Exploring Net Benefits in the Context of an E-Government Project

A typical e-Government project will undergo an impact assessment several times in its lifecycle. An important aspect of impact assessment is to measure benefits from the project, especially to the end-users. Often, when these benefits are measured, projects have positive scores, but when it comes to voluntary adoption of e-Government project on a large scale, the rate of adoption is slow. Not all the people who use it for the first time are willing to continue with the digital alternative. In this paper, we argue that one source of such contradictory findings is a unitary view of an important construct – benefits. In the extant literature, the construct – benefits - has been widely regarded as a single-dimensional construct. We propose that a multi-dimensional approach to measuring benefits will facilitate the respective government department to reach out to all the target audience with significant relative advantage. In order to identify the dimensions of benefits, we use the theory of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Accordingly, we propose five dimensions of benefits which would cater to different kinds of individuals among the target users.