View/Open - Scholarly Commons Home

Chapter 3 : M-Government Readiness Framework
“Technology readiness” refers to a country's ability or “readiness” to integrate ICT, in
order to provide a baseline that can be used for regional comparisons and planning. It is
essential to understand what it really means to be technology ready and conduct an
evaluation based on objective criteria to establish any readiness tool. “Readiness
assessment” determines whether the necessary infrastructure is in place, whether ICT is
accessible to the population at large, and whether there is an appropriate framework to
support its use.
Readiness of an organisation could also refer to the attitude of decision-makers towards
the technology, which could become a obstacle to the implementation of technology.
The regulatory environment is another factor which determines whether the
implementation will be possible or not.
Readiness for e-Government is not restricted to the government body. It is also
important to assess society, government institutional frameworks, human resources,
existing budgetary resources, inter-department relationship, national infrastructure,
economic health, education, information policies, private sector development and other
issues related to e-Government readiness (Al-Omari & Al-Omari, 2006). This shows
that the concept of e-Government has multiple dimensions and Al-Omari and Al-Omari
have discussed these dimensions and identified them into organisational readiness,
Customer Readiness, Competency readiness, Technology readiness and Legal readiness.
In this study we are interested in the technology readiness and also an overview of
employee readiness by considering their attitude towards the adoption of the technology
in general.
- 57 -