Hayat Ali

Measurement of e-services quality: an empirical study of University of Bahrain

In the last decade the Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) have significantly revolutionized the educational sector. With an increasing number of universities and its presence on the website, the e-service quality is becoming a vital concern toward satisfying the students who are the main stakeholder. E-service quality and e-satisfaction relationship is previously tested. However, the pervasiveness of internet use in education warrants measuring e-service quality a high importance. Therefore, this research aims at measuring the e-services quality and its impact on student e-satisfaction at University of Bahrain (UoB). Toward this aim, a research model was developed and tested. A questionnaire consisting 33 of Likert type items were distributed. Primary data were collected from 390 students. Regression analysis was used to determine if the quality of dimensions (website design, reliability, responsiveness, ease of use, and privacy) have an impact on students’ e-satisfaction. The results show that all of the dimensions of e-services quality have an impact on student’s e-satisfaction expect for the dimension of ease of use. Thus, according to the results of this research, there is insufficient evidence of the effect of ease of use directly on students’ e-satisfaction. The contribution of this article relates to the fact that the proposed model integrates in a holistic way various relevant factors affecting e-service quality into a single model that can be adopted to measure the e-services at university. In addition, the researchers present some recommendations for UoB to apply e-services quality dimensions through websites, and some suggestions for future research.

E-Participation: an investigation of Government Readiness in the Kingdom of Bahrain

Nowadays, governments around the world started recognizing the importance of involving citizens in decision process making through what is called e-Participation. E-Participation is the use of Technology to enhance involving citizens in decision making in order to increase transparency and enhance communication between governments and citizens. EParticipation by its real mean is now applied in the Kingdom of Bahrain. This research is to investigate the readiness of e-Participation implementation in the Kingdom. To achieve this aim, an e-Government Authority’s initiative that is responsible for the implementation of eParticipation in the Kingdom was evaluated using a framework from the literature. The results showed that the Kingdom of Bahrain is ready to implement e-Participation as there were good initiatives with relation to the ten dimensions of the framework considered in this research. This research provides the government of the Kingdom of Bahrain with insights on the dimensions and factors that are important to enhance the readiness of e-Participation implementation.