icegov2012 proceedings

1. What kind of social media services do Saudi e-Government
websites use?
This research question is meant to address the combination
of technology, telecommunication and social interaction
between the Saudi government and its citizen, and which
tools of the social media is more suitable for Saudi citizens.
Knowing these information will help in improving the
service and delivery of information through the correct
channel.
2. Which e-Government agency is using social media services
and tools and to what extent?
Since the aim of this paper is to know which government
agency is actively using social media and to what extent?
Identifying this government agency will help in delivering
our recommendations and better improve their services.
3. In what capacity in terms of announcement, discussion,
consultation, seeking ideas have social media been used in
Saudi e-Government websites?
Finding the answers to these questions will help in (1) providing
recommendations to Saudi e-Government websites to better
utilize social media services and (2) identify weaknesses in their
current usage. Thus, this study provides the first comprehensive
examination and analysis of 170 Saudi e-Government websites.
The focus will be on top social media services used in Saudi
Arabia, as mentioned before.
In the following section, we present some related work on the
usage of social media in e-Government context. In section 3, we
describe the methodology we followed in order to collect Saudi
government agencies websites. Then in section 4, we discuss our
findings and answer the three posed research questions. Finally
section 5 provides recommendations and future directions for this
research.
2. RELATED WORK
In the past few years, we have witnessed the utilization of social
media services by many governmental websites worldwide. The
aim of the utilization was to provide a two way interactive
communication channel with the citizens and to relate the
government with their constituencies.
Among the previous studies on the adoption of social media
service in government agencies websites, is a study by Alam et al.
[4] on the usage of Facebook in the Australian Taxation Office
(ATO). They found that ATO used Facebook as a one-way
communication tool to provide information about their e-Tax
service.
Similarly, Upadhyay and Ilavarasan [5] studied Facebook pages
of three government agencies in Delhi, India. These include
Municipal Corporation of Delhi, Delhi Traffic Police and
Planning Commission. Based on the agencies usage the authors
offered suggestions for policymaking to facilitate a wider and
more effective reach of social media in the developing countries.
On the other hand, Rojas et al. [6] studied the interaction of six
territorial public entities in Colombia through Facebook and
Twitter. They found that the usage of Twitter and Facebook by the
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six entities was not as expected. As a result they provided a set of
recommendations to improve eParticipation on Social Media.
In another study based on a three-tiered approach to eParticipation
(Inform, Consult and Empower) [7], Inform: about the existing
policy, consult: by sharing knowledge and opinions, and
empower: by pursuing particular issues to the policy actors. The
authors found that the main challenge to their approach was not
the technological barriers; instead it was the socio-political
barriers.
In a wider context, Chua et al. [8] analyzed 200 international
government websites using content analysis and multiple
regression analysis. They found that the prevalence of seven Web
2.0 applications in descending order was: RSS, multimedia
sharing services, blogs, forums, social tagging services, social
networking, services and wikis. Finally, Gharawi et al. [9]
introduced the perceived values and pressing issues which
concerning practitioners that may complicate adoption of social
media services in e-Government websites.
From the previous research, we can see that many international
government websites do use social media services; however their
usage were very basic and did not fully utilize the potential and
capabilities of social media. So, will this be the case with Saudi e-
Government websites? The answer will be addressed in the next
sections.
3. METHODOLOGY
3.1 Collection of Saudi e-Government
Websites
One hundred ninety four Saudi government agencies websites
listed in the Saudi e-Government Portal (saudi.gov.sa) was
considered in this study. These websites were visited to make sure
that their addresses are correct. From the 194 websites only 170
were working properly. Table 1 shows the number of collected
websites based on their category type.
Table 1. Number of e-Government websites in each category
3.2 Methods of Data Analysis
During the period between 2 ed and 28 th March 2012 three experts
in social media domain were involved in the analysis. The first
step was to count the appearance of four social media services,