Evaluating the transition of e-Government: A review of local authorities in England

The goal of e-Government is seen as a panacea for governmental authorities. The emerging needs of citizens, their inclusion and engagement in policy development, political and participatory processes have meant new perspectives on e-Government are required. This paper seeks to identify and evaluate the preparedness of 10 UK-based local authorities to transition from basic e-Government to a more sophisticated and integrated e-Government. A categorical assessment of e-Government characteristics is made and these authorities are ranked accordingly. Our findings reveal the majority of local authorities sampled had reached a high percentage of informational and transactional e-Government but few had reached the interactional level and none had achieved assimilation. This suggests that local authorities seem to have focused on basic e-Government services. There is a need now to forge ahead to integration and assimilation of e-Government in order to address the critical objectives of citizen inclusion and engagement, and alignment of institutional processes to provide an infrastructure for the transition to e-governance and e-knowledge

Investigating the use of semantic technologies in spatial mapping applications

Semantic Web Technologies are ideally suited to build context-aware information retrieval applications. However, the geospatial aspect of context awareness presents unique challenges such as the semantic modelling of geographical references for efficient handling of spatial queries, the reconciliation of the heterogeneity at the semantic and geo-representation levels, maintaining the quality of service and scalability of communicating, and the efficient rendering of the spatial queries' results. In this paper, we describe the modelling decisions taken to solve these challenges by analysing our implementation of an intelligent planning and recommendation tool that provides location-aware advice for a specific application domain. This paper contributes to the methodology of integrating heterogeneous geo-referenced data into semantic knowledgebases, and also proposes mechanisms for efficient spatial interrogation of the semantic knowledgebase and optimising the rendering of the dynamically retrieved context-relevant information on a web frontend

Leading careers education information advice and guidance (CEIAG) in secondary schools

This report summarises the findings of a set of six case studies, undertaken during November 2010, which explored the effective leadership of careers education information advice and guidance (CEIAG) in a small sample of secondary schools in England. The findings indicate that effective CEIAG is an extremely important component of school provision as it impacts upon students’ aspirations, achievement and therefore potentially their life chances and social mobility. The report describes different curriculum models, with the integration of CEIAG across the curriculum as the preferred approach allied to a strong emphasis on partnership working. The leadership and management of CEIAG follow a distributed model with staff operating at a variety of levels to secure its development and implementation. There is significant evidence of this model combining the skills of both teaching and non-teaching staff. The importance of strategic vision, continuing professional development and monitoring and evaluation is highlighted as substantial. The report concludes with a set of key message for both school leaders and policymakers

Knowledge management : critical perspectives on e-business activities

This article is both a review and an agenda-setting piece. It argues that knowledge management suffers from conceptual and definitional ambiguity, oversimplification of its development processes, and methodological limitations. Nevertheless, there is a consensus in business and academia that knowledge is a key component of success and allows firms to achieve and sustains competitive advantages. In a digital era, these advantages arise from the potential of data and information that can be gathered, processed, shared, and used to improve e-business activities. Thus, this research bridges the gap in the assessment of knowledge management and e-business relationship, by applying an SEM to a large database sample of KM activities performed by European firms.N/

A model for Business Intelligence Systems’ Development

Often, Business Intelligence Systems (BIS) require historical data or data collected from var-ious sources. The solution is found in data warehouses, which are the main technology used to extract, transform, load and store data in the organizational Business Intelligence projects. The development cycle of a data warehouse involves lots of resources, time, high costs and above all, it is built only for some specific tasks. In this paper, we’ll present some of the aspects of the BI systems’ development such as: architecture, lifecycle, modeling techniques and finally, some evaluation criteria for the system’s performance.BIS (Business Intelligence Systems), Data Warehouses, OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing), Object-Oriented Modeling

Technology Advancement Influence in Accounting and Information System Fields

This research serves to relate the accounting and information technology fields. The information in the research documents changes in the accounting and information technology fields, and how the fields are expected to change in the coming years. The research also discuss the relationship between the accounting and information technology fields. The topics on the ideal accounting candidates for employers and the expectation gap between graduates skills and employers’ expectations are also discussed. Careers in accounting and information systems and also similar and different basic skills of both fields are documented in the research. The changes in accounting are influenced by the improvements in technology as time progress. Information technology makes integration and communication possible anywhere in the world between businesses. Information technology systems have created a lot of job opportunities. Accounting and Information Systems are two different fields but combined they create a means of collecting, storing, managing, processing, retrieving and reporting financial data effectively

The real SAP® Business one cost : a case study of ERP adoption in an SME

This paper reports on a UK based service management Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) that invested into SAP® Business One. The action research case study highlights the real cost and difficulties faced in moving to the one single SAP system and the process that was followed in order to identify third-party vendors that can integrate or customise SAP® Business One. This paper highlights the additional costs required to ensure a ‘fit-for-purpose’ solution to close the gap between strategic needs and the existing SAP Business One solution. The gap itself is illustrated by highlighting 10 key functionalities expected by the given service management SME. The actual implementation cost of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) was found to be approximately double the initial SAP costs. The real costs involve time for, among other things, process reengineering, strategic decision making, software add-ons, staff-training, project-management and software maintenance

Adding Value to Statistics in the Data Revolution Age

As many statistical offices in accordance with the European Statistical System commitment to Vision 2020, since the second half of 2014 Istat has implemented its internal standardisation and industrialisation process within the framework of a common Business Architecture. Istat modernisation programme aims at building services and infrastructures within a plug-and-play framework to foster innovation, promote reuse and move towards full integration and interoperability of statistical process, consistent with a service-oriented architecture. This is expected to lead to higher effectiveness and productivity by improving the quality of statistical information and reducing the response burden. This paper addresses the strategy adopted by Istat which is focused on exploiting administrative data and new data sources in order to achieve its key goals enhancing value to users. The strategy is based on some priorities that consider services centred on users and stakeholders as well as Linked Open Data, to allow Machine-to-Machine data and metadata integration through definition of common statistical ontologies and semantics

Leveraging Open-standard Interorganizational Information Systems for Process Adaptability and Alignment: An Empirical Analysis

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand the value creation mechanisms of open-standard inter-organizational information system (OSIOS), which is a key technology to achieve Industry 4.0. Specifically, this study investigates how the internal assimilation and external diffusion of OSIOS help manufactures facilitate process adaptability and alignment in supply chain network.Design/methodology/approachA survey instrument was designed and administrated to collect data for this research. Using three-stage least squares estimation, the authors empirically tested a number of hypothesized relationships based on a sample of 308 manufacturing firms in China.FindingsThe results of the study show that OSIOS can perform as value creation mechanisms to enable process adaptability and alignment. In addition, the impact of OSIOS internal assimilation is inversely U-shaped where the positive effect on process adaptability will become negative after an extremum point is reached.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the existing literature by providing insights on how OSIOS can improve supply chain integration and thus promote the achievement of industry 4.0. By revealing a U-shaped relationship between OSIOS assimilation and process adaptability, this study fills previous research gap by advancing the understanding on the value creation mechanisms of information systems deployment