E‐Readiness for Developing Countries: Moving the focus from the environment to the users

Abstract The achievement of high levels of e‐readiness is being increasingly heralded as one of the top priorities for developing countries. Furthermore, a growing amount of time, money and effort is being invested in calculating the level of a country's e‐readiness. This paper carries out a critical review on the concept of e‐readiness, with a special focus on developing countries. The results show that used by themselves, such measures do not help in terms of development as they tend to focus on the wider environment while ignoring the level of the organisation. In this light, a new model is proposed which gives importance to both e‐readiness (the environment) and technology acceptance (the organisation), in order to gain a richer understanding of the situation.