Towards a Secure Maturity Model for Protecting e-Government Services in Tanzania: A Stakeholders View

Abstract

E-Government Maturity Models (eGMMs) are widely used as a tool for guiding the development and implementation of e-Government services. The government of Tanzania recognizes that e-Government services can accelerate the achievement of a sustainable social and economic development in the country. However, despite the good benefits provided by e-Government services, information security and privacy are the most significant obstacles for e-Government services adoption. Unfortunately, very few designs of e-GMMs have considered security as a specific issue. However, even these few security responsive models consider security mostly at the transaction stage. Responding to this security weakness of eGMMs, in our earlier work a holistic secure e-Government maturity model that includes security layers consisting of technical and non-technical security related aspects in each of its four maturity stages was developed, but the model was not yet tested and evaluated. This paper reports on the tests and the validation of the proposed secure model. The applied evaluation criteria were: simplicity, reliability, accessibility and usability, dynamics and flexibility, applicability, coverage and completeness, and compliance with legal aspects. Primary data were collected from five Tanzanian public organization using questionnaires. The collected data were processed and analyzed using the SPSS. The overall results show that the model designs meet all required specifications to successfully secure e-Government services, and the model was accepted by majority of the respondents at different organizational levels (strategic, tactical, and operational).