A Model for Evaluation and Development of Citizens' Electronic Readiness for Deployment of an E-City Using Structural Equation Modeling

This article describes how as the world moves faster and faster towards a digital society, moving toward electronic cities is inevitable due to population growth and transformation of human relationships. Such trend is almost impossible without having electronic cities and citizens. Today, governments seek to improve their services by relying on new ICT solutions so that citizens get the services they want with the best quality, least cost, and in the shortest time possible. Considering the importance of this issue, in this article a model for evaluation and development of citizens' electronic readiness for deployment of an electronic city has been proposed. The present article is descriptive in terms of methodology and a survey in terms of data collection using a questionnaire with a population of 384 citizens of The Citizens of a City in Iran. The aspects this article explores include technical and communication infrastructure, business environment, and culture and society. These factors were investigated considering 33 indices derived from SEM as well as using SPSS and AMOS and the hypotheses of the research were tested. The results show that the model has an overall fitting and that there is a positive, significant relation between the variables and the citizens' E-readiness and using these indices is a good basis for presenting a model for the evaluation of citizens' E-readiness. According to the results obtained from the analysis of the research model, it was found that compared with other factors the understudy city lacked a proper technical and communication infrastructure. Therefore, some solutions for increasing citizens' E-readiness have been offered.