Evaluating public service maturity of e-government in Canadian cities

Following the emergence of the World Wide Web as a promising medium for electronic commerce, governments at all levels have set up websites to provide information and services to citizens and businesses over the Internet. The objective of this paper is to examine the public service maturity of e-government in Canadian cities and to provide targeted and strategic recommendations regarding e-government initiatives in Canada. For that, the content of 26 Canadian municipal websites was analyzed. Furthermore, a classification and a ranking of municipal websites were performed in order to compare different types of service in the same city. Finally, analyses were performed to investigate whether the economic situation in each city exerts a significant influence on the service maturity of e-government. Preliminary results showed that for most Canadian cities, e-government has a limited development