Towards a model for monitoring public services projects in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Information and communication technology (ICT) has been adopted by many governments around the world in the form of e-government to facilitate service delivery to the public. Saudi Arabia is an example of such a country that has adopted technology with these aims, but there is a failure in enabling the engagement of citizens with government to deliver public services projects with assured quality standards. The failings are blamed on the system's lack of support for stakeholder oversight. In light of these inadequacies, more effective monitoring of project construction and project implementation is required in order to improve public service quality from a long-term perspective. Fixes have been proposed to the lack of two-way communication between citizens and the government by inviting feedback from citizens through social media and other communication channels, however, a cohesive overarching model that enables the engagement of citizens with government projects has yet to be devised. There is a clear need for a model that can be applied to design official systems to facilitate consultation between the government and the public and to invite feedback from key stakeholders throughout each stage of the project lifecycle. This paper proposes a conceptual model to facilitate citizens in monitoring the quality of public services and the progress of public service projects. It is designed based on an in-depth analysis of the available systems on the market, e-participation studies and theoretical work presented in the literature. The paper also recommends technologies and features that will facilitate the implementation of the model in different contexts.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Khalied Al-Barrak: orcid.org/0000-0001-9224-5926

ORCID for Les Carr: orcid.org/0000-0002-2113-9680

ORCID for Matt Ryan: orcid.org/0000-0002-8693-5063

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