A framework for e-government implementation at a national level

This study attempts to explore and investigate empirically how an e-government system can be implemented at a national level; the key issues that might restrict its implementation; and how these issues could be treated in practice. Following a comprehensive review of the relevant literature, an initial conceptual framework for e-government implementation is formulated The framework is then applied in a real world case study to support further data collection and to establish an exhaustive view of the e-government implementation process at a national level. The case study examines the development of an e-government implementation in Qatar and involved 26 semi-structured interviews, 10 observations, 10 electronic reports, analysis of around 50 documents, and numerous newspaper articles and press releases. The interviewees included senior officials from the e-government steering committee, the e-government project team and various government ministries. The documentations included all the key documents relating the e-government project. Based on the data collected the initial framework is then revised by using the interpretive case study approach, which depends on an iterative research cycle where triangulated data are extracted The study then combined the evidence from the literature with the case study data to narrow the gap between e-government implementation theory and practice. As a result, a comprehensive framework including detailed measurements to differentiate four development stages is created. This framework classifies the key issues that might restrict e-government implementation into two main categories, organisational and technological issues, and uses other issues as the development measurements. The framework can be used as a tool to determine the road ahead for implementing an e-government system at a national level and to identify the main practices, processes, possible goals, progress indicators and key conditions to move from one stage to another. It can be claimed that this study has made a novel contribution to the area of e-government and has expanded the boundaries of knowledge, especially for governments that are seeking to implement an egovernment system at a national level

Evaluating the implementation of E-Government in developing countries: The case of Nigeria

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.E-Government applications have emerged rapidly in the developing world. This is due to its usefulness as an enabling tool to increase efficiency and enhance transparency. This research focuses on insights into the implementation process of e-Government within the context of developing countries. Institutional theory was the change theory applied since it explains why organisational structures and values endure. The neo-institutional theory was adopted by using multi-level approach and multi-stakeholder analysis, and these enable environmental forces to be used with other factors such as organisational and role of network actors. Due to its flexibility, institutional theory has been combined it with other theories and models such as: Lewin’s 3-stage model (deeply enriches understanding of how change occurs as well as the role of change agent); Driver-Barrier model (to assist in recognising the potential drivers and barriers that might influence successful e-Government implementation); Comprehensive Barrier framework (relevant for study of e-Government and information system barriers that could be used as checklist for project planning and evaluation);and Three-Quarter Moon model (developed for e-Commerce adoption and applied the model to e-Government implementation) The research questions and proposed framework were tested and validated by carrying out qualitative analysis using multi-methods approach for data collection. Case study research was adopted with focus on government-to-employee (G2E) within public sector organisations in Nigeria, West Africa. The research collection strategy included an in-depth investigation of organisations’ information systems using both primary and secondary data collection. The series of techniques adopted are questionnaire responses, interviews, document analysis and observation. The research findings suppose that most of the factors – internal and external, and characteristics – benefits, barriers and risks, identified as influential to e-Government implementation are similar to those discussed in existing literature, although some may be specific to the Nigerian public sector context. Based in the findings, the researcher was able to reconceptualise the developed model for e-Government implementation, which was specific to the case study. The model was then extended for application by other countries. A novel subset model – Rectangular Four-Actor-Activity - was also developed for identifying e-Government implementation key actors and their main activities, which is a subset of the holistic framework. The conceptualised model should help managers and academicians to understand the step-by-step guide to e-Government implementing process by ranking and mapping of relevant concepts and factors within the framework, understanding the difference between theory and practice in terms of e-Government implementation. The researcher therefore accomplishes that this study extends to the knowledge in the aspect of e-Government implementation from organisational perspectives, Government-to-Employee (G2E); thus contributing to the Information System (and e-Government implementation) literature through reviewing the range of studies using a wider multi-level and multi-method approach. This includes combining institutional theory with other models. This enables development of a holistic conceptual model for implementing e-Government, including a subset model for e-Government key actors and their main activities throughout the development life cycl

Semantic-enhanced hybrid recommender systems for personalised e-Government services

