an investigation into the portal content universality of 5 big municipalities in iran: a multi case study

Nowadays, a movement has begun toward offering services by means of portals to realize the goal of making the electronic city, and Iranian municipalities have already entered this scope. This investigation aims at measuring the realization of above-mentioned goal by investigating into municipality portals, since the typical view of an e-city and the user interface between management processes of an e-city and citizens is a portal that all city services will be available through. A multi Case study using structured observation is the method used for the current investigation. Municipality portal services of five most populated cities in Iran including Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, Shiraz and Ahvaz were investigated, and then they were compared with municipality portal services of four none-Iranian municipality portals. According to the results of the present research, less than 50 percent and 60 percent of the world e-city services were found to be offered in Iranian municipality and none-Iranian municipality portals, respectively. The results obtained from the current investigation would have some suggestions for improvement of Iranian municipality portals.