Shawren Singh
5. Three Round Delphi Study The statements presenting the 20 selected e‐Government challenges were distributed to the participants using LimeSurvey, an open source survey application. We planned, created, designed and pre‐tested the electronic version of the Delphi survey. For the first round, respondents would only proceed to the survey if they had read and accepted the informed consent statement. On completion, the electronic survey was submitted and we immediately received and automatic e‐mail from LimeSurvey stating that there was a new response added to the database. After the due date of each round, the data was exported from the LimeSurvey database to a spreadsheet which had been specifically designed to calculate the average response from the group for each issue and reprinted the statements showing each individual's actual response and the average score for each issue. The research participants were then asked to re‐evaluate their response on the basis of their own score for the previous round and the average score of all the participants for the previous round for that issue. The whole exercise was then repeated a third time in order to give the respondents an opportunity to consider their responses three times.
6. Results of the Delphi Study In Figure 2 a bar chart shows the average third round scores for the whole population of this study, together with a line graph showing the standard deviation of each issue. The supporting number for this graph may be seen in Table 2.
Figure 2: Graphical Representation of the Third Round Average Scores and Standard Deviations for the Whole Group From this graph it is clear that top scores are in the order of 5.56 to 7 out of 9. Thus it can be concluded that these issues were regarded as being relatively more important to the participant. Since these statements scored 5.56 or more out of 9 it is evident that these 17 statements were in general regarded as relevant by the respondents. The exceptions are statements 3, 19 and 9, which appear to be on the brink of neutrality (a neutral score is 5). These statements scored 5.44, 5.29 and 5.02, in prior rounds these statements were scored consistently the same, see Figure . These statements are also in general regarded as relevant by the respondents. Issue No. Q16 Q17 Q5 Q14
Statement The scarcity of in‐house ICT expertise and resources. The tendency towards 'turf wars' within government departments. Complicated internal bureaucratic policy requirements by governmental departments. Civil servants are generally not sufficiently technologically savvy to understand the consequences of their decisions on the project.
466
Average Score 7.22 6.98
Std Dev. 0.85 1.31
6.98
1.47
6.95
1.05