Critical Success Factors and Key Performance Indicators for e-Government Projects- Towards Untethered Public Services: The Case of Ethiopia

The road to digital transformation of the governance system of developing countries has been a steep uphill climb- in addition to massive investment in ICT infrastructure and applications e-Government projects often require changes in legislation, major policy decisions and restructuring of the public sectors. In this paper, pertinent issues that stand in the way of digital government ascent of Ethiopia have been investigated. To give the issues addressed a context, an e-Service that enabled consumers to pay utilities bill for water, telephone and electricity in one-stop service center has been analysed with respect to metrics developed as well as on the basis of consumers rating of the service. The main findings from consumers response of the service ratings are that, e-Government projects success cannot be judged solely by monetary return of investments which could be obtained among other things by cutting down the work force required to run the service and improvements achieved compared to how the service was delivered in manual settings before it went electronics. In fact as evidenced by the findings, monetary return of investments might not be achieved. However, other metrics such as time to process transactions, service responsiveness, availability of government services or the ability to conduct transactions anytime and anywhere, and costs associated to getting the service weighs more significance.