The 12th International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions (ICITST-2017)
Role of Transformational Leadership on E-
Government Switching: Multi-Channel and Digital
Divide
Khurram Mahmood1, Zainab Nayyar2, Hafiz Mushtaq3
Department of Software Engineering
Bahria University
Islamabad, Pakistan
km_khuram@yahoo.com1, zainabnayyar786@gmail.com2, h.mushtaqahmed@gmail.com3
Abstract— it has been observed from last 16 years that to switch
from the manual government processes to Electronic government
can put a huge impact in regulating the government processes.
The purpose of electronic government is to use Information and
communication technologies in government sector, combined with
organizational change and new skills to improve government
sector service delivery, democratic processes and capacity
building to give strength and support the government policies.
Previously government servants always work through traditional
channels like front desks or telephones to fulfill their
requirements. The use of traditional channels was time
consuming and was only fulfill the requirements of one user at a
time. These consequences lead towards a digital divide dilemma
in which people moved far away from the electronic process. This
study is based upon filling the gaps between E-Government and
digital divide by utilizing the multi-channel services governed by
transformational leaders. The study will reveal new ways of
switching to electronic government through digital channels.
Transformational leadership will influence the adapting phase of
this concept. Data gathered through questionnaires has shown
that transformational leaders along with digital channels have
put a positive effect in switching from manual to electronic
government processes. These aspects have increased the
transparency, efficiency, accountability and security in
government processes.
Keywords- electronic government; transformational leadership;
multichannel; digital divide
I. INTRODUCTION
The explosive entrance of technology in today’s world
has changed every aspect of life; way of interaction, study,
work, and living. The government and its agencies are also
getting effected by this drastic change and taking serious steps
to make use of IT all over the world. Pakistan is part of global
village and hence trying to cope with the technological
change. By using IT techniques governments are reinventing
themselves as they also want to transform and indulge them
into e-businesses and certain e-processes for their economic
fueling and better growth in the global world. The change in
businesses at governmental level has provided an ease to up
lift the social status of its citizens and hence that was an
emergence of E-government [1]. The integrated use of
978-1-908320/93/3/$31.00©2017 IEEE
Information and Communication Technology in public sector
organizations for the improvement in their processes is known
as E-government. In the digital era it is a dire need of
government to automate their traditional manual processes
into the sophisticated automated systems to provide E-services
to the citizens of the country through E-government
applications.
Digital divide [2] [3] is simply the gap between people
who have an easy access to the internet and those who have
not. E-Government and digital divide are closely related as if
government has implemented certain IT policies and defining
and implementing the E-Government processes in the society
but the citizens cannot make use of them efficiently then such
technology fueling is of no use because people are not getting
interacted with the political processes in meaningful ways.
The main purpose of the e-government is to use
Information and communication technologies in government
sector organizations combined with organizational change and
new skills in order to improve government sector service
delivery and democratic processes and capacity building to
give strength and support to the government policies. The
main focus of the e-government is on the delivery of better
and efficient services to all citizens with transparency,
accountability and in timely fashion at lower cost. It will
increase the productivity of the government sector
organizations and these citizen services may be accessed
through a central gateway. The e-government demands to use
the new multi- channels [4] i.e. internet, kiosks, mobile and
Digital TV media, new infrastructure and technologies to
enable transparency, accountability and openness of
government organizations for the retrieval of specific
information.
A composed leadership [5] is very important factor for the
e-government processes implementation and coordination
within and among the departments in a speedy way and
reinforcement of governance objectives. The matter of fact is
that e-government is a complex issue and having many
dimensions. A strong leadership is required for each
dimension which will well conversant with the technology to
take decisions.
