A readiness assessment framework for e-government planning: design and application

The availability of information on electronic government readiness is a critical factor in developing effective e-government policies and strategies. Although there are many readiness assessment instruments in the public domain, there are no clear guidelines on how these instruments can be reused as frameworks in carrying out assessment in specific contexts, such as in e-government planning or implementation. The design of readiness assessment frameworks requires clear specification of the assessment purpose and the design of concrete instruments explicitly based on the information requirements. Usually, these information needs are modular and can be satisfied by any instrument composed from the required set of assessment components. In this paper, we examine the requirements for a readiness assessment framework to support e-government planning and propose an assessment framework consisting of a set of assessment perspectives. Each of these perspectives is mapped to a corresponding set of concrete assessment components (partly derived from other major e-government assessment frameworks) satisfying the information requirements of these perspectives. The componentized framework allows for easy substitution or specialization of specific components to suit different contexts or assessment scenarios. As an example, we show how this framework can be used for developing a readiness assessment instrument to support e-government planning in Maldives.