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.E-Government is becoming ever more active in terms of improving the provision of services to citizens from a citizen-centred perspective, in which online services and information are delivered to citizens on a personalised basis. Some developed governments have started to offer personalised services through their official portals. However, the personalised services that are offered are mostly limited to static customisation and are therefore far from achieving effective citizen-centred e-Government services. Furthermore, delivering personalised online services that match the different needs and interests of government users is a challenge for e-Government, specifically in connection with the increasing information and services that are offered through the medium of government portals. Therefore, more advanced and intelligent e-Government systems are desirable. Personalisation techniques, particularly in the form of recommender systems, are promising to provide better solutions to support the development of personalisation in e-Government services. Furthermore, semantic enhanced recommender systems can better support citizen-centred e-Government services and enhance recommendation accuracy. The success of semantic enhanced hybrid recommendation approaches and the citizen-centric initiative of e-Government have fostered the idea of developing personalised e-Government recommendation service systems using semantic enhanced hybrid recommender systems. Accordingly, the effectiveness of utilising the semantic knowledge of e-Government services to enhance the recommendation quality of offered services is addressed in this thesis. This thesis makes five significant contributions to the area of e-Government personalised recommendation services. These contributions are summarised as follows: (i) the thesis first proposes a general framework for offering personalised e-Government services from a citizen-centred perspective based on the available user profiles information and semantic knowledge of a specific e-Government domain of interest; (ii) based on this general framework, a personalised e-Government tourism service recommendation framework is also proposed and considered as a target domain in this research study; (iii) new semantic enhanced hybrid recommendation approaches are developed to support the implementation of the recommendation generator engines of the proposed e-Government frameworks. The recommendation generator engines represent the core components of the proposed frameworks; (iv) new semantic similarity measures based on semantic knowledge of a target domain ontology are proposed to effectively evaluate the similarity between e-Government service items. The new semantic similarity measures are incorporated within the proposed hybrid approaches to improve the quality and accuracy of recommendations and to overcome the limitations of existing hybrid recommendation approaches; and (v) a switching semantic enhanced hybrid recommendation system is further proposed to enhance the overall quality of recommendation, address the sparsity, the cold-start user and item problems. Experimental evaluations of the proposed semantic enhanced hybrid recommendation approaches and switching system, on a real world tourism dataset, show promising results against state-of-the-art recommendation approaches in terms of the quality of recommendations, capacity to alleviate the sparsity, cold-start item and user problems

The limits and possibilities of monitoring and evaluation: a case study of the KwaZulu Natal Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs (KZN CoGTA).

Master of Science in Political Science. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg 2016.As South Africa seeks to consolidate and deepen the country‟s democracy post-1994, subsequently it has had to focus on good governance to achieve efficiency and effectiveness in the conduct and operations of government. The country‟s development efforts towards improving accountability, transparency, efficiency as well as effectiveness of government in service delivery seeks to create and maintain high levels of performance in government departments. As a result monitoring and evaluation (M&E) has developed into a significant practice in guiding the transformation of the South African Public Service. M&E is the systematic assessment of the policy processes as well as the measurement of a policy‟s impact. It can be used to assess whether a policy or program achieves its objectives. M&E practice in South Africa is anchored towards developing an efficient Public Service that delivers on the objectives and mandate of the South African Government as enshrined in the country‟s post-1994 Constitution. In 2005, Cabinet approved a plan for the development of a Government-wide Monitoring and Evaluation System (M&E), which was envisaged as a system in which each department would have a functional M&E system. In 2009 a Ministry of Performance M&E was created in the Presidency, and a Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME) in January 2010 was established. Subsequently, monitoring and evaluation has become a subject of interest in public policy implementation. This study seeks to understand the limits and possibilities of monitoring and evaluation using the KwaZulu Natal Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs (KZN CoGTA) as a case study. It aims to ascertain how M&E as defined in the National Monitoring and Evaluation Framework and the literature is implemented, conceptualised and used. KZN CoGTA is a South African provincial government Department whose legislative mandate according to the South African Constitution is to provide effective, transparent, accountable and coherent intergovernmental system for the Provincial government departments. Evidently, as a relatively new strategic and operational practice in the South African government, M&E exposes some of its own limits and possibilities. Ultimately, not all resources invested into M&E actually get implemented to strengthen transparency, accountability and improvement. The study adopted an interpretative approach whilst using a qualitative methodology to identify and capture meaning that informs the understanding and implementation of monitoring and evaluation, (M&E). Non-probability; purposive sampling was used to select elements for a specific purpose of their unique position and capabilities to provide information on practical and expert knowledge in M&E. Therefore, the data collection method includes interviews with relevant personnel in the M&E practice, as well as the documents about the implementation of monitoring and evaluation in KZN CoGTA, South Africa. The implementation of M&E which is the focus of the study was analysed within the theoretical framework of public policy implementation which involves monitoring and evaluation. The challenges encountered when implementing M&E within the various approaches such as the Results-Based Management are also analysed in order to understand the limits and possibilities of monitoring and evaluation. The results pointed to the importance of an improved and standardised M&E practice with enhanced and standardised coordination between different spheres of government in national, provincial and local government institutions, as responsible for monitoring the process of design, implementation and continuous monitoring and evaluation of the public service, aiming to improve the quality of its services

