Impact of information technology on organizations: The state of the art

This article gives an introduction to the field of impact research. After a short discussion of the role of information in organizational context, the interaction perspective on impact research is presented. Empirical research results in the field of impacts of IT on internal organization in 11 organizations in the fields of banking, services, government and industry are presented. In general the systems studied were useful in realizing more centralization and impersonal control. Professionals seemed to be very pleased with information systems, because they avoided tedious jobs and organizational bottle-necks, and gave them opportunities to do their work in a better way. This is very different from the experiences of non-professional workers, who met with more routinization, rigidity and job dissatisfactions. Competitiveness was very often increased due to big cost savings and better service to clients. The authors note that much extra research is needed, especially for making more accurate estimates of impacts and how they occur. This should become an integral part of systems development and information management practice in the future

Open government objectives and participation motivations

Open government aims, among others, at improving engagement of citizens in public sector activities. To realize this potential, we need to understand citizens' motivations to engage in the many different variants of open government. This article identifies motivations for open government participation from the free/libre open source software (FLOSS) and crowdsourcing literature. The literature gives two dimensions of open government aims: innovation objectives (high or low) and managerial level (political versus administrative). The results of our survey with 168 participants revealed different motivations for participation in open government projects related to three objectives of open government projects: collaborative democracy, citizen sourcing, and citizen ideation & innovation. We found indications that socio-economic characteristics of citizens do not influence the willingness to participate in open government projects—contrary to findings in other forms of government participation—and therefore open government opens a great potential for enlarged citizen engagement. Our survey also indicates that open government projects with lower ambitions result in more participation than more ambitious projects, which implies that considerable steps need to be taken to realize the full potential of open government