Government-to-Citizens Relationship: Evaluating the Quality of Information on Saudi Ministries' Websites

The government is an important provider of information to citizens. The provision of government information, as part of the Government-to-Citizens relationship in e-Government implementation, is necessary for enhancing the level of government transparency and increasing citizens’ awareness. In Saudi Arabia, Saudi ministries are the main government information providers to citizens but those citizens often encounter barriers in accessing government information due to various factors, including the geographical ones. As part of the efforts that Saudi Arabia has undertaken to enhance the government-to-citizen relationship, the government has sponsored a variety of e-Government initiatives as a means of improving daily communication with Saudi citizens, and thus the government has started to embrace the World Wide Web (WWW) for delivering government information to citizens. The purpose of this paper is to assess the quality of the web-based information available on Saudi ministry websites. This paper begins by exploring the assessment framework used to assess web-based information content on Saudi ministry websites. It then sheds light on previous assessment studies conducted in 2003 and 2005 on web-based information content of Saudi ministry websites before assessing ministry websites in the beginning of 2007, using the same framework as used on the previous studies. It concludes by discussing the progress with regards to government information provision on the Saudi ministries’ websites.