Did the Reduction of ICT Investment due to the 2008 Economic Crisis Affect the Innovation Performance of Firms? - An Exploratory Analysis Based on Firm Data for the European Glass, Ceramics and Cement Industry

In this paper we investigate, first, the characteristics of the firms that reduced their ICT investment due to the 2008 crisis, focusing on the firms’ ICT characteristics in terms of the ICT, budget, skills and applications used. The analysis of the ICT characteristics that may influence the likelihood of having reduced ICT investment as a consequence of the crisis is primarily explorative, thus driven by available data and economic intuition. The second research question we examine empirically refers to the possibility that an economic crisis could affect innovation performance through the ICT investment channel. In connection with this, it is also interesting to analyze the ICT characteristics that are associated with ICT-enabled innovation performance; this is the third research question of this paper. Our study is based on firm data from the glass/ceramics/cement industry in six European countries, which have been collected through the ‘e-Business Survey’ of the European Union. We find that ICT-related crisis vulnerability correlates positively with decreasing ICT budgets (pro-cyclical investment behaviour), the existence of skill deficits in ICT, the awareness of and interest in new ICT applications that presumably request much additional ICT investment, the exposure to strong price competition and the strong presence in international markets, in which activities have significantly decreased due to the crisis. Further, statistically significant negative relationship between ICT-enabled product innovation and crisis vulnerability (pro-cyclical behaviour) is found only for new products or services that contain ICT components, and are therefore directly affected by crisis-related decreasing product demand

EVALUATING COMPLEX GOVERNMENT SAAS THROUGH VALUE FLOW MODEL ESTIMATION

Government agencies are increasingly making use of cloud computing (CC) services, initially simpler infrastructure and platform as a service (IaaS and PaaS) ones, and later more sophisticated software as a service (SaaS) ones. However, with respect to the latter the electronic support of the high complexity government processes is a difficult task and requires highly sophisticated and complex government-specific SaaS offering extensive functionalities for fulfilling the extensive requirements posed by relevant legislation. It is therefore imperative to conduct comprehensive evaluations of such complex government-specific SaaS, in order to assess to what extent they support the targeted government processes and fulfil their extensive and complex requirements, and also identify and prioritize necessary improvements. This paper presents an advanced methodology for evaluating complex government-specific SaaS, which enables comprehensive multi-dimensional evaluation of a wide range of aspects of them that are highly important in the government context, and detailed evaluation of the provided complex and extensive functionality with respect to the requirements defined by relevant legislation; furthermore, it enables a rational identification and prioritization of necessary improvements. It is based on the estimation of multi-layer ‘value flow models’ of these SaaS from evaluation data collected from users. The proposed methodology has been applied for the evaluation of a complex SaaS aiming to support the wide range of activities of the Greek ‘Local School Committees’, which are responsible for managing all government funding provided for the operation of all the schools in a specific geographical area, as well as all other income of them, and for covering all kinds of their operating expenses as well as purchases. The research presented in this paper can contribute to a more rational, efficient and effective exploitation of an emerging ‘disruptive technology’, the CC, and especially its most sophisticated form, the SaaS, in the public sector

Outsourcing and firm performance—a comparative study of Swiss and Greek firms

This article aims at analyzing (i) the factors determining the firms' propensity to outsource various processes (production of intermediate products, production of final products, R&D activities, ICT activities), and (ii) the impact of outsourcing on firms' innovation performance, as well as labor productivity. The integral investigation of the determining factors, as well as the impact of outsourcing on innovation and productivity based on the same data in a comparative setting (Switzerland versus Greece) are important new elements and contributions of this study to the existing empirical literature. It has been concluded that in both countries more innovative firms (R&D) were stronger inclined to outsourcing activities than less innovative ones, whereas on the contrary, the educational level of employees and the labor cost showed no effect on outsourcing in both countries. Also, the intensity of ICT use and organizational aspects, especially those related to the formal structure of workplace organization, were relevant for the Swiss firms but not for the Greek firms. With respect to the impact of outsourcing on performance, it has been concluded that it tends to enhance innovation, particularly process innovation, but only weakly productivity (at least directly

