e-Government Adoptions in Developing Countries: A Sri Lankan Case Study

This paper presents a set of lessons learned from the adoption of an e-Government initiative in Sri Lanka. The case study presented in the paper is the e-Pensions project of the e-government initiative of the Government of Sri Lanka called "e-SriLanka". This is one of the first World Bank projects designed to bring Information Communication Technology (ICT) to every village, citizen, and business, and transform the way the government thinks and works. A set of lessons related to leadership, hidden cost, BPR, group dynamics, data migration, language issues, bureaucracy, training, change management, project governance, staff turnover and transitional projects were identified. While some of these lessons have been identified in the previous literature five such lessons have not been discussed previously. Those are transitional projects, language issues relating to software development processes, group dynamics, planning for data migration and staff turnover. Moreover, the study further revealed some interrelationship among these factors eg., how transitional projects can positively impact training and change management. Thus, these new insights relating to e-Government adoptions will shed some light into new e-government initiatives in developing countries with similar environments to Sri Lanka. Additionally, these new factors will contribute to enhancing e-Government adoption models.