Assessing e-governance maturity through municipal websites – Measurement framework and survey results

Abstract

The paper presents a measurement framework for assessing the e- Governance maturity level of countries through the analysis of municipal websites. The paper also introduces the results of a survey carried out to apply and validate the framework. Applied to municipal websites of different countries, the framework considers websites content and design. For each country, the sample included three websites of local governments belonging to regions with low, medium and high population, respectively. The country measure was calculated based on the average obtained by the municipal websites adjusted by a correction factor based on the compliance of general features. The numerical values obtained by countries allow comparing their degree of e-Governance maturity and ranking them accordingly. The contribution of this paper is to present a novel approach for assessing e- Governance maturity of countries based on analyzing how electronic public services are delivered through municipal websites to citizens living in different populated areas.