Towards t-government in Malaysia: Investigation of citizen´s willingness to participate in democratic services and information privacy concern

The concept of t-government was started by the UK Government in 2006 and was construed as the enactment of three perspectives; (i) citizen centricity, (ii) shared service culture and (iii) professionalism. Their aim is to integrate information systems technologies (IST) that enables citizens´ participation in the initial stages of policy development and the process of reengineering public services. Malaysia aims to be a developed nation and pushing its public service towards the realization of the t-government. After claiming success with several e-government applications that range from information provision to transactional services, currently it overlooks the essential aspect of the t-government that involves citizens´ participation in the early stage of policy development as an exemplary of democratic practice. As a developing nation the existence of the digital gap between urban and rural citizens may hinder future plans for implementing t-government. To support future work towards participatory aspect in t-government we seek to gain some understanding of the needs of Malaysian citizens relating to citizen information privacy and citizens´ participatory aspects of t-Government. We conducted a survey on 350 respondents from urban areas of Kuala Lumpur and the state of Selangor and also the rural areas of Selangor. The result of the survey showed a strong concern for personal information privacy and willingness to participate for both urban and rural citizens. The result of this study will be a basis for developing the privacy framework in the t-government.