A Structural Equation Model (SEM) of Governing Factors Influencing the Implementation of T-Government

Governments around the world have invested significant sums of money on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of services been provided to their citizens. However, they have not achieved the desired results because of the lack of interoperability between different government entities. Therefore, many governments have started shifting away from the original concept of e-Government towards a much more transformational approach that encompasses the entire relationship between different government departments and users of public services, which can be termed as transformational government (tGovernment). In this paper, a model is proposed for governing factors that impact the implementation of tGovernment such as strategy, leadership, stakeholders, citizen centricity and funding in the context of Saudi Arabia. Five constructs are hypothesised to be related to the implementation of t-Government. To clarify the relationships among these constructs, a structural equation model (SEM) is utilised to examine the model fit with the five hypotheses. The results show that there are positive and significant relationships among the constructs such as the relationships between strategy and tGovernment; the relationships between stakeholders and tGovernment; the relationships between leadership and tGovernment. This study also showed an insignificant relationship between citizens’ centricity and t-Government and also an insignificant relationship between funding and t-Government. document is a “live” template and already defines the components of your paper [title, text, heads, etc.] in its style sheet. Keywords—t-Government; e-Government; Strategy; Stakeholders; Citizens’ Centricity; Funding


INTRODUCTION
Many nations have put in place e-Government applications to enhance the efficiency of the public sector and streamline government systems to enable creating connections between different government organisations. To create further efficiencies, it has been recommended that countries move towards a goal of transformational government [1,2]. Nowadays, the concept of a transformational government (t-Government) needs to be viewed on an international scale. In order to facilitate more centrally-connected and citizencentric-government services, and put the needs of individuals and businesses at the center of online processes, many governments have started shifting away from the original concept of e-Government towards a much more transformational approach that considers the entire relationship between different government departments and users of public services, which can be termed as transformational government (t-Government) [3][4][5].
This paper identifies and analysis the governing factors (strategy, leadership, stakeholders, citizens' centricity and funding) that influence the implementation of t-Government in Saudi Arabia. The proposed model is empirically tested through an analysis data from 217 surveys from various organisations in Saudi Arabia using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) technique and utilized AMOS version (22) tools. This study provides insights for government officials and decision-makers to understand and improve the level of t-Government implementation in government organisations.
The organization of this paper is as follows: Section 2 gives an overview of the governing factors. Section 3 provides the methodology for this study that includes the research model, hypotheses and data collection. Section 4 presents the data analysis and results. Section 5 discusses the results, and Section 6 provides the conclusions of the study.

II. BACKGROUND
There is still insufficient research regarding the critical factors that affect transformational government (t-Government) such as technical, organisational and governing factors [6][7][8]. This section discusses some of the popular governing factors that have been identified (strategy, leadership, stakeholders, funding and citizens centricity) as affecting t-government in more details as follows: www.ijacsa.thesai.org

A. Strategy
Strategies and Regulations are important in any development of e-Government, and one of the most important elements involved in the implementation of t-Government [9], as its establishment inevitably requires major changes in strategic direction, and to modes of paradigm thinking [10,11]. Thus a comprehensive e-Government strategy becomes a major factor when collaboration between government agencies is necessary to ensure the successful presentation of an online service [11][12][13]. Appropriate regulations are also important for the successful implementation of t-Government, as the absence of such a regulatory framework is one of the more onerous challenges hindering its effective establishment [14][15][16]. Strategies and regulations are measured through: the importance of e-Government strategy, strategy's plan, strategy's goal, strategy's vision, and strategy's commitment.

B. Stakeholders
A key factor in the implementation of t-Government projects will be stakeholders: their presence within any e-Government initiative is fundamental to the success of its interoperability [17][18][19]. Governments need to identify their stakeholders are, and what they want, to succeed in egovernment implementation, and achieve the maturity of e-Government [20]. Rowley [21] argued that the classification of stakeholders are often implicit in categorizations of e-Government such as (G2G), (G2C), (G2B), and (G2E), or they offered by a number of authors. For example, Heeks [22] classified stakeholders to Non-profits, other agencies, citizens/customers, businesses, communities, government. Orange, Burke [23] classified stakeholders to Politicians, staff, public, project managers, design developers, other government agencies. UnitedNations [24] classified stakeholders to Public administrators, programmers, end-users, politicians. As this study only focuses on (G2G) e-Government categorization, it concern only about internal stakeholder in government organisations. According to Al-Rashidi [25] Internal stakeholders are political stakeholders, organizational stakeholders, and technological stakeholders such as Public administrators (employees), Other government agencies, Politicians ,E-Government project managers, Design and IT developers, and naturally, co-operation between these categories of stakeholder is critically important to the successful implementation of t-Government projects [26,27]. Hu, Cui [28] considers that cross-agency cooperation has the potential to transform the way that governments work, share information, and deliver services to external and internal clients. According to [29], implementing interoperability involvers many stakeholders at different government level and coordination between these stakeholders is important. In this study, participating stakeholders are measured by: stakeholder's involvement, stakeholder's management, and stakeholder's coordination.

