Using a Best Practice Case in evaluating e-Government potential in Iranian Cities

E-government implementation in developing countries has seen some very good examples in trying to modernize and digitize government but there is still a lot of work to be done. In the Middle-East region there have been a number of successful cases, but these still stand as isolated examples. Learning from experiences of developed countries is valuable and still applicable to developing countries. Identifying the exact extend of applicability of successful experiences of developed countries in this field can lead to identification of key success factors for implementation of electronic government in developing countries. Considering similar infrastructure and environmental factors, might contribute to successfully identify and adopt suitable experiences from other developing countries that have a proven track record in e-government. The aim of this paper is to prove that the five stage process is applicable by analysing Dubai services and then applying the five stage model to the Iranian municipalities to demonstrate how far they are away from the Dubai model. The characteristics of three municipalities in Iran, namely Isfahan, Shiraz and Yazd have been studied and methodically recorded. These are used to establish the basis upon which common ground for requirements for developing electronic government can be identified. The authors of the paper attempt a two-stage approach: In the first stage a framework for developing electronic government have been introduced and evaluated against a best practice example in the Middle-East (Dubai municipality). This framework for implementation of e-government is based on the experiences recorded in developed countries. In the second stage, initiatives of the three municipalities towards implementing functional electronic government are compared with the validated framework presented in stage one. Five indicators have been used to evaluate and analyse the electronic service initiatives of the municipalities. These indicators have been extracted from comprehensive literature review in the field of electronic government