`ICT Policy` for ICT service management - role of business organizations in national reforms agenda for services sector

Several governments around the world have made significant endeavours and allegiances to deliver new National Reforms Agenda (NRA) in order to drive sustained prosperity for their citizens e.g. the cases of Australian, Georgia, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) governments etc. In general, the rationale for transformation in NRA has been manifold such as: (a) healthier and more active the population, the stronger the economy; (b) the more skilled the population, the higher the productivity; (c) the greater the degree of social inclusion, the greater the workforce/stakeholder participation and (b) improving individual government’s investment climate and strengthening democratic and political institutions. Notwithstanding, in the present and coming decades nationals of different countries around the world are (to a greater extent due to the credit crunch) and further will be facing immense challenges, due to mounting competitiveness in the global economy. Some governments are highly aware of the magnitude and complexity of these challenges. Nevertheless, resolving these challenges is not merely within the jurisdiction of the national government – success will essentially hinge on a collaborative working relationship within all levels of governments (e.g. local, national, central) and business/trading stakeholders. As a result of this collaboration, formulating and consigning prosperity to citizens. The research carried out in this paper strives to exemplify the objectives of the national reforms in general. In addition, structural change of the reformation policy is presented to the business organisations for the purpose of enabling them by focusing on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) based participation and productivity in service management

Integrating information and knowledge for enterprise innovation

It has widely been accepted that enterprise integration, can be a source of socio-technical and cultural problems within organisations wishing to provide a focussed end-to-end business service. This can cause possible “straitjacketing” of business process architectures, thus suppressing responsive business re-engineering and competitive advantage for some companies. Accordingly, the current typology and emergent forms of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies are set in the context of understanding information and knowledge integration philosophies. As such, key influences and trends in emerging IS integration choices, for end-to-end, cost-effective and flexible knowledge integration, are examined. As touch points across and outside organisations proliferate, via work-flow and relationship management-driven value innovation, aspects of knowledge refinement and knowledge integration pose challenges to maximising the potential of innovation and sustainable success, within enterprises. This is in terms of the increasing propensity for data fragmentation and the lack of effective information management, in the light of information overload. Furthermore, the nature of IS mediation which is inherent within decision making and workflow-based business processes, provides the basis for evaluation of the effects of information and knowledge integration. Hence, the authors propose a conceptual, holistic evaluation framework which encompasses these ideas. It is thus argued that such trends, and their implications regarding enterprise IS integration to engender sustainable competitive advantage, require fundamental re-thinking