Pengembangan Model Penilaian Kematangan Citizen Relationship Management (CiRM) Oriented E-government

Di dalam pemerintah digital, masyarakat merupakan pemegang kepentingan utama. Sebuah strategi yang disokong oleh teknologi untuk membuat dan mengoptimalkan hubungan pemerintah dengan masyarakat dengan mengikutsertakan pendapat mereka ke seluruh pengelolaan publik dikenal dengan nama CiRM (Citizen Relationship Management). Namun demikian, dalam konteks penelitian e-government, orientasi terhadap masyarakat masih belum banyak dieksploitasi karena sebagian besar proyek e-government hanya mentransformasi layanan dan informasi yang semula masih tradisional menjadi menggunakan teknologi. Model-model penilaian kematangan e-government yang sudah ada pun sebagian besar hanya mengukur kemampuan teknologi egovernment. Berdasarkan permasalahan di atas, peneliti mencoba menjawab permasalahan yang ada dengan menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif dalam perspektif kajian sistem informasi. Jenis pendekatan kualitatif yang digunakan adalah grounded theory. Sebuah model konseptual dikembangkan oleh peneliti berdasarkan literatur yang dikaji. Model konseptual tersebut berisi faktor-faktor penentu kematangan dan skala penilaian yang digunakan. Selanjutnya dilakukan penggalian data dengan teknik purposive sampling untuk mengetahui pendapat masyarakat terkait model penilaian kematangan e-government. Lokasi penelitian adalah di Surabaya dengan jumlah informan sebanyak enam orang. Hasil penggalian data dibandingkan dengan model konseptual untuk kemudian dilakukan perbaikan pada model konseptual tersebut. Penelitian ini menghasilkan sebuah model penilaian kematangan untuk menilai apakah e-government yang diimplementasikan telah berorientasi kepada masyarakat atau tidak. Faktor-faktor yang diukur untuk menentukan kematangan CiRM oriented e-government adalah budaya (citizen oriented culture), dukungan manajemen, kebijakan, saluran komunikasi, partisipasi pegawai pemerintah, partisipasi masyarakat, kemudahan penggunaan, fungsionalitas sistem, reliability, integrasi sistem, analisis kebutuhan pengguna, knowledge sharing, segmentasi dan personalisasi, serta pengukuran kinerja. Model ini diharapkan dapat digunakan sebagai alternatif alat penilaian implementasi e-government yang lebih komprehensif karena mengukur dari tiga sisi, yaitu organisasi, interaksi pemerintah dengan masyarakat dan layanan e-government itu sendiri. ======================================================================================================== In the digital government, citizen is the key stakeholders. A strategy that is supported by technology to create and optimize the government's relationship with the citizen by engaging their opinions to the whole public management known as CIRM (Citizen Relationship Management). However, in the context of e-government research, orientation to the public is still not widely exploited because most e-government projects only transform services and information which was originally traditional into using technology. Most of existing egovernment maturity models only measure the ability of e-government technology. Based on the above problems, the researcher tried to answer the existing problems using a qualitative approach in the perspective of information systems study. The type of qualitative approach used is grounded theory. A conceptual model developed by the researcher based on the literature studied. The conceptual model contained the factor affecting maturity and assessment scale. Then, data were gathered by using purposive sampling to determine public opinion related to the e-government maturity model. This research is located in Surabaya by the number of informants are six people. The results of data gathering then used to revise the conceptual model. This research developed a maturity assessment model to assess whether the implemented e-government have been oriented to the public or not. The factors measured to determine the maturity of CIRM oriented e-government is citizen oriented culture, top management support, policy, communication channels, public officials participation, community participation, ease of use, system functionality, reliability, system integration, user requirement analysis , knowledge sharing, segmentation and personalization, as well as performance measurement. This model is expected to be used as an alternative tool to assess the implementation of e-government. This model is more comprehensive as it measures CiRM oriented e-government from three aspects, organization, government interaction with their citizen and e-government service

