Utilising AHP and PROMETHEE for evaluating the performance of online services

Abstract

Limited usage of online services by citizens is one of the main obstacles to the success of e-government projects. Most of the previous studies have focussed on identification of the main significant factors affecting adoption of online services by using statistical methods for hypotheses tests. However, there is a need to go a further step and propose methodologies to examine to what extent such identified adoption factors are practically achieved. This turns the adoption process of online services to be a multi-criteria decision-making problem which make it more practical for handling. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a methodology to evaluate the performance of online services utilising two of the most well-known and extensively used multi-criteria decision-making methods. It uses the hierarchy structure of AHP while using ranking procedure of PROMETHEE. The proposed methodology has been applied to evaluate the performance of a sample of 24 services available on the Egyptian national portal. Each service has been analysed against nine acceptance criteria covering application and service aspects. It is found that 46% of the evaluated services tend to be performing quite reasonably.