AHP for Evaluating E-Government: Analysis and Application

摘要

E-government is an area that constantly gains interest. However, for an e-government service to be effective it should be evaluated. The evaluation of an electronic service or a website is a complex procedure and, therefore, is often omitted in the software's life-cycle despite its importance. Taking into account the suitability of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for evaluating electronic services or websites, we make a review on the evaluation experiments on e-government that are using the AHP theory. More specifically, the paper presents evaluation experiments that use AHP, fuzzy AHP or their combination with other methods for e-government evaluation. The chapter summarizes and presents the steps that need to be taken for the application of AHP in combining e-government sites. The outcome of the literature review of AHP evaluation studies is a set of the most frequently used evaluation criteria for e-government. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed sets of criteria in real-world evaluation studies, we conducted an evaluation experiment where we compare five sites for e-government in Greece. The particular country was selected as it is a country that tries hard the latter years to improve the way the government services are performed and improve e-government.