An assessment of Jordan's e-government maturity: a user-centric perceptive

There has been a rapid growth in e–government research over the past few years. The deployment of e–government initiatives around the world has also emerged and grown enormously. Like other nations, in recent years, Jordan's efforts to provide e–government services to the public have been recognised. However, its overall progress in this field is still relatively behind expectations. The major purpose of this paper is to provide a qualitative analysis of the current sophistication levels of Jordanian e–government services in order to establish an understanding of how to offer efficient and effective e–government services that are tailored to a citizen or user-centric approach. It was found that seven ministries (27 per cent) out of 26 ministries are at the first stage of e–government maturity (one–way information flows); six ministries (23 per cent) are at the second stage (two–way interaction); and only two ministries (7.5 per cent) offer e–payment transactions. In addition, findings of this study indicated that the majority of ministries (46 per cent) offer some e–democracy capabilities to citizens. These findings clearly demonstrate that although Jordan has developed relatively high–level e–government–service delivery capabilities in e–democracy and two–way interaction, there is a notable lack of transactional websites across the national government sites in this country.