Co-authored with Long, Y.
The growing interest in e-government raises the question of stages in e-government development. A few stage models for e-government have been proposed. Without a common e-government stage model, different research in e-government may be based on different stage models. This presents a difficulty in comparing and understanding different research results. In this research, we synthesize the existing e-government stage models so that there is a common frame of reference for researchers and practitioners in the area. This research utilizes a qualitative meta-synthesis methodology to synthesize different e-government stage models. The meta-synthesis follows the steps used in meta-ethnography. Five different e-government stage models were used in this research. We translated the stages within different models into one another and developed a new e-government stage model. The new e-government stage model has the following five stages: web presence, interaction, transaction, transformation, and e-democracy. The paper contributes to e-government theory development.
The new five-stage model provides a synthesized conceptual framework for researchers to evaluate
and understand e-government development. The synthesized e-government stage model also presents a road map for practitioners to follow in their e-government projects.