ICT RESOURCES & CAPABILITIES, ECONOMIC CRISIS AND CRM ADOPTION

Firms are implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems not for reducing their operational costs and increasing their efficiency, as it happens with other kinds of information systems, but in order to offer better services to their customers and build better relationships with them. This fact stems from CRM’s customer facing nature, which is there to improve the relationship a firm has with its most valuable asset: the customers. However, there is limited research about the factors that lead firms to adopt CRM systems. This paper aims to contribute to filling this research gap, by investigating the effects of a wide range of factors on CRM adoption by firms; these factors include firm’s ICT resources and capabilities, and also the effects of a major disruption in the environment: economic crisis leading to recession. Our main theoretical foundation is the Technology, Organization, Environment (TOE) theory of technological innovation adoption. Based on data from 363 Greek firms CRM adoption models have been estimated, which indicate that the sophistication of firm’s ICT technological resources has a strong positive effect on CRM adoption, alongside two ICT capabilities: ICT strategic planning, and the rapid internal implementation of various interconnections/integrations of existing applications to achieve interoperability. Human capital, innovativeness and use of ‘organic’ forms of work organization (such as horizontal teamwork) are also important factors that affect positively CRM adoption. On the contrary, the effects of the economic crisis (decrease of domestic demand for products/services from businesses, individual customers and the public sector, reduction of credit limits by banks and non-payment or late payment by customers) do not have impact on CRM systems adoption

TRANSPARENCY-ORIENTED DIGITAL TRANSFOR-MATION: REASERCH ISSUES FOR OPEN GOVERNMENT DATA FROM POLICY DOCUMENTS

The digital transformation of government initially focused on the internal processes and work practices of government agencies, and then on the channels and ways of services provision to citizens and firms, as well as on the services themselves, and aimed mainly to increase efficiency. However, later it was extended towards the enhancement of government transparency and accountability, by exploiting the digital technologies in order to provide large amounts of information to citizens and firms about the activities and plans of government agencies, and recently to open and publish large datasets of them. This constitutes a big innovation/transformation, since previously government data were regarded as highly secret, and could be accessed only by limited numbers of competent public servants. The Open Government Data (OGD) have a great potential to promote not only government transparency and accountability, but also economic development (especially concerning the emerging data economy), scientific research as well as efficiency and effectiveness of other government agencies (beyond the one who publishes them). However, the OGD domain is relatively new, rapidly evolving, and has not reached and realized its full potential, so extensive research is required in order to support and facilitate progress in this direction, and finally increase the social and economic value generated from the large amounts of published OGD. So, it is quite important to define rationally the research agenda in this OGD domain: the main research areas as well as the particular research topics of each of them. For this purpose, some research has been conducted, which however is based exclusively on the review and analysis of previous scientific papers in this domain. In this paper we investigate the exploitation of recent OGD-related policy as well as legislation documents, as an additional and complementary source for extracting areas and topics in the OGD domain that require research in the near future. A methodology for this is developed, which is used in order to we analyse the ‘OECD Open Government Data Report – Enhancing Policy Maturity for Sustainable Impact’ and the EU Directive 2019/1024 on ‘Open Data and the Re-use of Public Sector Information’. This results in the identification of interesting new areas and topics of required OGD research, which are highly important and have not been identified by previous relevant research based on the review and analysis of scientific papers in this domain

A Methodology for Economic Crisis Policy Analytics

The development and success of the ‘business analytics’ in the private sector, in combination with the growing availability of large quantities of useful data in government agencies, gives rise to the emergence of the ‘policy analytics’ in the public sector. However, though some knowledge has already been developed in this area, extensive research is required in order to increase our knowledge base concerning the exploitation of these exponentially increasing quantities of data available in government, in combination with data from private sector firms as well, using advanced analytical techniques (from various areas, such as machine learning, statistics, simulation, etc.), in order to provide substantial support for all stages of public policies in various important policy domains. This paper makes a contribution in this direction, by describing a methodology for policy analytics in the economic policy domain, concerning a highly important problem: the economic crises, which repeatedly occur in market-based economies being an inevitable trait of them. Our methodology aims at the identification of firm’s characteristics that affect positively or negatively their sensitivity to the economic crisis, which enables a deeper understanding of the kinds of firms that exhibit higher sensitivity to economic crisis (i.e. have more negative consequences) and provides a basis for the design of public policies for supporting such firms. It exploits existing data from various public sources (e.g. Ministries of Finance, Statistical Authorities), in combination with data from private sources (e.g. business information firms, consulting firms), from which firm-level crisis sensitivity models are estimated. Furthermore, an application of the proposed methodology is presented, using data from Greek firms for the crisis period 2009 – 2014, which provides interesting insights

