CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS FOR AN E-TOURISM SERVICES IMPLEMENTATION INITIATIVE

Abstract

With the rise of the Internet, online delivery of public information and services has become crucial to be a key enabler to support E-government services. On par with the development of all nations in the world, the government of Oman has taken every effort to implement and improve public services delivery system within the Egovernment concept. This study examines the extent of E-services features applied in the E-Tourism sector in Oman. The study will identify the critical success factors for a successful implementation of an E-Tourism portal. In order to achieve this, a list of factors is identified for investigation. A study is carried out systematically to investigate the critical success factors of an E-Tourism portal. The success factors are based on the feedback from the potential users of the portal. Upon identifying the critical factors, a selection is done based on the priority ranking. With the critical factors extracted from the study and based on the framework of an E-Tourism service, E-Tourism portal has been developed. The technology has evolved and the development methodology like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has spanned into a framework for E-Tourism services. SOA development framework is chosen as best to adopt for an E-Tourism initiative in Oman over the other software development approaches. The other software development method is traditionally quite monolithic. It is monolithic as it builds applications in meeting its modular requirements and in most cases, application codes are very tightly coupled with the system. SOA can expand from the other system iii development methodology. This means that using the SOA software development framework, service can originate from existing systems. Services can combine and work as a composite service. SOA allows the “reuse of existing IT infrastructures”. The aim of this study is to develop an advanced E-Tourism portal to connect customers with virtual service providers anywhere at all times with the ever growing needs and requirements of the modern day tourists. The vision is to enable extensive exchange of information within the tourism industry supply chain players cutting across all time and geographical limitations. This will be done through the integration of information and bringing together the stakeholders to work together. The availability of an integrated E-Tourism services portal will be complementing the existing E-government initiatives of the Tourism Ministry of Oman. The results show not only the critical success factors but also the ranking. These are used to develop the proposed E-Tourism portal for Oman. The implications of this result will lead the E-Tourism portal to be more in line of the Voice of the Citizen.