M-Government and Service Delivery: A Case Study on the Pension System in South Africa

The ability for a government administrator to make just, fair and reasonable decisions, better known as administrative decision making, is dependent on the information flow between the administrator and a citizen. South Africa recognizes that it struggles with the information flow primarily because of a lack of skilled human resources (Republic of South Africa, 2007). In this paper, we investigated in the interpretive paradigm the use of mobile technology designed as the technology in a group support system (GSS) to support the decision making process required by the Promotion of the Administrative Justice Act of South Africa (PAJA) within the context of pension applications. Group Support Systems (GSS), the technological focus of this research, is a suite of software tools which focus team efforts working towards a set of goals. The findings from the research resulted in a framework for government service delivery for pension applications with mobile technology serving as a convenient communication tool. The paper argues that the resultant service delivery framework can better deal with the typical government service delivery problems such as citizen frustration, citizen threats, administrative abuse of power and the non-compliance problem of the PAJA. The framework also revealed that mobile technology designed as GSS can help to anticipate and preclude these problems. The paper makes a contribution to research and practice by proposing a framework for government service delivery using mobile phone technology designed as a GSS tool.