Evaluating Saudi Municipal Portal Sophistication

Portals today serve as the key source of information and are gateways which customers conduct their businesses with organizations through anytime from anywhere. Several evaluation tools exist to describe and evaluate e-government portal maturity. This paper introduces the term portal 'sophistication', in which lower levels of sophistication imply that a portal provides static information and higher ends imply that the portal not only enables clients to conduct all their businesses through it, but they can even use it to participate in the organization's strategic planning and to transform the way it operates. A 5-level sophistication evaluation scheme is proposed. The scheme is an evolvement of existing models, where citizen participation and transformation enablement were added as the highest level of sophistication. The scheme is then used to evaluate Saudi municipal portals and to provide insight as to what needs to be done to take them to higher levels of sophistication.