The purpose of this study is to develop an e-government readiness model and to test this model. Consistent with this model several instruments, IS assessment (ISA), IT governance (ITG), and Organization-IS alignment (IS-ALIGN) are examined for their ability to measure the readiness of one organization for e-government and to test the instruments fit in the proposed e-government model. The ISA instrument used is the result of adapting and combining the IS-SERVQUAL instrument proposed by Van Dyke, Kappelman, and Pybutok (1997), and the IS-SUCCESS instrument developed by Kappelman and Chong (2001) for the City of Denton (COD) project at UNT. The IS Success Model was first proposed by DeLone and McLean (1992), but they did not validate this model. The ITG instrument was based on the goals of the COD project for IT governance and was developed by Sanchez and Kappelman (2001) from UNT. The ISALIGN instrument was also developed by Sanchez and Kappelman (2001) for the COD project. It is an instrument based on the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) that measures how effectively a government organization utilizes IT to support its various objectives. The EGOV instrument was adapted from the study of the Action-Audience Model developed by Koh and Balthazrd (1997) to measure how well a government organization is prepared to usher in e-government in terms of various success factors at planning, system and data levels. An on-line survey was conducted with employees of the City of Denton, Texas. An invitation letter to participate in the survey was sent to the 1100 employees of the City of Denton via email, 339 responses were received, yielding a response rate of 31%. About 168 responses were discarded because they were incomplete and had the missing values, leaving 171 usable surveys, for a usable set of responses that had a response rate of 16%. Although the proposed and some alternate models were partially consistent with the hypothesized theory, the confirmation of the relationships among the constructs warrants further research via either by replication of this research or by development a new theoretical model. However, the significant validity and reliability measures obtained in this study indicate that the e-government readiness model has the potential for use in future studies.