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 The 12th International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions (ICITST-2017)
This study is based upon filling the gaps between E-
Government and digital divide by utilizing the multi-channel
services governed by transformational leaders. Multi-Channels
include digital and non-digital channels; the primary focus on
this study is on digital channels. The study will reveal new
ways of switching to E-government by using the concept of
digital channels. However transformational leadership will
influence the adapting phase of this concept. The main focus of
the e-services is:
a. To ensure User Interaction with technology (Digital
Divide).
b. To make accessible and flexible services (Anytime,
Anywhere).
c. To analyze Multi-Channel Service delivery.
d. To explore appropriate Channel Selection without
limitations.
e. To Manage Transformational Leadership approach for the
implementation of e-government and to achieve
transparency, accountability, effectiveness and Scalability.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
The authors studied [6] the software assessment model by
using metrics products for e-Government in the government to
business model. They found that the government to Business
(G2B) model was not much used by the researchers as
compared to G2C. In this regard, many software applications
were developed to support G2B model but their utilization
were very low due to noncompliance of needs of the users and
stakeholders. It was important to develop the software
application which may fulfil the requirements and
expectations of the end users. The purpose of their study was
to assess of this model by doing enhancement of metrics
products from ISO 9126 for e-government to business model.
The development was based on the assessment, functionality,
reliability and effective usability with efficiency to develop
quality software for the G2B model. The model not only
connected the citizens but also other areas such as business,
customer, and organizations or connection between public
bodies. The authors were proposed the application and
demonstrated through a case study. They implemented the
model in local government bodies. They found that the
security of the application was not up to the mark and the
maturity of the software was low but functionality, operability
and accuracy of the software was good enough.
A survey was conducted [7] on the impacts of E-
government all over the world and identified that E-
government has put a positive impact on political
environment. It provided a lot of political benefits not only in
the form of automation and transperency but also in
operations, preventive and awareness detection by reporting
and promoting ethical attitudes. She surveyed the due to E-
governemnt inplementation 90% reduction in curroption
occurred by enhancing the security, reduction in bribery and
legal logging.
The impact of e-government was examined [8] by
reducing administrative corruption. The main purpose of study
was to give answer of electronic government constraints on
978-1-908320/93/3/$31.00©2017 IEEE
managerial corruption. The study had found biasness between
the group level and at individual level which were considered
as the major cause of corruption. They found the factors which
contributed in corruptions in the government namely
monopoly power and discretionary power. The authors used to
measure the corruption factor with the help of the following
formula:
Corruption = Monopoly + discretion – accountability
The researcher prepared a questionnaire, for collecting the
required data. Questionnaire stability was calculated by a
reliability coefficient, where the reliability coefficient (93.5%)
confirms the validity. The study sample consisted of 147
males (55.5%) and 118 females (44.5%). Based on the data
collected through questionnaires it was resulted that the 88.7%
population agreed that the use of e-government may help to
reduce the corruption in public sector.
In [9] the e-government vision and its implementation
strategy in Lebnon was studied. Futhermore they enlighten the
importance of using ICT applications in Lebnon and
emphasied the use of ICT in public administration, e-
government solutions etc their use and implications.
Similarly [10] also conducted a survey to deal with the
challenges faced by Indian Government for implementation of
E-government. They suggested to implment interoperabiliy by
enforcing security and privacy policies, trust between
deaprtments and common public and standardization of
processes.
The relationship between E-government and curroption
in developed and underdeveloped countries was examined
[11]. While examining this relationship they investigated the
impact of E-government on curroption and either the impact of
e-government was higher in developed or underdeveloped
countries. They developed the empirical model named as
probit model to test and examine the results on the basis of
relationships between two variables from different time
periods. They took a data of seven years from (2003 to 2010)
and observed the change in e-government development index
with the change of curroption perception index by applying
the causal method. The samples were deivided into 3 different
intervals from 2003 to 2008 nd from 2008 to 2010. They
found that curroption is less in those countries where e-
government usage was increased. Secodly the e-government
usage and its impacts were higher in developing countries.
The results from probit method and regression method showed
that 1% increase in e-government made 1.17% decrease in
curroption. The limitations on their research were that research
focused the intra country comparisons and this didn’t effect
each and every area of country. Secondly the conditions of
curroptions affected from economic, political, historical and
public sector policies of countries.
