Towards a Conceptual Framework for Pledging Sustainable e-Government Success The Case of G2G in Ethiopia Lemma Lessa, Salehu Anteneh Addis Ababa University Addis Ababa, Ethiopia lemma.lessa@gmail.com salehu_anteneh@yahoo.com Ralf Klischewski Faculty of Management Technology German University in Cairo, New Cairo City, Egypt ralf.klischewski@guc.edu.eg Mesfin Belachew Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of Ethiopia Addis Ababa, Ethiopia mesfinbelachew@gmail.com Abstract - Sustaining successful e-government initiatives is of paramount importance for governments of developing countries. However, extant literature indicate that: (1) failure of e-government initiatives in those countries is very high and this demonstrates that the issue is challenging and poorly understood; and (2) sustainability aspect of e-government initiatives is a neglected topic and calls to extend e-government research beyond success. This research, thus, tries to explore the potential relationship between two concepts (e- government success and sustainability) in an integrated manner. The paper presents a case of a G2G project in Ethiopia and structurational model of technology was used as a theoretical foundation. The study proposes a conceptual framework for understanding success and sustainability of e-government initiatives. Keywords—sustainability, success, e-government success, e- government sustainability, administrative processes I. INTRODUCTION E-government has received interest all over the world ([1, 2]) because of its potential to pave way for governments to transform their relations with citizens, businesses or other arms of government [3] and also increase transparency in administration, reduce corruption, and increase political participation [4]. Although several challenges exist in implementing e- government especially in developing countries [5], there is little evidence of research that discusses those challenges and how they could be addressed [6]. Besides, most of the measures to date focus on evaluating the immediate success of e-government initiatives while sustainability [6] is an often ignored indicator of e-government success. Despite the shocking failure rate, e-government initiatives still receive huge investment [2] and thus their long term success is of paramount importance, especially for developing countries. This research attempts to fill the aforementioned gap by exploring the potential relationship between the two concepts based on a case study of a G2G e-government project in Ethiopia using structurational model of technology as an analytical tool. The study proposes a conceptual framework for understanding success and sustainability of e-government initiatives by uncovering the relationship between enablers of e-government success and sustainability considering the role of IT-enabled administrative processes as a potential trajectory between these two concepts. This paper is organized as follows. Section II briefly discusses the research gap. Subsequently, we present a brief background on the research setting in section III followed by the research methodology in section IV. This is followed by section V that presents case study results. Drawing on these results, section VI and VII discuss the implications and propose a conceptual sustainability framework respectively. Section VIII concludes by highlighting the contributions, limitations of the study, and propose opportunities for future work. II. RESEARCH GAP: SUSTAINABILITY OF E-GOVERNMENT PROJECTS Failure of information systems projects is one of well addressed topics in literature ([7, 8, 9, 4, 10]). Scholars argue that most of these projects fail due to different reasons such as ‘design-actuality’ [11] or ‘design-reality’ gaps [8], long-term sustainability problems [12], or lack of commitment on the part of political leadership and public managers [13]. These failures are threatening development efforts of developing countries because if the trend continues, those countries would face major crisis [7]. The increase in failure of such e-government initiatives is critical because apart from fact that the projects are taking large amount of money, the investments keep going up [7] and are unlikely to decrease in near future [14]. Evaluation of information systems (IS) has been a popular research area over the past years, calling for appropriate evaluation measures. It has been argued [15] that if IS research is to make a contribution to the world of practice, well-defined measures are essential. In response to this growing need for evaluation approaches and tools, different attempts have been made so far. Accordingly, various IS evaluation models and techniques featuring different indicators have been developed and also applied to the e-government domain. However, the concern has only been devising mechanisms as how to evaluate and assess the success of those projects [2]. Yet there is a gap in the literature regarding mechanism that can serve as a tool to evaluate sustainability ([4, 12, 11, and 8]). Sustainability is identified as an important but neglected topic especially in developing countries [16] and it has been, and continue to be, 978-1-4799-7498-6/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE