Towards a Shared Services Model to support e-Government implementation in Developing Countries: Findings from Liberia

The e-Government program in many developing countries is an emerging concept and at the formative stage. This paper focuses on Liberia, a developing country in sub-Saharan Africa faced with many challenges impeding government efforts to harness ICT to deliver quality services. Key among the challenges is the fragmentation of government information systems causing inoperability among government ministries and agencies. This paper describes a project in which we develop a shared services model to transform e-government implementation in Liberia by determining key services that will allow the government to share and leverage finite ICT resources. Few academic studies have been carried out to investigate approaches and ways of combining e-government services in order to implement shared services in a developing country. Through a case study approach, we propose electronic government services that have the potential to promote Shared Services Model implementation in sub-Saharan African countries

Identification of current IS challenges based on the business/IS alignment model and improving eGovernment services

Information systems (IS) are currently used in various units of the eGovernment sector in order to improve the efficiency, quality, usefulness, rapidity and convenience of their services or products. However, not all governments are able to benefit from the full advantages of IS development due to a lack of alignment between the IS department and other agencies in the eGovernment sector. There is no common framework or model that can be applied globally. Each country develops its own eGovernment programmes based on its needs and other national considerations such as political, economic, cultural and social factors. The literature indicates that eGovernment adoption, uses and development have been considered extensively from the viewpoints of the organization and technical issues. However, there is a need for further investigation to inspect how eGovernment agencies can be aligned so that the efficiency of their services can be improved. A strong alignment not only assists any government in improving the performance of its services, but it also enhances public trust in the government’s services. The concept of alignment is not new, first emerging in the 1970s. Since then, researchers and practitioners have studied the process of alignment in the context of organizational strategic alignment, structural and business goals alignment. This thesis proposes an ideal pattern of alignment for the eGovernment sector in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and proposes modelling IS requirements as a suitable solution for strong alignment. The ideal pattern of alignment consists of strategic, structural, social and cultural alignment between the IS department and other agencies in the eGovernment sector. The study uses a mixed (qualitative and quantitative) method approach to validate the proposed ideal pattern of alignment. For the qualitative study, initially the factors affecting the ideal pattern of alignment are extracted from the literature and validated by the eGovernment experts. The qualitative data were collected from 20 eGovernment experts from different eGovernment sectors in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The thematic analysis approach is identified as a suitable approach to analyse qualitative data. For the quantitative study, the questionnaire was posted online and possible participants were contacted in the Saudi ministry. The data were collected from 200 eGovernment users in Saudi Arabia. To analyse the quantitative data, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation model approaches are used. At the process modelling phase, a case study on patient visits to a healthcare clinic is used to validate the method of modelling IS requirements in the context of eGovernment alignment. The study results indicate: 1) if the eGovernment sector in Saudi Arabia is aligned through this ideal pattern of alignment, improved eGovernment performance and enhanced public trust can be achieved; 2) the eGovernment sector in Saudi Arabia can improve its internal and external relations by focusing on the ideal pattern of alignment; 3) modelling and analysing the government environment have a positive impact on the implementation of IS which meets the needs of the government and consequently positively affects the process of alignment

Gestão do conhecimento organizacional em contexto dos serviços partilhados: revisão sistemática da literatura e estudo bibliométrico

