icegov2012 proceedings

and socio-economic backgrounds. Their age group varies from
late teens to early twenties.
3. FINDINGS
Trust concerns or issues over e-government implementation in
Nepal can primarily be grouped into nine categories as follows:
1) Reliability concerns on services such as electricity and
internet.
2) Usability concerns owing to low digital literacy.
3) Privacy and Security concerns regarding online transactions
and exchange of documents online.
4) Authenticity concerns about service providers and validity
of submitted data online.
5) Concerns over Government readiness in terms of trained
and competent human resources for providing electronic
services.
6) Legal concerns about online procedures.
7) Transparency concerns about the status and progress
notification of requested services.
8) Technology acceptance and their reliance on word-of-mouth
marketing from family, friends and relatives to use new
services.
9) Affordability concerns leading to non-uniform use of egovernment
services thus creating ignorance and
consequently distrust to e-government services in general.
Figure 1. Trust Framework in the E-Government
Implementation in Nepal
In order to address different trust concerns raised above, we
present the trust framework in Figure 1. The trust framework
categorizes trust parameters into three domains (service provider,
service recipient and ICT) and shows the relationship between
them in establishing trust among the citizens. In the given trust
framework, service providers are the organizations or authorities
responsible for delivering electronic services to citizens. Service
recipients are the individuals and different organizations seeking
e-government services. ICT is the bridge to connect both service
providers and service recipients. Each of these interlinked
domains has similar intensity to trust. Effective implementation
of law is the grounding body to facilitate communication and
information exchange between service provider and service
recipient.
525
4. CONCLUSION
The trust framework shown in Figure 1 forms a basis to address
citizens’ trust concerns and thus increase user participation in the
e-government system. Therefore, entire trust framework needs to
be incorporated in each implementation of e-government. Keeping
into consideration the nation’s limited resources, phase-wise
implementations of e-government seem to be the most suitable
and feasible approach that will eventually gain trust from citizens.
For instance, e-government service could be initially implemented
in selected urban population, which will serve as beta release of
the system. The service can then be expanded mitigating the
different problems coming up during implementation. On the
other hand, e-government procedure may be automated
eventually. For example, to start with, the verification process of
the information passed to the e-applications may be done using
traditional paper-based procedures. Gradually, every material
required for verification would then be fed in to the automated
system.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work has been partially supported by the University Grants
Commission, Nepal. We would like to thank Mr. Rajendra Man
Banepali for his efforts in developing the e-government dummy
portal for this research. Our sincere thanks also go to Dr. Sanat
Kumar Bista for his kind guidance and reviews of the work.
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