Digital framework for redefining South African Local Government Service Delivery
The emergence of new ICTs is triggering organisations into digital transformation, targeting their business model, resulting in a shift on how organisations operate and generate revenue. Moreover, high consumer technological demand and external dynamics also signify the need for organisations, both public and private, to reshape their operations on how they respond to emerging technologies. The study investigated the digital transformation initiative to integrate emerging technologies into the South African rural municipalities business model. A pragmatic paradigm was adopted to achieve the study objectives, and holistically examining the digital transformation in municipalities, and further allowed the researcher to explore digital transformation initiatives from both individual (citizens) and organisation’s (municipalities) perspectives. Self-administered questionnaires were distributed to collect quantitative data from citizens on their perception towards emerging technologies as a model of accessing and engaging rural municipalities. Interviews were conducted with rural municipalities departmental managers. IBM Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used for regressions and corelation test analysis, while the IBM AMOS was deployed to test the study model and confirm the study’s quantitative results. Furthermore, Atlas. ti was used to analyse qualitative data. The results of the study show that both citizens and rural municipalities have a positive perception towards using emerging technologies in municipalities. However, the citizens identified safety issues as their primary concern. Furthermore, the study shows that rural municipalities currently do not have the right skills, expertise, resources, infrastructure, external relationships, research, and innovation capabilities to support digital projects initiative. Based on the findings, a framework to support digital transformation initiative in rural municipalities was developed.
Municipalities, Citizens, Digital transformation (DT), Emerging Technologies, Business model innovation, Service delivery, Adoption, Use, UCTD
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