C. Leadership
Leadership always plays a significant role to any group endeavour, and is thus the quality of the leadership employed will have a significant impact on the successful implementation of t-Government, particularly in e-Government projects requiring a high level of interoperability [17,30]. t-Government projects are long-term: consequently the quality of leadership is crucial [31]: strong leaders are required to overcome the inherent challenges involved. Researchers have identified both vision and leadership as the main drivers of successful e-Government [10,19,32], consequently, and according to many studies, [27,33,34], Effective leadership of this kind is a major contributory factor to the successful implementation of t-Government. The effectiveness of any leadership derives from its quality. Altameem, Zairi [16] and Prybutok, Zhang [34] state that effective leaders express more complex and contradictory behaviour than ineffective leaders. Zairi [35] claims that -Nowadays leadership is considered as a must for survival. It comes from the level of inspiration, commitment generated and corporate determination to perform‖. Thus a particular challenge to government as top manager of a project is the selection of a strong political leader with both IT and management skills capable of leading the project to a successful completion [10,19,32]. In this study leadership is measured by: leadership support, leadership style, and the influence of strong leadership.

D. Citizens' Centricity
A citizen centric involves the provision of services from the end-user's point of view rather than the perspective of the government department [36][37][38][39][40]. A t-Government project should have a citizen centric perception. However, citizencentric service delivery is a complex issue with many perspectives that need to be considered at the very beginning of a transformation project. The provision of citizen-centric service has been identified by some researchers as a critical success factor [38]. Therefore, t-Government should be provided in a way that enable citizens to easily access information and complete their transactions. In order to assess the level of success of the provision of citizen centric services end-user satisfaction should be regularly measured [36][37][38][39]. Citizens' centricity is measured in this study by: citizen centric legislation, citizen's measurement and citizen's satisfaction.

E. Funding
e-Government initiatives being long-term, they require long-term financial support from the Government, which can become a major challenge if that funding has to come from a government where political influence may interfere with decisions taken by high level officials [17,41]. Moreover, Gottipati [42] argues that the way e-government projects are being reviewed and funded in the Arabian gulf is that such projects appear to seen as budget-based instead of seeing those projects as project-based budgets. Thus funding is inevitably a crucial factor in the implementation of t-Government, as a lack of adequate, consistent financial backing will become a major challenge to the successful implementation of any e-Government project [43]. Adequate funding supports the necessary integration of government organisations by facilitating the development of infrastructure (such as building, technology, human resources) required to implement t-Government, and ensures that goals and targets are met on time. Its impact on e-Government interoperability is also positive [17]. Fund is measured in this study through fund www.ijacsa.thesai.org amount, measurement mechanism, fund management, and fund controlling.

A. Research model
The objective of this study is to identify governing factors that influence the implementation of t-Government in Saudi Arabia. The research model of the study is presented below in FIGURE I. The constructs included in the research model, were drawn from the variables used from a review of the relevant literature TABLE I.

H1
Strategy positively influence the implementation of t-Government

H2
Stakeholders positively influence the implementation of t-Government

H3
Leadership positively influences the implementation of t-Government

H4
Citizens' Centricity positively influences the implementation of t-Government

H5
Funding positively influences the implementation of t-Government

C. Data Collection
This study uses a quantitative research approach with methods that include a survey. The survey was divided into different sections to enable respondents to very understand it and a Likert scale with six levels of possible answers was used (from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree  [62][63][64]. SEM is a popular approach in social science research [65]. It is popular analysis technique because it has flexibility for interpreting the theory to be tested and the sample data [66]. The following section will illustrate the analysis of the study in more detail.

A. Descriptive Statistical Perspective
In the questionnaire 5 demographic questions were used to capture demographic information: age, education level, occupation, organisation size, and the number of G2G services. More than (72.9 percent) of the respondents were between 31 and 45 years old and more than (88 percent) have hold a Bachelor's or postgraduate degree. More than (41 percent) of the respondents are manager, more than (55 percent) of the respondents come from organisation have more than 500 employee, and (53 percent) of the respondents come from organisation have from (1 -5) G2G services. The demographic information about the respondent is summarised in TABLE III. www.ijacsa.thesai.org

C. Validity Test
All the constructs were shown to have a composite reliability greater than the threshold level of 0.60 and their Average Variance Extracted (AVE) is also greater than the threshold level of 0.50 [62] as shown in TABLE V. Also, all the indicators (factors) had significant loadings greater than 0.50 (p < 0.001) on their respective constructs as shown in TABLE VI.
Since their factor loadings were meaningful and highly significant, they were retained in the measurement model. Moreover, Average Variance Extracted (AVE) is greater than the squared correlation of constructs show TABLE VII. These results indicated that the measurement model possessed substantial convergent validity and unidimensionality [62].

