuracy,
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