The Critical Success Factors for e-Government Implementation in South Africa’s Local government: Factoring in Apartheid Digital Divide

Abstract

Local government institutions present the ideal place for majority of the interactions between the government and the citizens. Despite this, most e-government implementation strategies tend to be national outfits that fail to consider the unique contexts of the local government. South Africa’s local government takes the form and shape of the national socio-political system that is characterized by alarming levels of inequalities. This has resulted in sharp apartheid digital divide for which local e-government implementers cannot afford to ignore. Using data from three municipalities, drawn from each of the three categories of South Africa’s local government institutions, this paper presents the critical success factors for guiding e-government implementation initiatives at local government level. Results from principal component analysis and arithmetic mean of data from 243 respondents was used to determine the significance of the factors relating to the priority e-services, e-skills and e-infrastructures.