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E-government considerably promotes national economic development and social stability. Related to state secret information and highly sensitive core public affairs, e-government also involves the implementation of national public policy execution, providing transparent, fair and public services. However, e-government projects are not always satisfactory. UN believes e-government projects in developing countries have a 60% to 80% failure rate (UN, 2003). The significance of e-government construction makes performance evaluation get more attention. Decades of years have witnessed China's e-government projects investment (Yuan et al., 2013), and it was agreed that overall performance of e-government projects are under the expected.
The present situation of e-government performance evaluation in China can be summarized as the following three aspects:(1) Leaders are striving to use e-government as an engine for economic development. For this reason, the understanding of gaining healthy e-government projects has become deeper which is badly in need of available performance evaluation system (Sun, 2009). (2) E-government performance evaluation is inconsistent with e-government in their development stages. China has invested billions of dollars in the modern informatization projects even transcending some developed countries in some extent. Nevertheless, the absence of a set of universal standards and specifications hampers process of performance appraisal. (3) Some provinces and cities in China have explored effective paths of e-government performance spontaneously and disorderly such as Guangdong, Lanzhou and Anhui, etc. (Song & Guan, 2013). Acted as a guiding role, e-government performance evaluation aims to encourage good behavior. Effective assessment in regions and departments can help and support government control the picture of application and maintenance status, collecting successful experience of e-government planning, construction, operation and management. Meanwhile, problems are discovered to reach higher goal. Through synthetic evaluation, it is our destination that enhances the cognition about e-government and accelerates development with consensus. High-investment, high-yield and high-risk are the basic elements of e-government. It is obvious that we should manage and estimate the whole life cycle of e-government projects which include planning, construction, operation and maintenance. As modern management master Peter F. Drunker says, the classic concept of “cannot be measured, cannot manage” determines the necessity of e-government performance evaluation.
This paper is mainly devoted to establishing performance evaluation index system of e-government projects in China based on the four dimensions of the balanced scorecard and the usage of AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) to calculate weights of each index. Due to some shortcomings of AHP, it is possible to take advantage of a method about minimum range on account of GA (Genetic Algorithm) to better the importance of some indexes, which makes overall evaluation more objective and accurate.