Strategic Analysis and Development of Electronic Government Strategies For the Palestinian Municipalities

e-Government is considered as one of the modern tools, which emerged from the escalated development in the Information and Telecommunication Technology sector. e-Government has been adopted in order to make the governmental services around the world, at both the national and municipal levels, better, faster, cheaper, more convenient, more transparent, more efficient, more accountable, and more accessible to their beneficiaries; the citizens and businesses. To achieve those e-Government benefits, there are specific requirements that must be addressed, which form the bases towards the success of developing and implementing e-Government. Those requirements are categorized into organizational, human and psychological, technical, political and legal, financial and economic, and promotion requirements. Palestine is one of the Middle East countries that tries to implement and develop e-Government initiative, which was launched in 2005 and was expected to take several years to be completed. Most of the research and studies on e-Government field focused on development and implementation part and ignored the strategic planning and management part, although this is a basic and an important part of e-Government. Most of the research on the strategic part of e-Government concentrated on the national level; few studies were accomplished on the municipal and local levels. The aim of this thesis is to develop e-Government strategic framework for the Palestinian municipalities. This aim is achieved according to the strategic analysis for the Palestinian e-Government current situation for the national and then municipal levels. The strategic analysis process is based on the data collected through the combination of the documents from the published documents on the official websites or the governmental agencies themselves, and from interviews with the Palestinian e-Government experts including employees of the public and private sectors. The strategic analysis process resulted in identifying the SWOT -the internal factors (strengths and weaknesses), and the external factors (threats and opportunities)- that affect the Palestinian e-Government at the national level then at the municipal level. The SWOT analysis forms the basis in suggesting the vision, the mission and then concluding strategic goals for the national and municipal levels. The findings for this research were achieved through the matching process between the internal and external factors for e-Government at the Palestinian municipal level, which is called the SWOT matrix. SWOT matrix contributed in formulating set of feasible strategic solutions needed to be implemented in right way to achieve e-Government's municipality strategic goals.