The Effectiveness of E-services in Enhancing Municipal Service Delivery within the Local Government Environment

Description

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23498059

California Mohale (Department of Public Administration, University of Limpopo, South Africa)

Government entities, including those at the local level, have been striving to transform public administration processes to adapt to an ever-changing environment to meet citizens’ needs. This transformational objective within the local public sector environment, facilitated by Communication Technology, revolutionised municipal service delivery. The development of e-services as a technological innovation meant to transform the provision of municipal services and served as a mechanism and a catalyst to enable effective government through better access to municipal e-services. Municipalities such as the City of Tshwane revolutionised municipal service delivery by introducing the e-services online portal to allow residents to report service queries, pay municipal bills, and access information about municipal services directly from their mobile devices. This transitioned the local public sector environment from a paper-based system to a paperless system. However, despite these transformational efforts, many e-services platforms have not yet achieved the desired level of success, which continues to be a challenge. Particularly for those that are frequently not designed with a user-centric approach, therefore failing to engage citizens at their respective levels of knowledge. The study examines the effectiveness of e-services and their related e-services programs within the local government environment. This was done to determine how effective the e-services programs are in transforming the level of municipal services. The study adopted a qualitative research methodology with specific reference to a conceptual approach based extensively on secondary data. The study concluded by giving an exposition of the effectiveness of e-services in enhancing municipal services within the local government environment. The findings of the study included the e-services programs and their effectiveness in enhancing municipal services within the local government environment.