Innovative public governance through cloud computing: Information privacy, business models and performance measurement challenges

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze challenges and to discuss proposed solutions for innovative public governance through cloud computing. Innovative technologies, such as federation of services and cloud computing, can greatly contribute to the provision of e-government services, through scaleable and flexible systems. Furthermore, they can facilitate in reducing costs and overcoming public information segmentation. Nonetheless, when public agencies use these technologies, they encounter several associated organizational and technical changes, as well as significant challenges. Design/methodology/approach: We followed a multidisciplinary perspective (social, behavioral, business and technical) and conducted a conceptual analysis for analyzing the associated challenges. We conducted focus group interviews in two countries for evaluating the performance models that resulted from the conceptual analysis. Findings: This study identifies and analyzes several challenges that may emerge while adopting innovative technologies for public governance and e-government services. Furthermore, it presents suggested solutions deriving from the experience of designing a related platform for public governance, including issues of privacy requirements, proposed business models and key performance indicators for public services on cloud computing. Research limitations/implications: The challenges and solutions discussed are based on the experience gained by designing one platform. However, we rely on issues and challenges collected from four countries. Practical implications: The identification of challenges for innovative design of e-government services through a central portal in Europe and using service federation is expected to inform practitioners in different roles about significant changes across multiple levels that are implied and may accelerate the challenges' resolution. Originality/value: This is the first study that discusses from multiple perspectives and through empirical investigation the challenges to realize public governance through innovative technologies. The results emerge from an actual portal that will function at a European level. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Evaluating m-government applications: an elaboration likelihood model framework

Mobile government application and services refer to governmental functions that are available to mobile devices, such as smart phones or personal digital assistants, to the users anytime/anywhere. M-Government and m-Participation are emergent concepts used to represent the evolving field of public administration functions provided as mobile services and the provision of participation to public consultations via mobile devices accordingly. In this paper we present an evaluation framework for m-government tools. The evaluation approach is grounded on the assumption that m-government tools should not only provide access to governmental information and functions, but they should also motivate users to participate to public policy making processes. The evaluation approach is based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model. Its novelty lies on a) its ability to capture the actual performance of a system instead of the users’ perceptions, and b) its capacity to assess the motivational and persuasive ability of a system.EU FP7 Marie Curie People Project “CEES - Citizen oriented Evaluation of E-Government Systems (reference IAPP-2008-230658) and EU FP7 Project “UbiPOL- Ubiquitous Participation Platform for Policy Making” (Reference INFSO-ICT-248010)

The Same Antecedents Do Not Fit All Activities: An Activity-specific Model of Personal Internet Use in Workplace

IT devices connected to Internet, such as computers, tablets and smartphones, are commonly used in organizations. At the same time, organizational employees increasingly perform non-work related activities at work by using the IT resources, which is defined as personal Internet use (PIU) in workplace. Multiple models have been developed by previous studies to investigate why employees perform PIU. These studies consider all PIU activities as a uniform behavior. However, literature suggests that there are different types of PIU activities. Therefore, it is with limitations to consider PIU behavior and its antecedents uniformly for all activities, given that PIU behavior may differ significantly when bounded with the different activities. As a first step to close the gap, we examine separately the antecedents of three types of PIU activities: non-work related emailing activities, browsing activities, and online financial activities, to validate our hypothesis that the same antecedent does not explain all PIU activities. Our study contributes to research by demonstrating the necessity to separately examine different types of PIU activities when investigating why employees perform PIU

Demystifying the Influential IS Legends of Positivism

Positivism has been used to establish a standard that Information Systems (IS) research must meet to be scientific. According to such positivistic beliefs in IS, scientific research should: 1) be generalizable, 2) focus on stable independent variables, 3) have certain ontological assumptions, and 4) use statistical or quantitative methods rather than qualitative methods. We argue that logical positivist philosophers required none of these. On the contrary, logical positivist philosophers regarded philosophizing in general and ontological considerations in particular as nonsense. Moreover, the positivists’ preferred empirical research method was not a survey, but rather a qualitative observation recorded by field notes. In addition, positivist philosophers required neither statistical nor nonstatistical generalizability. At least some positivist philosophers also acknowledged the study of singular cases as being scientific. Many research orientations (e.g., single-setting research, examination of change, qualitative research) that are deemed “unscientific” by positivism in IS seem to be “scientific” (in principle) according to logical positivism. In turn, generally speaking, what has been justified as scientific by positivism in IS (e.g., requirements of statistical or nonstatistical generalizability, surveys, independent variables, ontological views) were either not required by logical positivists or were regarded as nonsensical by logical positivists. Furthermore, given that positivism is sometimes associated (or confused) with logical empiricism in IS, we also briefly discuss logical empiricism. Finally, realizing that certain influential, taken-for-granted assumptions that underlie IS research are unwarranted could have ground-breaking implications for future IS research

Evaluating e-Government services from a citizens' prespective: A reference process model

