Using Mobile Technology to Support Government Service Delivery: A Case Study on the Pension System in South Africa

Abstract

The flow of information between a government administrator and a citizen is critical for the administrator to make a just, fair and reasonable decision. South Africa recognizes that it struggles with non-compliance in this decision making process 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 a group support system (GSS) tool 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 can focus team efforts to converge on a set of key issues. The findings from the research resulted in a government service delivery model based on the pension application cycle with mobile technology serving as a GSS tool. The paper argues that the resultant service delivery model 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 model also revealed that mobile technology designed as GSS can help to anticipate and preclude the stated 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.