Is it Time to Address Selective Disclosure for Nonprofit Organizations?

Over the past two decades, there have been several highly publicized nonprofit scandals that have eroded the publics confidence in the sector (Aviv 2004). Significant changes in nonprofit regulation have been implemented to address these concerns that have expanded the financial information available to the public. Interestingly, the calls for more nonprofit accountability have not focused on an important concern, that of selective disclosure. This is a practice under which an organization provides material information to some constituents while withholding it from others. This paper argues that practice is frequently observed in the nonprofit sector. As the New Era Philanthropy scandal highlighted, this practice can pose substantial risks to the nonprofit sector by facilitating fraud and harming the publics trust. The paper describes the existing nonprofit reporting requirements and potential shortcomings. It examines two alternative disclosure environments, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the federal government and corporate securities regulation, particularly Regulation Fair Disclosure, and their limitations. It will then discuss what measures could be taken to address selective disclosure in the nonprofit sector.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 33.7. Hauser Working Paper Series Nos. 33.1-33.9 were prepared as background papers for the Nonprofit Governance and Accountability Symposium October 3-4, 2006

GLADNET: Promise and Legacy

[Excerpt] The Global Applied Disability Research and Information Network on Employment and Training (GLADNET) was launched by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 1995, in cooperation with over 50 social policy research centres, governmental and non- governmental organizations involved in disability-related employment programmes from over thirty countries around the world. Major organizations of persons with disabilities were also represented – the World Blind Union, the World Federation of the Deaf, Inclusion International (formerly the International League of Societies for Persons with Mental Handicap (ILSMH)) and Disabled Peoples International (DPI). GLADNET’s lifespan was little more than a generation (1995 – 2018). What’s of interest is that it survived beyond its first few years of existence. It could easily have died early on, given a significant change in nature of support from its initiating body. That it didn’t speaks to the aspirational nature and relevance of the vision prompting its formation. It’s in pursuit of that vision where GLADNET left its mark. This document focuses on its legacy, beginning with a brief review of context within which it was initiated

Reaching inter-institutional business processes in e-Society

Each business enterprise strives to achieve the most efficient organization of its operations. While business enterprises can influence internal factors of organization, external factors are more rigid. Public organizations have less of an incentive to be efficient. Furthermore, their organization is less favorable since the decision making is centralized and highly formal (i.e. legislative). Adoption of business process orientation (BPO) paradigm,with an emphasis on the management of internal factors of organization, has provided business organizations with substantial savings and improvements in efficiency. However, external factors also have a high potential for improvement of efficiency. For instance, development of supply chains or value chains has proven that external factors can be harnessed to provide additional sources of competitiveness. Other external factors can also beused to improve the performance of individual organizations, an entire industry or economy as a whole. These synergic effects can be achieved through a unified and virtualized communication infrastructure, document exchange and conduct of business transactions. The goal of this paper is to present business environment properties in an e-Society that can be further developed to enhance integration between organizations and public institutions, which in turn can be used to create and manage inter-institutional business processes. This typeof processes can promote e-business and e-business models to a new level of efficiency, making a whole industry or national economy comparatively more competitivein international markets.business processes; public administration; e-business; e-society; interactions

Interoperability, Trust Based Information Sharing Protocol and Security: Digital Government Key Issues

Improved interoperability between public and private organizations is of key significance to make digital government newest triumphant. Digital Government interoperability, information sharing protocol and security are measured the key issue for achieving a refined stage of digital government. Flawless interoperability is essential to share the information between diverse and merely dispersed organisations in several network environments by using computer based tools. Digital government must ensure security for its information systems, including computers and networks for providing better service to the citizens. Governments around the world are increasingly revolving to information sharing and integration for solving problems in programs and policy areas. Evils of global worry such as syndrome discovery and manage, terror campaign, immigration and border control, prohibited drug trafficking, and more demand information sharing, harmonization and cooperation amid government agencies within a country and across national borders. A number of daunting challenges survive to the progress of an efficient information sharing protocol. A secure and trusted information-sharing protocol is required to enable users to interact and share information easily and perfectly across many diverse networks and databases globally.Comment: 20 page