Evaluating and optimizing e-government services is imperative for governments especially due to the capacity of e-services to transform public administrations and assist the interactions of governments with citizens, businesses and other government agencies. Existing widely applied evaluation approaches neglect to incorporate citizens’ satisfaction measures. Several citizen satisfaction models and indicators have been suggested in academia; however a reference process model that can assist practitioners to apply these performance measures is missing. In this paper we draw upon the evaluation approach proposed by the EU funded project CEES and propose a reference process model that captures re-usable practices for e-government evaluation from a citizens’ perspective. The novelty of the proposed approach is that using DEA for evaluating the e-services the assessment results in suggestions for strategic improvement of the e-services.EU FP7 Marie Curie People Project “CEES - Citizen oriented Evaluation of E-Government Systems” (reference IAPP-2008-230658

Governance of IT Service Procurement: Relationship vs Network based Approach

Relational and structural embeddedness are reported to play an important role in the context of information technology outsourcing (ITO). However, we do not fully understand which of the two types of embeddedness is more appropriate in preventing opportunistic behaviour and improving long-term performance in the presence of uncertainty which is not uniform across a wide range of outsourced IT services and products. In order to address this question, a virtual ITO network is simulated where firms take the partner selection and control strategy based on relational or structural embeddedness. They also compete with each other to maximise their long-term profits. The simulation results show that the advantage of each type of embeddedness is different according to the levels of measurement difficulty and requirement unpredictability which coexist in the ITO business environments. Therefore, this study provides a better understanding of the conditional superiority of each type of embeddedness in the precence of the two uncertainties and offers ITO managers with a guideline for a choice between relational and structural embeddedness

Mobile Application Privacy Risks : Viber Users’ De-Anonymization Using Public Data

Mobile application developers define the terms of use for the applications they develop, which users may accept or declined during installation. Application developers on the one hand seek to gain access to as many user information as possible, while users on the other hand seem to lack awareness and comprehension of privacy policies. This allows application developers to store an enormous number of personal data, sometimes even irrelevant to the application’s function. It’s also common that users choose not to alter the default settings, even when such an option is provided. In combination, the above conditions jeopardize users’ rights to privacy. In this research, we examined the Viber application to demonstrate how effortless it is to discover the identity of unknown Viber users. We chose a pseudorandom sample of 2000 cellular telephone numbers and examined if we could reveal their personal information. We designed an empirical study that compares the reported behavior with the actual behavior of Viber’s users. The results of this study show that users’ anonymity and privacy is easily deprived and information is exposed to a knowledgeable seeker. We provide guidelines addressed to both mobile application users and developers to increase privacy awareness and prevent privacy violations

AppAware: A Model for Privacy Policy Visualization for Mobile Applications

Privacy policies emerge as the main mechanism to inform users on the way their information is managed by online service providers, and still remain the dominant approach for this purpose. Literature notes that users find difficulties in understanding privacy policies because they are usually written in technical or legal language even, although most users are unfamiliar with them. These difficulties have led most users to skip reading privacy policies and blindly accept them. In an effort to address this challenge this paper presents AppWare, a multiplatform tool that intends to improve the visualization of privacy policies for mobile applications. AppWare formulates a visualized report with the permission set of an application, which is easily understandable by a common user. AppWare aims to bridge the difficulty to read privacy policies and android’s obscure permission set with a new privacy policy visualization model. To validate AppAware we conducted a survey through questionnaire aiming to evaluate AppAware in terms of installability, usability, and viability-purpose. The results demonstrate that AppAware is assessed above average by the users in all categories

IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES FOR INFORMATION SECURITY AWARENESS INITIATIVES IN E-GOVERNMENT

With the widespread adoption of electronic government services, there has been a need to ensure a seamless flow of information across public sector organizations, while at the same time, maintaining confidentiality, integrity and availability. Governments have put in place various initiatives and programs including information security awareness to provide the needed understanding on how public sector employees can maintain security and privacy. Nonetheless, the implementation of such initiatives often faces a number of challenges that impede further take-up of e-government services. This paper aims to provide a better understanding of the challenges contributing towards the success of information security awareness initiatives implementation in the context of e-government. Political, organizational, social as well as technological challenges have been utilized in a conceptual framework to signify such challenges in e-government projects. An empirical case study conducted in a public sector organization in Greece was exploited in this research to reflect on these challenges. While, the results from this empirical study confirm the role of the identified challenges for the implementation of security awareness programs in e-government, it has been noticed that awareness programmers often pursue different targets of preserving security and privacy, which sometimes results in adding more complexity to the organization

Aligning Security Awareness With Information Systems Security Management

This paper explores the way information security awareness connects to the overall information security management framework it serves. To date, the formulation of security awareness initiatives has tended to ignore the important relationship with the overall security management context, and vice versa. In this paper we show that the two processes can be aligned so as to ensure that awareness activities serve the security management strategy and that security management exploits the benefits of an effective awareness effort. To do so, we analyze the processes of security awareness and security management using a process analysis framework and we explore their interactions. The identification of these interactions results in making us able to place awareness in a security management framework instead of viewing it as an isolated security mechanism