Evaluating e-Government services from a citizens' prespective: A reference process model

Evaluating and optimizing e-government services is imperative for governments especially due to the capacity of e-services to transform public administrations and assist the interactions of governments with citizens, businesses and other government agencies. Existing widely applied evaluation approaches neglect to incorporate citizens’ satisfaction measures. Several citizen satisfaction models and indicators have been suggested in academia; however a reference process model that can assist practitioners to apply these performance measures is missing. In this paper we draw upon the evaluation approach proposed by the EU funded project CEES and propose a reference process model that captures re-usable practices for e-government evaluation from a citizens’ perspective. The novelty of the proposed approach is that using DEA for evaluating the e-services the assessment results in suggestions for strategic improvement of the e-services.EU FP7 Marie Curie People Project “CEES - Citizen oriented Evaluation of E-Government Systems” (reference IAPP-2008-230658

Challenging the Enterprises' Business Model: helping entrepreneurs to understand and interpret opportunities and threats

Christopher Brown, Diane Morrad, ‘Challenging the Enterprises' Business Model: helping entrepreneurs to understand and interpret opportunities and threats’, paper presented at the 15th Annual Edineb Conference, Malaga, Spain, 15-18 June, 2008.Enterprises are presented with ever increasing challenges regarding marketplace uncertainty and ambiguity. They face competitive pressures from local and international sources, their competitors are constantly tweaking products and services to jostle ahead of them, and their customers expect responsiveness and innovativeness to their expressed and latent needs. The enterprises’ very success, and survival, depends on their ability to change their business, market and product strategies to fit these challenges. Underlying these business, market and product strategies is the enterprises’ business model. Simply, business models are an organisation’s understanding and interpretation of how they currently, and in the future, achieve their revenue and profit streams. These business models, used by the senior management and employees, are often based on outdated perspectives of both how the marketplace works and the changing business and customer values expected by their demanding stakeholders. In SMEs the creation, development and creative deconstruction of business models is most often driven by the founding entrepreneur, or subsequent corporate entrepreneurs brought in to provide professional management of these rapidly growing businesses. Interestingly, more recent research has strongly linked entrepreneurs’ mindset, or mental models (Zahra, Korri et al. 2005), associated with the challenges to the enterprise, with their drivers for innovation and changes in their enterprises’ business models. Certainly research has identified the potential value changes, business and customer, that can often facilitate the construction and deconstruction of business value-based innovations (Munive-Hernandez, Dewhurst et al. 2004), and then reflecting these in their overall business processes. This paper discusses the research study, undertaken by the authors, to explore the link between entrepreneurs’ understanding and interpretation of business opportunities and threats, and the potential influence in challenging their mindset business model. The paper begins by discussing the two broad approaches to modelling enterprise strategies and the resulting integrated business models: innovation and process orientations.Peer reviewedSubmitted Versio

Third-age Entrepreneurs Propensity to Engage in New Venture Creation and Development

Christopher Brown, Diane Morrad, ‘Third-age Entrepreneurs Propensity to Engage in New Venture Creation and Development’, paper presented at the 4th European Conference on Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ECEI), Antwerp, Belgium, 10-12 September, 2009.Increasingly the issues of entrepreneurship and new venture creation have become two of the most important drivers for future success of the UK economy, especially in the current climate of economic turbulence and uncertainty. The creation of an enterprise culture, one that depends on entrepreneurs, is one of the strategic goals of the UK Government’s action plan for micro- and small-enterprises. The development of these enterprise cultures will naturally create a marketplace ‘churn’, one that stimulates both continuous and radical innovations, and as a consequence of this contribute to the overall UK’s overall productivity and sustained economic performance. Yet research on entrepreneurs, and particularly third-age entrepreneurs, their abilities and motivation to start-up new enterprises within the environmental good and services sector is limited.Our research study utilizes qualitative data collection and analysis. We have engaged with 12 small enterprise entrepreneurs who are currently, or have already started-up a new enterprise in the EGS sector. Our research studies on how opportunities and threats influence third-age enterpreneurs’ values, attitudes and practices suggested that both, sector-wide values and practices, as well as the strength of sector-based systems of innovations, significantly influence the effective prediction of venture creation, development and creative destruction practices. It is these third- age entrepreneurs mindset Business Models (BMs), how they perceive they can generate business value and align their business practices around EGS sector opportunities and threats, that both determines their propensity to create new ventures, and their motivation and success in driving new venture creation and development oportunities. A framework is proposed based on our limited entrepreneurial mindset analysis that links their values, vision and actions with a more substantial evaluation of their overall mindset business model.Peer reviewe

The impact of enterprise application integration on information system lifecycles

