Diffusion of innovations: The case study of Oman’s e-payment gateway

Abstract

In 2006 the Government of Oman has embarked on a strategy called ‘Digital Oman’ which, aims to make government services available electronically throughout the country, and to facilitate e-Commerce in all of its forms. Part of the e-Government initiative was to develop an e-Payments gateway to facilitate the online payments for users of different departments and services. The Information Technology Authority (ITA) of the Sultanate of Oman has taken up the strategic initiative to drive the development of e-Payments in Oman. The ePayment gateway is one of a kind in the region, and it was implemented in partnership with MasterCard’s “MiGS” platform. The project has been live for over 8 years, yet neither the number of customers nor the value of transactions is close the initial projections. The project is about to reach a dead end and get replaced with another solution. In this paper we apply the Diffusion of Innovations Model [12] in a case study to identify the issues and propose a solution for future initiatives.