Theorizing Collective Green Actions

The notion of “green” has gained increasing attention over the years. Many major companies have made significant attempt to better fit into the green concept. Are these corporate marketing endeavors purely based on their environmental consciousness or driven by their intention to gain social recognition which could in turn reshape their corporate image that better reflects the concerns of environments, climate change, and green IT issues? This question is interesting to explore because the complexity and difficulty of ‘green endeavor’ has been widely addressed among practitioners and researchers. Based on an institutional perspective, this paper thus proposes a theoretical framework that helps organizations analyze these green issues in the competitive marketplaces. Propositions of the framework theorize that organizations will inevitably face various isomorphic pressures that lead them to initiate or follow green actions collectively. Those isomorphic pressures usually stem from influential agencies or initiatives in their respective fields such as REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals), the Green Grid, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and European Waste Catalogs (EWC). The implications of this theoretical framework suggest that organizations need to undertake green actions shiftily in order to continuously validate their competitive status in the global, networked economy. The cost of failing to do so, i.e. being ‘not’ green, might be beyond any organization’s measure in the long term. Further implications of collective green actions are made to the UAE local industries and research community

Value-driven Security Agreements in Extended Enterprises

Today organizations are highly interconnected in business networks called extended enterprises. This is mostly facilitated by outsourcing and by new economic models based on pay-as-you-go billing; all supported by IT-as-a-service. Although outsourcing has been around for some time, what is now new is the fact that organizations are increasingly outsourcing critical business processes, engaging on complex service bundles, and moving infrastructure and their management to the custody of third parties. Although this gives competitive advantage by reducing cost and increasing flexibility, it increases security risks by eroding security perimeters that used to separate insiders with security privileges from outsiders without security privileges. The classical security distinction between insiders and outsiders is supplemented with a third category of threat agents, namely external insiders, who are not subject to the internal control of an organization but yet have some access privileges to its resources that normal outsiders do not have. Protection against external insiders requires security agreements between organizations in an extended enterprise. Currently, there is no practical method that allows security officers to specify such requirements. In this paper we provide a method for modeling an extended enterprise architecture, identifying external insider roles, and for specifying security requirements that mitigate security threats posed by these roles. We illustrate our method with a realistic example

Innovative public governance through cloud computing: Information privacy, business models and performance measurement challenges

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze challenges and to discuss proposed solutions for innovative public governance through cloud computing. Innovative technologies, such as federation of services and cloud computing, can greatly contribute to the provision of e-government services, through scaleable and flexible systems. Furthermore, they can facilitate in reducing costs and overcoming public information segmentation. Nonetheless, when public agencies use these technologies, they encounter several associated organizational and technical changes, as well as significant challenges. Design/methodology/approach: We followed a multidisciplinary perspective (social, behavioral, business and technical) and conducted a conceptual analysis for analyzing the associated challenges. We conducted focus group interviews in two countries for evaluating the performance models that resulted from the conceptual analysis. Findings: This study identifies and analyzes several challenges that may emerge while adopting innovative technologies for public governance and e-government services. Furthermore, it presents suggested solutions deriving from the experience of designing a related platform for public governance, including issues of privacy requirements, proposed business models and key performance indicators for public services on cloud computing. Research limitations/implications: The challenges and solutions discussed are based on the experience gained by designing one platform. However, we rely on issues and challenges collected from four countries. Practical implications: The identification of challenges for innovative design of e-government services through a central portal in Europe and using service federation is expected to inform practitioners in different roles about significant changes across multiple levels that are implied and may accelerate the challenges' resolution. Originality/value: This is the first study that discusses from multiple perspectives and through empirical investigation the challenges to realize public governance through innovative technologies. The results emerge from an actual portal that will function at a European level. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited