The links between e-service delivery, usage and sustainable development are mediated and influenced by fundamentals like education, skills and digital infrastructure Governments wishing to succeed in e-government would there for do well to invest in strengthening these particular fundamentals, including broadband.
Governments need to improve capacity to effectively seek citizen feedback, monitor, track and analyze usage trends, so as to prioritize service digitization and integrate relevant data into policy. User feedback can provide important data for integration into policy efforts to increase service usage promotion and awareness campaigns, evaluation needs to be an integral part of a policy effort to increase e-government uptake, which is also an important part of educating the public about the benefits of e-government, there by helping to increase user uptake Governments need to effectively manage such collaboration with clear ‘rules of the game’, including partners’ roles and responsibilities, while also allowing for those inside and outside governments to develop innovative arrangements with a view to delivering services more effectively and increase usage In essence, the challenge of increasing e-government usage is therefore a governance challenge.
While the term e-government has only been in general use in the past five years, the phenomenon has been developing since the mid-1980s. E-government can be described as arising from the interactions between three separate sets of forces, each of which has gone through its own evolution: ICTs, management concepts and government itself. A notable feature is that most of the technological innovation and new thinking in management practices has occurred outside government — especially in the private sector — while government has been significantly influenced by external forces, notably the needs and capacities of the public. In that sense,
e-government is still an evolving concept; as governments increasingly come to terms with its characteristics and tools, it is likely to undergo significant further evolution.