The implication of multichannel service delivery for
sustainable electronic government was examined in [12]. It
was important to provide multi-channel for expanding the
services to the citizens especially in rural areas. They have
further identified the operations carried out by the
governmental bodies of China through multi-channel delivery.
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From their study they concluded that the internet, mobile and
electronic service channels were primarily involved in the
reduction of digital divide. Based on that study the e-services
like e-taxation services through multi-channel delivery were
launched through establishing the call center at local
administration body in China.
III. FRAMEWORK
In this paper the conceptual frame work will represent the
synthesis of literature review. It will show that how the certain
variables used in the research is interrelated with each other.
As [13] stated that the conceptual framework presents the
specific research question that is associated with the problem
statement. Problem statement highlights those issues that
occurred during research. Fig 1 shows the research framework
in which it is clearly seen that Transformational Leadership
being an independent variable is influential on all other
variables of the research.
independent variable and its direct impact is observed on e-
government and an indiect effect is checked on digital divide
with the help of a moderator, which is digital channel. The
major focus of data gathering was from public institutions,
government offices, educational institutes, hospitals, students
and teachers of different age groups, posts, jobs and
qualifications. Research startegy was descriptive and
quantitative data is gathered and a sample size was 288. The
sampling technique is probabilty based which is discussed in
next section.
V. DATA ANALYSIS
The data gathered through questionnaires. Three hundred
questionnaires were circulated in the market, including
academia, public sector, private sector, semi government and
unemployed professionals out of which 288 were recieved.
The data was analysed using IBM SPSS version 24. There
were five variables which were linked with the research
directly or indirectly named as E-Government (EG),
Accountability (A), Efficiency (E), Transperency (T) and
Transformational Leadership (TL). After the computation of
variables the reliablity, skewness and kurtosis of computed
data is statistically analysed. According to [14] the benchmark
of reliability is 0.7, skewness is ±1 and kurtosis is ±3. Based
on the above mentioned benchmark the reliability of data is
0.787 which is close to the benchmark value which means that
the results are acceptable. Similarly the values obtained by
computing the skewness and kurtosis are near to the
benchmark values which validated the research data. Table 1
is showing the values of reliability, skewness and kurtosis that
are obtained after the computation of data.
Table ,. Data Analysis

Variables Reliability Skewness Kurtosis

Statistics
FigXUH 1. Research Framework Cronbach’s Statistic Std Statistic Std
Alpha Error Error
IV. METHODOLOGY All 0.787 - - - -
Variables
After a thorough and extensive litrature review it is EG - -0.205 0.144 3.836 0.286
inferred that although everyone has put his efforts for the A - -1.495 0.144 4.607 0.286
successful implementation of electronic government and they E - -1.161 0.144 3.836 0.286
are successful to some extent but no one has emphasized on
T - -0.855 0.144 3.393 0.286
the impact of transformational leadership on electronic
TL - -0.181 0.144 -0.065 0.286
government implementation with the utilization of digital
channels and decreasing the digital divide. So the focus of our     )URP WKH DERYH PHQWLRQHG ILJXUH LW LV FOHDUO\ VKRZQ WKDW
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general and thus open more areas and dimentions of research
in some specific domain) and a questionnaire was developed HQKDQFHG7KXVLWLVSURYHGWKDWWUDQIRUPDWLRQDOOHDGHUVKLSKDV
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and one moderator. Transformational Leadership is taken as

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 The 12th International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions (ICITST-2017)

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VII. CONCLUSION
Electronic government implementation is a very important
aspect for the automation of various processes which take
place among private, public and government sector. In this
research the major focus was to implement electronic
government through transformational leadership which will
decrease the digital divide dilema by increasing the usage of
digital channels. The data analysis and results have shown that
tansformational leadership is a backbone to achieve
tranperency, accountability and efficieny by implementing
electronic government system. This will bring a revolutionised
change in Pakistan.
REFERENCES
[1] Zhu Y.Q, Kindarto.A, (2016), A garbage can model of government
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978-1-908320/93/3/$31.00©2017 IEEE 478