Modeling for Accountability: The Case of the Viral Business Counter

In face of pressure from politicians and constituents public agencies have to collaborate with each other to offer a one-stop shop. The emphasis shifts from vertical to horizontal coordination and integration, which requires the making of commitments between public agencies and the fulfillment of these commitments. Consequently accountability shifts from hierarchical to commitment-based accountability. In this paper we propose an agent-based modeling approach aimed at modeling coordination of activities and commitments. Software agents are used to simulate the actors and dynamic behavior of the organization network. Our approach supports decision-makers to improve cross-agency business processes and checks if the commitment loop of request, promises, reports on status of the commitments and justification is completed. We apply the proposed modeling approach in a case study of a virtual business counter and test the approach using a number of interviews

Critical Success Factors for Multi-Channel Service Delivery (MCSD)

Multi-channel service delivery is increasingly used in the interactions with citizens and businesses. Some projects have been undertaken successfully, whereas others failed and the reasons for success are not entirely clear. In this paper we focus on success factors for the development and implementation of multi-channel service delivery strategy. The factors are derived based on a document analysis and expanded and validated by public sector staff working in this field. In total 21 CSF were found and the top eight critical factors concern especially institutional and macro issues related to managing the interdependencies of strategic decisions, lobbying for strong political support and management buy-in, harnessing scarce resources, determining the right channel and services mix, enhancing inter-organizational integration and coordination, and managing clients’ perceptions. The findings should help to improve the development of service delivery strategies

Measures for Assessing the Readiness of Back-office Staff

Purpose—Public organizations deploy state-of-the-art technological advancements to facilitate sophisticated services to the citizens, businesses, and employees. The maturity of backoffice staff to adapt, use, and utilize these technological changes at the organizational level is a prerequisite to introduce cutting-edge services. This paper investigates the maturity of backoffice staff and proposes a conceptual framework, measurement constructs, and subsequent measures for the assessment.Methodology/Design/Research—Design methodology focuses on combining research with practice. An initial framework and measurement constructs are developed based on the literature review, which are further investigated by conducting a case study at Inland Revenue, Karachi to test the usability in practice using the directive content analysis qualitative method.Findings—the outcome of measurement reveals that though the proposed framework and measurement constructs i.e. roles; responsibilities; trainings; capacity building; capabilities; and attitude are relevant and useful to assess the back-office staff readiness, the measures to assess the constructs may vary in practice depending on the size, scope, and type of the public organizations.Research limitations/implications—although the proposed measurement constructs and measures proved to be useful for assessing the back-office staff maturity, the relationships among different measures and constructs affecting the staff readiness require further research.Practical implications—the case study was conducted at single public organization, which will be extended to multiple public organizations in practice. The extension will not to allow effective testing of the usability of the proposed conceptual framework and constructs, but will also broaden the benchmarking scope.Originality/Value—back-office staff education is discussed and described in the literature as well practice, but there is hardly any existing framework for the assessment and benchmarking of staff maturity. Often viewed in isolation, the practitioners hardly realize the long term intangible objectives to understand how research (literature) can help improve the maturity. Similarly, the academics also describe staff education at generic level, which may or may not be applicable to the different types of organizations. Therefore, we propose a conceptual measurement framework with constructs and subsequent measures and show that combining the research (literature) and practice (Inland Revenue, Karachi) provides deeper insights.Research type: Conceptual paper, Case study, Literature revie

Do We Need Intermediaries in E-Government? Intermediaries to Create a Demand-Driven Government

The advent of e-government and the use of the Internet to connect governments to citizens and businesses have resulted into direct contact among government agencies and their customers. The development towards more direct interaction can be used to predict the bypassing of intermediaries. In this paper three case studies are analyzed which counter this argument. A reintermediation strategy is followed in which intermediaries are used as new distribution channels to interact with customers. The case studies show that intermediaries can be employed to reduce cost and at the same time make government more demand-driven. Following only a disintermediation strategy, often motivated by transaction cost, is a too narrow approach and needs to be complimented by reintermediation strategy to advance towards a demand-driven government

CHALLENGES FOR ADOPTING CLOUD-BASED SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE (SAAS) IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR

Technological advances such as the creation of bandwidth, modular applications and cloud computing have enabled the creation of a distributed collaborative sourcing model named Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS presents the embodiment of a new service delivery model in which a service provider is delivering its electronic services over the web to many users on a pay per use or period basis. SaaS is still unexplored in the public sector context and its use has been limited. Based on interviews and a group session the main challenges for adopting SaaS are explored from the government perspective. It was found that SaaS could provide many benefits which are related to the outsourcing of the local control, installation and development of software which could result in potential cost-savings and better cost control. Disadvantages and risks are related to the more difficult control of the IT function. Several items were mentioned as both a benefit and disadvantage, as this will be dependent on the organizational arrangements. There are also many challenges that need to be addressed including ensuring the quality, privacy, security and business continuity which require the implementation of organizational changes and governance mechanisms for public sector organizations that are considering SaaS

The Impact of Social Business Process Management on Policy-making in e-Government

The combination of social media and Business Process Management (BPM) has given rise to the emerging field of “social BPM”. The new devel-opment of social BPM is expected to provide bene-fits like flexibility for knowledge-intensive pro-cesses, like policy-making. The goal of this paper is to understand the impact of social BPM on poli-cy-making. We first present a literature survey showing that social BPM is a new and emerging research area and limited attention has been giv-en to social BPM in e-government. The literature reviews showed a lack of empirical research into the accomplished benefits of social BPM. To bridge this gap, a comprehensive case study in a Dutch government social BPM platform was con-ducted. While not all the benefits suggested in the literature were identified in the case study, nega-tive impact of social BPM were also found. A ten-sion was found between accomplishing flexibility and accountability and user efficiency

Effects Of The Internet Of Things (IoT): A Systematic Review Of The Benefits And Risks

The Internet of Things (IoT) might yield many benefits and can be transformative in nature, yet has been given scant attention in e-commerce literature. The IoT describes a situation whereby physical objects are connected to the Internet and are able to communicate with, and identify themselves to other devices. These devices generate a huge amount of data. When it is possible to combine data from devices and other systems, new insights may be created which may provide important benefits to e-commerce. The duality of technology predicts that the accomplishment of benefits might also cause risks. In this paper we conduct a systematic review of literature to create an overview of perceived benefits and risks of IoT. The results confirm the duality that IoT has a variety of expected political, strategic, tactical and operational benefits as well as interrelated risks attached to its adoption. However, risks regarding the adoption of IoT also occur at all levels. Accomplishment of benefits requires that possible risks need to be mitigated in concert

Open Data for Evidence-based Decision-making: Data-driven Government Resulting in Uncertainty and Polarization

Over the last decade, more and more data are collected and opened. Governments actively stimulate the opening of data to increase citizen engagement to support policy-making processes. Evidence-based policy-making is the situation whereby decisions made are based on factual data. The common expectation is that releasing data will result in evidence-based decision-making and more trust in government decisions. This study aims to provide insight into how evidence-based policy based on open data can result into uncertainty and even polarize the policy-making process. We analyze a case study in which traffic and road utilization datasets are used and model the decision-making process using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). The BPMN model shows how the government and business organizations can use the data and give different interpretations. Data-driven decision-making might potentially create uncertainty, polarization, and less trust in decisions as stakeholders can give different meanings to the data and arrive at different outcomes. In contrast to the common belief, we found that the more data released, the more discussions happened about what is desired according to the data. The various directions derived from the data can even polarize decision-making. In other words, the more data opened, the more people can construct their perception of reality. For further research, we recommend understanding the types and role of data to create an evidence-based approach