A Gestão do Conhecimento (GC) apresenta um papel determinante nas organizações de qualquer setor, sendo de interesse como esta se pode relacionar com os Serviços Partilhados. Para isso, elabora-se o presente estudo com os objetivos de reunir a informação necessária para auxiliar novos investigadores e as suas investigações e efetuar o mapeamento da produção científica relacionada com a GC nas organizações e o SP entre os anos 2015 e 2022. A concretização do estudo empírico tem em conta os objetivos delineados, pelo que se efetua uma divisão do trabalho em duas fases: a primeira é uma Revisão Sistemática da Literatura (RSL), que consiste numa forma de síntese de pesquisa, que utiliza métodos sistemáticos para procurar, analisar criticamente e, de certa forma, agrupar os resultados de estudos existentes sobre um ou vários tópicos, com o objetivo de responder às questões de investigação e reunir literatura relevante sobre os tópicos referidos, analisando-as e relacionando-as, assim como identificar as principais metodologias e técnicas de pesquisa usadas nas áreas. E, numa segunda fase, efetua-se um estudo bibliométrico, que consiste na aplicação de técnicas estatísticas e matemáticas para descrever os aspetos da amostra de literatura e/ou meios comunicacional, resumir estatísticas e prover índices comparativos. A concretização do trabalho pressupõe recolha e análise dos artigos resultantes das expressões utilizadas para questionar cada Sistema de Recuperação de Informação, sendo estes Google Scholar (Google Académico), o Mendeley, o Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP) e a B-On, das pesquisas e artigos provenientes das mesmas, tendo em conta os 11 pontos de análise da qualidade de Kitchenham (et al., 2015). Durante a avaliação de qualidade, extrairam-se os dados para um documento MS Excel para, posteriormente serem cruzados, avaliados e discutidos. Uma análise bibliométrica também foi realizada, incluindo os indicadores relativos ao documento, nomeadamente: tipologia documental, idioma, palavras-chave e ano de publicação, assim como o indicador relativo ao país de origem dos autores. Conclui-se que o RCAAP apresenta o número mais elevado de resultados; a tipologia mais frequente, no cômputo geral, é “Artigos Científicos”, com os números mais elevados entre os anos 2016 e 2020; de entre os idiomas, “Português do Brasil” ocorreu na maior percentagem da amostra; a palavra-chave mais utilizada é “Conhecimento”; o ano de 2017 foi o mais produtivo, uma vez que exibe o número mais elevado de publicações; e, por fim, o país com o maior número de documentos é o “Brasil”.Knowledge Management (KM) presents a decisive role in organizations of any sector, showing an interest in how it can be related to Shared Services (SS). For this, the present study is prepared with the objective of gathering the necessary information to help new researchers and their investigations to map the scientific production related to KM in organizations and the SS between the years 2015 and 2022. To carry out the study, taking into account the objectives outlined, the work is divided into two parts: within the first is a Systematic Literature Review (RSL), which consists of a form of research synthesis that uses systematic methods to search, analyze critically and group the results of existing studies on one or several topics. The first phase aims to answer the research questions and gather relevant literature about the topics mentioned, analyzing and relating them, as well as identifying the main methodologies and research techniques used in the areas. And, in a second phase, a bibliometric study is carried out, which consists of applying statistical and mathematical techniques to describe the aspects of the literature sample and/or communication media, summarize statistics and provide comparative indices. The completion of this work presupposes the collection and analysis of several articles resulted from the expressions used to question each Information Retrieval System, being Google Scholar, Mendeley, Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP) and B-On, of the researches and articles from them, taking into account the 11 points of analysis of the quality of Kitchenham (et al., 2015). During the quality assessment, the data are extracted into an MS Excel document to be later cross-checked, evaluated and discussed. A bibliometric analysis was also carried out, including form and content indicators, namely: document type, language, keywords and year of publication, as well as the personal indicator of the authors’ country of affilitation. It is concluded that RCAAP presents the highest number of results; the most frequent document type is, overall, “Scientific Articles”, with the highest numbers within the years of 2016 and 2020; among the languages, “Brazilian Portuguese” occurred in the highest percentage of the sample; the most used keyword is “Conhecimento”; the year 2017 was the most productive, as it displays the highest number os publications; and, finally, the country with the largest number of documents is “Brazil”

SHARED SERVICES CENTER FOR E-GOVERNMENT POLICY

It is a general opinion that applicative cooperation represents a useful vehicle for the development of e-government. At the architectural level, solutions for applicative cooperation are quite stable, but organizational and methodological problems prevent the expected and needed development of cooperation among different administrations. Moreover, the introduction of the “digital government” requires a considerable involvement of resources that can be unsustainable for small public administrations. This work shows how the above mentioned problems can be (partially) solved with the introduction of a Shared Services Center (SSC). The functional features of SSC in terms of its basic services are presented together with a experimentation that involves the Ente Regione Marche as SSC as far as both the technical capacities and the organizations ones are concerned