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1. Introduction
E-government is a one-stop gateway to the delivery of national or local government services via the internet or other digital means to citizens or businesses or other governmental agencies. It encourages transformation from the traditional bureaucratic paradigm, which emphasizes standardization, departmentalization and operational cost-efficiency, to the “e-government” paradigm, which emphasizes coordinated network building, external collaboration and customer services (Tat-Kei Ho, 2002). E-governance refers to how managers and supervisors use IT and internet to execute their functions of supervising, planning, organizing, coordinating and staffing effectively (Palvia and Sharma, 2007). In Malaysia, one of the government agencies, Malaysia Administrative Modernization and Management Planning Unit, has been entrusted to plan, implement and monitor the e-government initiative. Seven applications were designed in Malaysia electronic government, namely, as e-services, e-procurement, generic office environment, Human Resources Management Information System (HRMIS), project monitoring system, Electronic Labor Exchange and E-syariah (Norshita et al., 2010). The government can re-strategize the ways to govern its citizens with the network utilization, in addition as it is a tool for collaboration to save time and to reduce costs for both citizens and government. The objectives of this research are to:
identify the existing level of public acceptance to use MyEG service;
compare and discuss the results with similar research on e-services; and
develop suitable guidelines/methods on increasing the acceptance levels of e-government.
The low level of user acceptance for these services are recognized as a problem for government policymakers, government agencies and e-government services providers globally. For instance, one of the online services offered in Taiwan known as tax filing and payment system ranked low for its user acceptance rates, even though the Taiwanese Government tax agency has invested millions of dollars in promoting this service (Hung et al., 2006). Another research by Kaliannan and Awang (2010) focused on the ICT and e-government initiatives in Malaysia, but the focus of their work is geared toward business holders or suppliers. There have been a few major improvements and challenges identified by the similar existing research within the government systems in Malaysia, but there is a lack of research that re-strategizes the way of communication between citizens and government. This means that any enhancement or improvement for the existing traditional way of communication and services...