Shared Services Strategies and Their Determinants: A Multiple Case Study Analysis in the Public Sector

Shared service has proven to be a key element when it comes to increasing government efficiency by collaboration. Here, we seek to investigate into the shared services phenomenon in the context of government reforms. For this purpose, an interview and document analysis-based multiple case study has been conducted in Germany. The qualitative analysis covers three shared service implementations on the local government level and identifies important preconditions for shared service emergence, namely cost pressure as motive, the existence of key actors promoting the topic and the existence of prior cooperation. Moreover, it is shown that the structure of such previous cooperation determines, if shared services are being organised in a centralised (shared service centre) or decentralised format (shared service network)

Developing Maturity Models for IT Management – A Procedure Model and its Application

Maturity models are valuable instruments for IT managers because they allow the assessment of the current situation of a company as well as the identification of reasonable improvement measures. Over the last few years, more than a hundred maturity models have been developed to support IT management. They address a broad range of different application areas, comprising holistic assessments of IT management as well as appraisals of specific subareas (e. g. Business Process Management, Business Intelligence). The evergrowing number of maturity models indicates a certain degree of arbitrariness concerning their development processes. Especially, this is highlighted by incomplete documentation of methodologies applied for maturity model development. In this paper, we will try to work against this trend by proposing requirements concerning the development of maturity models. A selection of the few well-documented maturity models is compared to these requirements. The results lead us to a generic and consolidated procedure model for the design of maturity models. It provides a manual for the theoretically founded development and evaluation of maturity models. Finally, we will apply this procedure model to the development of the IT Performance Measurement Maturity Model (ITPM3)

Supporting Creative Group Processes: Design Principles for Appropriate Groupware

Creative work is often conducted in distributed groups. Therefore information exchange is frequentlyfacilitated by groupware systems. However, group work suffers from several losses such asinformation overload, production blocking, free riding, evaluation apprehension and productionmatching and yet has not been tailored to the need of creative work. In order to reduce these lossesand to best support creative group processes (CGP), we propose a framework which combines a) thestages of the creative process, b) the potential losses of creative group processes and c) differentmedia characteristics drawn from the Media Synchronicity Theory to formulate groupware designprinciples. We conclude that idea generation should be supported by asynchronous groupwarefunctionality whilst idea evaluation merits from synchronous functionality

Modelling and Implementing Macro Web Navigation Structures

From the three existing dimensions - content objects, navigation and presentation - of web pages, the navigation dimension is analysed. It consists of macro, meso and micro navigation. A conceptual approach to model and implement the macro navigation structure of web sites is presented. We start by enhancing a function decomposition diagram to model the macro navigation structure. The resulting graph is analysed and transformed to find its crucial components. In order to store these components in a database table, an appropriate entity-relationship model is developed. Afterwards we identify three navigation styles that can be produced from the underlying database and give the PHP source code for one of them. Finally, an example web page using our navigation styles is depicted. It is concluded that using our ideas may lead to reduced development time and avoids link errors in the process of creating the site navigation