In theory, there are no reasons why citizens would not like the convenience that e-government provides. Yet, the adoption is not high for most services. In Malaysia, less than half of the taxpayers have adopted e-personal income tax filing despite the promise of faster refunds by the inland revenue agency. Habits and attitudes are not easily overcome by e-government. Certainly, availability of internet is a big factor but in Malaysia the Internet penetration rate is high including also access to broadband. There is also the lingering fear or distrust of the net and the authorities. For many government services provided online, citizens will have to disclose their credit numbers which is inhibitor. Credit card frauds and hacking are high and often not widely report by card issuers and banks. This further fuels the fear that such payments methods will compromise the citizens' interest. The younger generation is less distrustful of the internet and take to the online government services more readily than the older generation of citizens. M-government is still to take hold. It is limited to information dissemination and search services. Complete e-government transactions still require a notebook, PC, tablet etc. These factors hold back more rapid adoption of online government services.

Technology acceptance has been studied in a myriad of settings. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) developed by Davis (1989) highlights two major factors: Ease of use and the preceived usefullness of the technology to the user. You may want to check out this website for other expanded models.

http://www.vvenkatesh.com/it/organizations/theoretical_models.asp

Technology Acceptance Model by Davis(1989), combined with several other constructs added by researchers under different contexts, may provide an explanation to the given problem.

There are, by one count , 22 models (many are variations of Davis's TAM and Roger's Innovation Diffusion Model). Change management models too can be quite useful in explaining adoption although not popular among egovernment researchers.

The technology acceptance model (tam) has been criticized on various grounds and (in its simplest form) might not be very suitable for explaining e-government adoption. However, there are elaborations of tam, such as utaut, tam2 and tam3, which better account for the complexities of technology acceptance. Bagozzi provides a good critique of tam here: http://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol8/iss4/3/

Since e-government is a term that includes political and technological meaning, you have to explore the subject from both perspectives. Political and technological are the factors that could influence the adoption of e-government in any country. Probably the best way to explore it is by building and testing a hybrid model that consists of tecnology acceptance and political activation theories.

Based on my experience as an International Business Development Manager for IT solutions and services to the Public Sector, I would like to add a set of enablers that would foster adoption of e-services by the citizens. These comprise:

Awareness:

citizens will only be able to use e-services when they know about their existence. So, promotion is key.

Access:

citizens will only be able to use e-services when they have access either via own or publicly available IT infrastructure. Access could be facilitated by the government e.g. by making available necessary IT infrastructure in community centers, public libraries, ...

Ability:

citizens will only be able to use e-services when they know how to do it. That starts with the basic ability to read and write, and includes IT literacy as well as subject matter knowledge related to the respective service e.g. tax. In order to assure this foundation, education and skills development has to be a pillar of any national development plan. Of course, ease-of-use of IT solutions and on-line help related to the subject matter will help tremendously.

Attractiveness:

citizens will change their behavior only when e-services offer a distinct added value. That may be

- the accessibility of e-services from the citizen's own desk or mobile device, especially important to people living in (remote) rural areas,

- instant access instead of queuing or

- 24/7 accessibility.

Quality of Service:

citizens will only be willing to adopt e-services when they are offered a service level that is at least equal or superior to the basic service. This includes ease-of-use, minimal down time of IT (for maintenance or error correction). For the respective agency the e-service becomes also a means to implement a homogeneous service quality based on on-line knowledge bases. In addition, citizen self service will reduce the effort of the agency for assistance to citizens and processing of administrative acts.

Security:

citizens will only use e-services when they can be reasonably confident that there will be no risks involved with using e-services. Protection of personal data is key, as well as easy-to-use security function e.g. via smart card ID.

In my view, the major factors that influence the usage of transactions are educational levels of the general public, access of the resources to them, and ease of use of the e-government services. Another factor is that the system should be secure i.e. there should not be any frauds.

Aside from the factors mentioned by many observers, habit is also a factor. i studied citizens who were from middle income and above, tertiary educated, lived in urban areas, had access to or subcribed to broadband services and had high time value of money but still filed their taxes the old fashion way.These groups has all the attributes of the adopters. This despite the promise of quicker refunds or excess taxes. Habits creates comfort zones. Adoption is not always a rational process. Its personal and potentially also irrational. Sometimes, the promise of economy through the use of IT in government service delivery cannot be realised because of the need to maintain the two channels - old and new. Governments must also nudge people towards adoption, not just rely on information and inducements.

Trust of the Internet, Trust of the Government, Trust of the E-government Website, Information Quality, System Quality, Service Quality are all various dimensions that have affected adoption to use E-government services, especially in light of recent serious security breaches of Personally Identifiable Information of companies such as Anthem Insurance and Target to name a few. Also, here in the US, the government tried to do a comprehensive rollout of Web site that would allow citizens to enroll in affordable health care plans as a result of the current Administration's Affordable Health Care Plan, and this rollout was an abysmal failure, which also enables a low adoption of e-government initiatives.

In this study, we studied the main factors influencing the development of local e-government in Portugal: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264822867_Significant_socio-economic_factors_for_local_e-government_development_in_Portugal

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