AN ANALYSIS OF ICT ACTIVITY BEHAVIOR OF GREEK BANKS IN THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

The influence of the external environment on ICT use, management and exploitation by firms has been widely recognized and researched for long time. However, quite limited research has been conducted on the impact of one of the most serious disruptions that repeatedly occur in firms external environment, the economic crises of various intensities and durations, which cause economic recession and sharp, rapid and strong decrease of the demand for products and services, and have quite negative short- medium- and long-term consequences. Our study contributes to filling this important research gap, by analysing the behaviour of the core ‘system-relevant’ Greek banks with respect to their ICT activity in the first years 2010-2014 of the severe Greek economic crisis, examining a wide range of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ aspects of their ICT activity concerning important ICT resources and capabilities as well as ICT plans. For this purpose, we have adopted a mixed methodology, including a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques (interviews with ICT General Directors of the above banks combined with questionnaire filling). It has been concluded that the main priority of core Greek banks in the economic crisis with respect to their ICT activities has been the rationalization of their ICT processes/practices and improvement of their ICT capabilities, especially their ICT strategic alignment capability, to a large extent, followed by the reduction of their ICT-related expenses, mainly for ICT personnel payroll, and for investments in new ICT technological resources (new hardware and software), and the adaptation of their ICT plans to the crisis conditions, both to a moderate to large extent. Our findings enable a better understanding of the impact of economic crisis on important ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ aspects of ICT activity, concerning important ICT resources and capabilities, as well as ICT plans, in a highly important and ‘information-intensive’ sector, which has been historically a heavy and experienced user of ICT. Furthermore, our findings reveal interesting multi-dimensional patterns of ICT behaviour /management (concerning a wide range of both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ aspects of ICT activity) in economic crisis, which might be of wider interest and usefulness to firms for managing ICT in such difficult recession times

Using Social Media Monitoring for Public Policy Making - An Evaluation

Social media monitoring has been initially adopted by private sector firms in order to collect opinions, complaints and questions concerning their products and services, to be used for making appropriate changes and improvements of them and also for designing communication strategies. Recently government agencies have started adopting SMM, as a form of ‘passive citizen-sourcing’, in order to collect useful information from citizens concerning their needs, problems, opinions and suggestions, to be used for public policy formulation. It is therefore important to evaluate these first initiatives, so that the potential of SMM with respect to public policy making can be exploited, and at the same time appropriate adaptations and improvements of relevant ICT platforms and practices can be made, in order to reach higher levels of maturity. This paper makes a two-fold contribution in this direction. Initially it develops a framework for evaluating the use of SMM for supporting policy making, initially from the ‘classical’ ease of use perspective, and then from a public policy perspective, based on the wicked social problems theory. This framework is then used for the evaluation of three pilot applications of a novel method of SMM by government agencies and other policy stakeholders, which has been developed as part of a European research project

Evaluating Advanced Forms of Social Media Use in Government

Government agencies gradually start moving from simpler to more advanced forms of social media use, which are characterized by higher technological and political complexity. It is important to evaluate systematically these efforts based on sound theoretical foundations. In this direction this paper outlines and evaluates an advanced form of automated and centrally managed combined use of multiple social media by government agencies for promoting participative public policy making. For this purpose an evaluation framework has been developed, which includes both technological and political evaluation, and focuses on the fundamental complexities and challenges of these advanced forms of social media exploitation. It has been used for the evaluation of a pilot application of this approach for conducting a consultation campaign concerning the large scale application of a telemedicine program in Piedmont, Italy, revealing its important potential and strengths, and at the same time some notable problems and weaknesses as well