Information systems (IS) have become the organisational fabric for intra-and inter-organisational collaboration in business. As a result, there is mounting pressure from customers and suppliers for a direct move away from disparate systems operating in parallel towards a more common shared architecture. In part, this has been achieved through the emergence of new technology that is being packaged into a portfolio of technologies known as enterprise application integration (EAI). Its emergence however, is presenting investment decision-makers charged with the evaluation of IS with an interesting challenge. The integration of IS in-line with the needs of the business is extending their identity and lifecycle, making it difficult to evaluate the full impact of the system as it has no definitive start and/or end. Indeed, the argument presented in this paper is that traditional life cycle models are changing as a result of technologies that support their integration with other systems. In this paper, the need for a better understanding of EAI and its impact on IS lifecycles are discussed and a classification framework proposed.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Grant Ref: (GR/R08025) and Australian Research Council (DP0344682)

The rationale of e-health evaluation: The case of NHS Direct

An important area of research is that of the evaluation of e-health services. A holistic e-health evaluation framework should address the aspects that are hampering healthcare services from embracing the full potential of information and communication technologies towards successful e-health initiatives. Towards building a holistic evaluation framework for e-health services, this paper is intended to examine the rationale of e-health evaluation, as the paper argues that this aspect should be addressed first in the development of such a framework. NHS Direct which is one of the largest e-health services in the world has been chosen to discuss and validate a set of evaluation rationales and their applicability in practice

The elicitation of key performance indicators of e-government providers: A bottom-up approach

Copyright @ 2013 EMCIS.Delivering an adequate e-Government service (e-service) is becoming more of a necessity in today's digital world. In order to improve e-services and increase the engagement of both users' and providers' side, studies on the performance evaluation of such provided e-services are taking places. However a clear identification of the key performance indicators from the e-Government providers’ side is not well explored. This shortcoming hampers the conduct of a holistic evaluation of an e-service provision from the perspective of its stakeholders in order to improve e-services as well as to increase e-services take-ups. In this paper, a systematic process to identify indicators is implemented based on a bottom-up approach. The process used three focus-group meetings with providers, users, and academics in Qatar, Lebanon and UK to collect, identify and validate key indicators from the perspective of e-services’ providers. The approach resulted in the identification of five factors levels (service, technology, employees, policy and management and social responsibilities) with fifteen sub-categories of SMART variables. Hence, leading to the development of a new model, STEPS, that can fully explain and predict e-government success from the providers’ point of view. It will work as a strategic management tool to align various stakeholders on common goal and values based on evidence based evaluation of e-services using smart measurable indicators for the improvement of an e-service at the engagement level in the field of e-government. In addition, other fields can benefit from the outcome of this work, such as logistics service providers, who make their services available across new and existing relationships between the Internet commerce firms, their customers, and their vendors

Planning strategically, designing architecturally : a framework for digital library services

In an era of unprecedented technological innovation and evolving user expectations and information seeking behaviour, we are arguably now an online society, with digital services increasingly common and increasingly preferred. As a trusted information provider, libraries are in an advantageous position to respond, but this requires integrated strategic and enterprise architecture planning, for information technology (IT) has evolved from a support role to a strategic role, providing the core management systems, communication networks, and delivery channels of the modern library. Further, IT components do not function in isolation from one another, but are interdependent elements of distributed and multidimensional systems encompassing people, processes, and technologies, which must consider social, economic, legal, organisational, and ergonomic requirements and relationships, as well as being logically sound from a technical perspective. Strategic planning provides direction, while enterprise architecture strategically aligns and holistically integrates business and information system architectures. While challenging, such integrated planning should be regarded as an opportunity for the library to evolve as an enterprise in the digital age, or at minimum, to simply keep pace with societal change and alternative service providers. Without strategy, a library risks being directed by outside forces with independent motivations and inadequate understanding of its broader societal role. Without enterprise architecture, it risks technological disparity, redundancy, and obsolescence. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this conceptual paper provides an integrated framework for strategic and architectural planning of digital library services. The concept of the library as an enterprise is also introduced

Does it work? evaluating a new pay system

This report focuses on the evaluation of the impact of new pay systems in large, unionised multi-site organisations by the organisations themselves. Evaluation of the effectiveness of a pay system, however, does not take place in a vacuum and relates to the aims and objectives of the pay system concerned. Moreover, evaluation is not an end in itself. It is, therefore, relevant to consider if any further steps were taken as a result of evaluation. Accordingly our research questions were: • What were the aims and objectives of organisations when introducing new pay arrangements? • What data did organisations collect and review to inform their evaluation? • What steps have organisations taken as a result of their evaluation? We re-appraised our data from 10 NHS trusts in England which had introduced some innovations in pay and grading in the 1990s. Additionally, we looked at seven multi-site unionised organisations outside the NHS in both the public and private sectors, which had recently made changes to their reward systems, carrying out interviews and inspecting documents. The main output is a template for the evaluation of Agenda for Change by NHS organisations

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