A novel hybrid assessment model to evaluate e-services websites of Iranian municipalities

Since municipalities are an essential part of urban management and are considered as the most important hub for offering urban services, they are expected to develop e-services rapidly and offer high-quality services to citizens. As the websites are the main infrastructure of e-services, therefore constant assessment of the websites assists to provide high-quality services. In this paper, a model was proposed for assessing the e-services websites of municipalities. Firstly, the most effective assessment indices and indicators were extracted from previous studies such as website design, responsiveness quality, security, content and information quality, citizen participation, trust, supporting and maintenance, services and usability including 73 indicators. The indices and indicators were assigned weight and raked using Analytical Hierarchy Process and PROMETHEE methods respectively. Owing to existed ambiguity in some of the extracted indices, fuzzy sets theory was applied to model existed uncertainty in the problem. Finally, the proposed model was used for evaluating the e-services websites of 10 Iranian metropolitan municipalities. Final results showed that Qom and Kermanshah cities received the highest and lowest readiness of e-services websites respectively.