MEASURING THE PERFORMANCE OF XYZ GOVERNMENT AGENCY WITH THE BASIS OF MALCOLM BALDRIGE METHOD

Government agency is collective designation which includes work unit and organizational unit of ministries or departments, non-departmental government institution, secretariat of state high institution, and other central and regional government agencies; including state-owned enterprises, state-owned legal entities, and regional-owned enterprises. One of the very effective models in improving the quality of performance of an agency is by using the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. This research was conducted with the aim of: 1) measuring the performance of XYZ Government Agency so that their performance consistency can be monitored and 2) finding out the opportunities and obstacles in measuring the performance of XYZ Government Agency by using the Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award (MBNQA) criteria. The type of this research is descriptive research that uses XYZ Government Agency as the research object. The measurement conducted in this research applies the Malcolm Baldrige method. The findings showed that the criteria with the highest percentage score is operation (39.8%) and the lowest percentage score is strategy (35.1%). The total score is 377.5 from a maximum score of 1000 points. It showed that the performance of XYZ Government Agency is at the level of “initial growth” (scale point of 376-475

A framework for the successful implementation of food traceability systems in China

Implementation of food traceability systems in China faces many challenges due to the scale, diversity and complexity of China’s food supply chains. This study aims to identify critical success factors specific to the implementation of traceability systems in China. Twenty-seven critical success factors were identified in the literature. Interviews with managers at four food enterprises in a pre-study helped identify success criteria and five additional critical success factors. These critical success factors were tested through a survey of managers in eighty-three food companies. This study identifies six dimensions for critical success factors: laws, regulations and standards; government support; consumer knowledge and support; effective management and communication; top management and vendor support; and information and system quality

The potential contribution of small firms to innovation in the built environment.

The methods by which small firms overcome the disadvantages of their size to implement innovation on construction projects are examined here through five case studies. It is found that such methods include working with advanced clients, prioritising relationship-building strategies and using patents to protect intellectual property. Key obstacles to innovation implementation by small firms on construction projects are found to be bias in the allocation of government business assistance and regulatory inefficiencies under federal systems of government. The study’s findings derive from a theoretical framework which emphasises firm capabilities and environment, and innovation typologies. Further research is recommended into the impact of government assistance and regulation on small innovative construction firms

The Knowledge Application and Utilization Framework Applied to Defense COTS: A Research Synthesis for Outsourced Innovation

Purpose -- Militaries of developing nations face increasing budget pressures, high operations tempo, a blitzing pace of technology, and adversaries that often meet or beat government capabilities using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies. The adoption of COTS products into defense acquisitions has been offered to help meet these challenges by essentially outsourcing new product development and innovation. This research summarizes extant research to develop a framework for managing the innovative and knowledge flows. Design/Methodology/Approach – A literature review of 62 sources was conducted with the objectives of identifying antecedents (barriers and facilitators) and consequences of COTS adoption. Findings – The DoD COTS literature predominantly consists of industry case studies, and there’s a strong need for further academically rigorous study. Extant rigorous research implicates the importance of the role of knowledge management to government innovative thinking that relies heavily on commercial suppliers. Research Limitations/Implications – Extant academically rigorous studies tend to depend on measures derived from work in information systems research, relying on user satisfaction as the outcome. Our findings indicate that user satisfaction has no relationship to COTS success; technically complex governmental purchases may be too distant from users or may have socio-economic goals that supersede user satisfaction. The knowledge acquisition and utilization framework worked well to explain the innovative process in COTS. Practical Implications – Where past research in the commercial context found technological knowledge to outweigh market knowledge in terms of importance, our research found the opposite. Managers either in government or marketing to government should be aware of the importance of market knowledge for defense COTS innovation, especially for commercial companies that work as system integrators. Originality/Value – From the literature emerged a framework of COTS product usage and a scale to measure COTS product appropriateness that should help to guide COTS product adoption decisions and to help manage COTS product implementations ex post