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E-government refers to the use of information and communication technology by governments to provide digital services to citizens, government employees, business and other agencies online through the internet, at local, national or international level. There are many related researches focused on the issues of e-government application since the initial proposal of the concept for e-government (Venkatesh et al., 2012; Akman et al., 2005; Miranda et al., 2009).The advantages of e-government in timeliness, responsiveness, and cost containment are substantial (Evans and Yen, 2006). Almost all of cities in China have their own e-government websites, and the people is enjoying more convenient than before since the development of the e-government.
The benchmarking and assessing e-government is necessary to monitor performance and progress by individual countries and identify areas to improve. The studies exploring the issues related to the development of e-government application have become increasingly important and the evaluation of e-government has been proven to be complex and important in both theory and practice (Jones and Hughes, 2001; Serafeimidis and Smithson, 2000; Symons and Walsham, 1988; Tavana et al., 2013; Hsieh et al., 2013). The complexity is mostly due to the multiple perspectives involved, the difficulties in quantifying benefits, and the social and technical context of use.
The e-government literature has focused predominantly on implementation (Chan and Pan, 2008; Chan et al., 2008; Chen et al., 2009; Heeks, 2005; Layne and Lee, 2001; Liao and Peng, 2005; Nagi and Hamdan, 2009; Rose and Grant, 2010) security and authentication (Kaliontzoglou et al., 2005; Tanka et al., 2005; Zhao et al., 2010; Zissis and Lekkas, 2011), technology acceptance (Hung et al., 2002; Lee et al., 2011; Lin, 2011), interoperability and connectivity (Choi and Whinston, 2000; Gottschalk, 2009; Jaeger et al., 2006), project planning and design (Batini et al., 2009; Ruuska and Teigland, 2009; Sarantis et al., 2011; Sharifi and Manian, 2010), and procurement and purchasing (Concha et al., 2012; Hardy and Williams, 2008). Tavana et al. (2013) assess a community’s overall e-government readiness from a Citizen Relationship Management perspective based on the group Analytic Network Process and TOPSIS. Hsieh et al. (2013) adopt a computational approach to measure the effectiveness of Taiwan's city- and county-level e-government applications. Alawneh et al. (2013) identify the key factors that determine Jordanians' e-satisfaction with e-government services portal. They also provide insights for both practitioners and governmental policy-makers to enhance e-government portals.