Strategy, ICT Investment, BPR And Business Performance: An Empirical Investigation

The study on the links between strategy, structure and performance has been for long time a fundamental and highly important research topic for the management researchers and practitioners. In this direction this paper presents a ‘holistic’ empirical investigation of the whole network of relations between business strategy (at a first level), information and communication technologies (ICT) investment, non-ICT investment and BPR (at a second level), and finally business performance (at a third level). It is based on firm-level data from 271 Greek firms, which are used for the estimation of structural equation models (SEM) connecting the above variables, theoretically based on the Cobb-Douglas Production Function. It is concluded that none of the three generic business strategies defined by M. Porter (cost leadership, differentiation and focus) has a significant effect on ICT and non-ICT investment; on the contrary, particular strategic choices (differentiation and focus strategy) have been found to drive process change. Also, it has been found that all the investigated internal factors, ICT investment, non-ICT investment and BPR, have a positive impact on business performance. Concerning their interrelations, ICT investment affects positively BPR, which indicates that BPR is a partial mediator in the relationship between ICT and performance; on the contrary, this does not happen with non-ICT investment, indicating an important difference between these two types of capital investment as to their relation with process change

AN ANALYSIS OF MULTIPLE SOCIAL MEDIA CONSULTATIONS IN THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT FROM A PUBLIC POLICY PERSPECTIVE

Government institutions of various levels have started experimenting with the use of social media for increasing citizens´ involvement in their public policy making processes. It is necessary to evaluate systematically these initiatives from various perspectives, in order to develop new knowledge in this recently emerged area, concerning methods of social media exploitation in government, the valu they can generate, and also the challenges they pose and their limitations. This paper contributes in this direction, by analysing three centrally managed multiple social media consulations conducted by Members of the European Parliament, from a public policy perspective, based on the wicked problems theory. It has been concluded that the above method of social media exploitation has a good potential for disseminating highly informative multimedia content on a policy under formulation to a much wider audience than the usual participants in the ˜traditional´ European Parliament consultations, and also involving and stimulating them to think about the policy, leading to the collection of useful relevant ideas, knowledge and opinions, in a cost efficient manner. However, in order to go into more discussion depth it will be necessary to conduct further consultations, more focused on particular sub-topics and participants. Furthermore,their outcomes should be combined and integrated with the ones of the ˜traditional´ consultations and experts´ studies. Finally, a critical success factor is to build wide, knowledgeable, diverse and pluralistic communities for these social media consultations, including various social actors with strong interest and good knowledge of the particular problem, and extending beyond the networks of the initiator

Social Media and Absorptive Capacity of Greek Government Agencies

As the external environment of most organizations becomes increasingly dynamic and complex, the exploitation and management of external knowledge becomes of critical importance for their success. This has led to a growing interest of both researchers and practitioners in the study of their absorptive capacity (ACAP). However, the research that has been conducted in this area has focused on the private sector, while there is a lack of similar research for the public sector. This paper contributes to filling this research gap, by investigating the use of social media (SM) in the public sector from the ACAP perspective, examining to what extent SM are used by Greek government agencies for the enhancement of their ACAP. It has been based on interviews with the SM managers of ten Greek government agencies from the central, regional and municipal government. It is concluded that in the examined government agencies SM are used only to a small extent for enhancing their ACAP, making limited exploitation of the potential that SM have for this purpose. In particular, SM are used to some extent for enhancing one of the components of ACAP, the ability for external exploratory learning, but not at all for enhancing the other two critical components of it: the abilities for transformative and exploitative learning

AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE IMPACT OF ICT ON INNOVATION IN EUROPEAN HOSPITALS

Hospitals have been making significant investments in information and communication technologies (ICT) for long time. Therefore it is important to investigate their effects on various dimensions of hospitals´ performance, such as their innovation performance. However, there is a lack of empirical investigations of the impact of ICT on innovation in this important industry using large datasets. This paper makes a twofold contribution in this direction. First, it investigates empirically the impact of ICT on product and process innovation in European hospitals, based on data for 743 hospitals from 18 European countries collected in the course of the e-Business Survey of the European Union. Second it uses multiple independent ICT-related variables, associated with ICT investment, budget and personnel, and also with the use of specific ICT applications and standards, both healthcare-specific and general ones, investigating their effects on product and process innovation. Our results provide evidence of positive impact of ICT on hospitals´ innovation, which is however not homogeneous across all types of ICT applications: it is mainly applications enabling the exchange of data and knowledge between different functions/departments of the hospital, and with external environment, that impact positively innovation

Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis in Policy Formulation Initiatives: The EU-Community Approach

Part 4: Policy Formulation and ModellingInternational audienceIn the last decade there is extensive and continuously growing creation of political content in the Internet, and especially in the Web 2.0 social media, which can be quite useful for government agencies in order to understand the needs and problems of societies and formulate effective public policies for addressing them. So a variety of ICT-based methods have been developed for the exploitation of this political content by governments (‘citizensourcing’), initially simpler and later more sophisticated ones. These ICT-based methods are increasingly based on the use of opinion mining (OM) and sentiment analysis (SA) techniques, in order to process the extensive political content collected from numerous sources. This paper describes a novel approach to OM and SA use, created as part of an advanced ICT-based method of exploiting political content created in the Internet, and especially in social media, by experts (‘expertsourcing’), aiming to leverage the extensive policy community of the European Union, which is developed in the European EU-Community project. Furthermore, some first experimental results of it are presented

A Web-based System for Supporting Structured Collaboration in the . . .

The development of effective public policies and programs concerning the big problems of modern societies is an increasingly complex task. The social problems today are multidimensional and their solution requires close collaboration among various Public Organizations from many regions or even countries. Each individual organization involved possesses pieces of information, experience, knowledge and competence about the problem. Their values, interests and expectations are often different, or even conflicting, and have to be taken into account. Similar hold for the ‘high level functions’ of the Public Administration, such as decision making towards the development of legislation. This paper presents a web-based system that supports collaborative activities in the above setting. Through a well-structured discourse graph, the system facilitates the wide participation and collaboration of the Public Organizations involved in the solution of social problem and provides a series of knowledge management and argumentative decision making features. The use of the system is described through a detailed example concerning a debate about state vs. non-state universities, which has recently started in Greece