Editorial

Citation

Irani, Z. and Ghoneim, A. (2007), "Editorial", Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, Vol. 1 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/tg.2007.32601caa.001

Editorial

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the third issue of the first volume of Transforming Government: People, Process, and Policy. This issue involves papers that deal with e-government issues from a variety of angles while providing you with a mixture of theoretical and practical contributions.

We start this issue by a view point on eGovernment and network security by Olaf Winkel. In his paper the author attempts to place the central aspects of eGovernment and network-security in a relationship to one another. The rational here being that because eGovernment plans for the participation of actors from all areas of society, it cannot be successfully developed without reliable and trustworthy network communication not even within the environment of the public sector. Moreover, every facet of network security addressed in the paper (reliability, trustworthiness and multilateral security) is of significance in this context. The author presses that the virtual world of the networks should not be viewed as an isolated area in the context of the promotion of eGovernment but instead as a communication and cooperation space that supplements the traditional communication spaces (such as those of personal communication and of mass communication in broadcasting) and that is to be connected to these in the most intelligent manner possible. In this way not only the development of trust and acceptance is promoted. The dangers associated with the negative scenario of the digital divide can also be better accommodated.

The integration of healthcare information systems represents one of the most urgent priorities of healthcare organisations that allow the whole organisation to meet the increasing clinical, organisational and managerial needs is explored by Khalil Khoumbati and Marines Themistocleous. They address in this paper the growing need to evaluate EAI adoption in healthcare organisations by attempting to evaluate the adoption of EAI in healthcare organisations. Based on previous work by Khoumbati et al. (2005) which analysed several factors and tested them through a case study strategy that support the adoption of EAI in healthcare organisation, they further expanded the scope of the research by exploring the areas of EAI by using fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) simulation. In doing so, FCM simulation was used to demonstrate the causal inter-relationships between the EAI adoption factors hence enhancing the quality of the evaluation process, and highlighting the importance of each factor and its inter-relationship with other factors. Khoumbati and Themistocleous highlight the advantages of using FCM within this study as falling into two categories. One is concerned with the technique, which offers structure through symbolic and graphical representation rather than linear layout. The second is concerned with the use of results, which offers a graphical picture of rates' understanding of appraisal decisions, information obtained is clearly communicable, and insight can be gained into the structure of information. Hence, this evaluation can be used as a decision-making tool to support the management of the healthcare organisations when taking the decision regarding the adoption of EAI. In doing so, healthcare organisations may benefit from this evaluation process.

The political rhetoric that accompanied the introduction of eGovernment expected to produce innovation in the way government agencies conducted themselves. It is assumed that this innovation is both “good” and inevitable. Graham Orange, Tony Elliman, Ah Lian Kor and Rana Tassabehji challenge these simplistic assumptions and present a conceptual paper aiming at proposing a more realistic view of innovation in local government. According to the authors, a key element in this is the notion of innovative value based on people, processes and technology (PPT). The approach towards the achievement of such a purpose was made possible by reviewing the background literature, a recent study of eGovernment achievement in the UK – Project VIEGO, and government assessments of innovation in both the EU and UK. Furthermore, some empirical evidence of the inherent complexity was also used. The analysis showed that extant models of innovation tend to focus on the private sector values, with their transfer to the public sector being questionable. This combined with a weak approach to evaluation leaves local government vulnerable. Hence, Orange et al., argue that change does not necessarily lead to a better future and as indicated by project VIEGO, promoting meaningful well-founded projects need a clear understanding of the impact and value of an initiative. Also, assessing the value of innovation is critical.

However, current measures are predominantly efficiency-based or focussed at a national level. Even the few tools available for single organisations are directed at the private sector rather than eGovernment. Thus, they have addressed this by postulating a PPT model of innovation value and populated the action-oriented innovation model that should be capable of supporting the growth of innovative behaviour within the public sector. This takes a holistic view of innovation evaluation by combining efficiency and effectiveness of innovations.

With the objective to find a timetable that minimizes the number of timeslots for exams required by the enrolled students within a learning environment, Abdelaziz Dammak, Abdelkarim Elloumiand and Hichem Kamoun consider the exam timetabling of the re-sit session at the Faculty of Economics and Management Sciences at their university. In doing so, two heuristic procedures based on graph colouring are developed and tested on real data to solve the exam timetabling problem at their faculty. The first heuristic is simple and is inspired from the current manual method used by the faculty administration to construct the timetable. The second heuristic, however, is more sophisticated and suitable to solve the graph colouring problem. Subsequently, these heuristics were tested on a simple example which shows the out performance of the second heuristic compared to the first one. When tested with real data, the exam size heuristic provided a timetable with a shorter timeframe, however, the timetable obtained from second heuristic is of better quality. The main contribution of this paper is the creation of an automated exam timetabling that helps the faculty to manage its own enterprise system in an educational institution. Further improvement of the quality of the timetable is possible through the use of metaheuristics such as tabu search and simulated annealing to get a better timetable. The authors present a possible extension of their research work in developing a complete enterprise system to the whole faculty that includes a fully automated timetabling subsystem.

Less attention has been given to investigate shared service organizations and in particular relationships that motivated Marijn Janssen, Anton Joha and Vishanth Weerakkody to investigate critical decisions and design choices regarding the design of a shared service centre (SSC) and relationship with its users. They used a framework developed by Kern and Willcocks published in 2000 to investigate the case of a shared services arrangement and its relationships in the Municipality of Amsterdam using qualitative research. The findings showed that there are many mutually interrelated factors that need to be taken into account during the decision and design process of shared service arrangements. Antecedent conditions provide the basis for setting the objectives that the SSC needs to meet and determines the way the SSC is operationalized and designed in terms of its service and financial model, organizational structure, and communication mechanisms. In addition, this research also found that in practice the level of trust, cooperation and satisfaction increased between collaborating parties in a shared service arrangement when strategic choices are made in a systematic, collaborative and structured way during the decision making process leading to the initiation of a SSC. Hence, this paper contributes to the limited body of research available on shared services in public administration and this analysis can be used by organizations to support decision-making processes relating to the introduction of SSCs in local government contexts.

The final contribution of this issue is a paper by Dwivedi, Y.K, Khoumbati, K., Williams, M. and Lai, B. which aimed to examine the various attitudinal, normative and control factors affecting the adoption of broadband internet in a developing country context by focusing upon Pakistan. For this purpose, a survey research strategy was employed to achieve the overall aim. The empirical data of the attitudinal, normative and control variables were collected using a questionnaire as a data collection tool. A regression analysis was performed to test the role of various variables on behavioural intention to adopt broadband by Pakistani consumers. The findings of this paper suggest that primary influence, facilitating conditions resources, cost, perceived knowledge and perceived ease of use are significant factors for explaining consumers' behavioural intentions to adopt broadband internet in Pakistan. The primary value of this paper lies in extending the understanding of broadband adoption from a developing country perspective. This has been achieved by synthesising and empirically testing the previous research work on broadband adoption conducted in a developed country (i.e. UK) perspective. Thus, this research presents one of the initial efforts towards understanding the broadband adoption behaviour of consumer outside of the context of developed countries. The findings are specifically useful for ISPs and policy makers of Pakistan.

We hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed assembling it for you, and hope to enjoy reading subsequent issues.

Zahir IraniEditorAhmad GhoneimEditorial Assistant

ReferenceKhoumbati, K., Themistocleous, M. and Irani, Z. (2005), “Evaluating the adoption of enterprise application integration in healthcare organisations”, Journal of Management Information Systems, Vol. 22 No. 4, pp. 69-108.