V. HYPOTHESIS TESTING RESULTS
Testing of hypotheses aims to determine which independent variables provide a statistically meaningful relationship to the dependent variables [62]. This study tested www.ijacsa.thesai.org the hypotheses using SEM. SEM provides information about the hypothesized impact both, directly from one variable to another and via other variables positioned between the other two. This study was conducted using AMOS 22.0.
The statistics of the model based on the SEM output are: RMSEA 0.053, Chi-square/df 1.61, CFI 0.975, TLI 0.971. These values are within the threshold limits prescribed by [62,63].TABLE VIII represents the results of testing the current study hypotheses. The ‗Result' column indicates whether that hypothesis was: supported or not supported depending on the result of the p value.

VI. DISCUSSION
The aim of this study is to test how governing factors namely strategy, stakeholders, leadership, citizens' centricity and funding to the implementation of t-Government among (n=217) from different organisations in Saudi Arabia. The SEM analysis data supported the analysis and results of the SEM were summarized as follows:

Strategy positively influences the implementation of t-Government
Strategy indicated a significant positive impact on the change towards a t-Government. This hypothesis is supported in not only this study but other studies conducted previously. [9-11, 17, 26, 44, 45, 52, 60] reported the impact of the strategy to the implementation of t-Government. Based on this result, decision-makers, and e-Government officials should pay attention to the e-Government strategy for the transformation to a t-Government. It should be translated into an effective and clear roadmap that can be easily interpreted and committed to by all government organisations.

Stakeholders positively influence the implementation of t-Government
This hypothesis is supported in this study and is consistent with previous studies [17,26,[52][53][54]60] found the impact of stakeholders on the implementation of t-Government. Success of t-Government implementation projects need involvement and collaboration between all stakeholders. Based on this result, it is clearly understandable that decision-makers and e-Government officials should pay attention to the existence of involvement, commitment, management and cooperation of the stakeholders toward the success of the implementation of t-Government.

Leaderships positively influences the implementation of t-Government
This hypothesis is supported in this study and is consistent with previous studies [11,17,26,67,68]. There is a support from the custodian of the two holy mosques King Abdullah [69]. Although, government organisations need strong leadership to speed up and follow up these kind of projects until the end. In addition, the knowledgeable leadership who understand the technology, the legislations and the policy goals plays a vital role in the outcome of any e-Government project. Therefore, decision-makers, and e-Government officials should pay more attention to leadership support, interaction and cooperation with sufficient knowledge and style on the implementation of t-Government.

Citizens' Centricity positively influences the implementation of t-Government
This hypothesis is not supported in this context and is inconsistent with previous studies [37][38][39][40] pointed out the impact of Citizen Centric on the change towards a t-Government. The reason for that could be the lack of regular reviewing and measuring of citizen satisfaction, and participation issues have not been adequately addressed. According to [2], the United Nations e-Government Survey uses a three stage model to assess the e-participation index (EPI). The first stage: 1) e-information measures how participants access public information and information upon demand, 2) e-consultation measures the engagement of contributions of people on public policies and services and 3) e-decision-making to measure the empowerment of people on designing the service delivery. The e-participation index (EPI) indicates Saudi Arabia achieved 85.19% in stage 1, 27.27% in stage 2, and 11.11% in stage 3 which means there is a gap in citizen centric focus. Therefore, decision-makers, and e-Government officials should pay more attention to citizen satisfaction, service quality and should be regularly measured.

Funding positively influences the implementation of t-Government.
This hypothesis is not supported in this context, and it is inconsistent with previous studies [43,44,46,[58][59][60] who pointed out that there is an impact of funding towards t-Government. The reason for that could be the support from the custodian of the two holy mosques King Abdullah to the transformation to e-Government projects [69]. www.ijacsa.thesai.org Therefore, funding is not an obstacle by itself the implementation of t-Government, and more effort should be considered to create plans and strategies to fund e-Government projects and to further monitor this funds.

VII. CONCLUSION
The aim of this study is to identify and test empirically the factors that affect implementation of t-Government from multiple perspectives. It provides a model to assess the success factors to the implementation of t-Government in Saudi Arabia. Also, it identifies the most important factors in this context, regarding evaluating the success of the change to t-Government in Saudi Arabia.
Based on the data collected and the results of the analysis, this study showed positive and significant relationships between factors such as the relationships between strategy and t-Government (H1); the relationships between stakeholders and t-Government (H2); and the relationships between leadership and t-Government (H3). Also, it indicated that there is an insignificant relationship between citizens' centricity and t-Government (H4); and an insignificant relationship between funding and t-Government (H5).
The results of this study generate some useful implications for decision-makers, and government officials in developing countries in general and especially Saudi Arabia, with important guidelines in understanding how different factors affect the transition to a transformational government. Since the Saudi government and many other governments face the problem of a low level of e-government integration [2,11,17], it is hoped that the results this study will support decisionmakers, and government officials in increasing the level of success of t-Government.
To summarise, this study has attempted to offer a better understanding of the relevant factors that may influence the change toward t-Government through an analysis of the literature and a survey. This study is based on 217 respondents and due to its limited size and exclusive focus on Saudi Arabia future studies can be conducted in future to verify the results and also tests the factors in other cultural contexts. Also, future research can expand this study by including the effect of different factors such as organisational and technical factors that may impact the implementation of t-Government in Saudi Arabia.