Explaining the Adoption of E-Government Features

Recently, many studies have emerged to document how the public sector uses the Internet to provide information and services, but very few have analyzed the factors that influence the adoption decision of e-government features. This study proposes a model of innovation adoption that integrates internal organizational factors and external peer influence and empirically tests how these factors influence Iowa county treasurers’ decisions to launch a departmental Web site and adopt other e-government features. Our results show that the factors influencing these two decisions are different but that both decisions are driven by the concerns about staff resistance. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for policy makers and directions for future research on e-government development.