Guest editorial

Citation

Irani, Z. and Kamal, M. (2010), "Guest editorial", Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, Vol. 4 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/tg.2010.32604aaa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, Volume 4, Issue 1

About the Guest Editors

Zahir IraniHead of the Business School at Brunel University (UK). Having worked for several years as a project manager. He is a multi-disciplinary researcher in the area of information systems evaluation and application integration. He has been recognized as the Hooker Distinguished Professor at McMaster University (Canada) as well as being a visiting professor at several universities, worldwide. He is the editor of the established Journal of Enterprise Information Management (JEIM) as well as Editor of Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy (TG: PPP). He has co-authored teaching text-books and written almost 200 internationally refereed papers. He regularly publishes his scholarly work in leading journals, which include: Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Information & Management, Information Systems Journal (ISJ), Journal of Management Information Systems, European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of Operational Research and European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS). He has received numerous contracts, grants and awards from funding bodies that include the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Royal Academy of Engineering, Australian Research Council, QinetiQ, Department of Health and European Commission.

Muhammad Mustafa Kamal Research Fellow at Brunel Business School. He received his PhD from the School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics (SISCM), Brunel University, in the area of Information Systems. He also holds MSc’s in the areas of Distributed Computing Systems from Greenwich University, London and Computer Sciences from the University of Central Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. In his current role as a Research Fellow at the Brunel Business School, he is primarily working as a Project Coordinator for Information Systems Evaluation and Integration Network (ISEing) with business development responsibilities. He has also worked as a Post-doctoral Research Assistant on a European-funded research project (Ref: proposal no. 2006/VP021/30137) namely – the REFOCUS (senior employees training on in formation and communication technologies) project at SISCM. His research interests include investigating enterprise application integration adoption practices in the public domain especially local government, electronic government (e-government) integration and IT infrastructure issues in local government and transforming government (t-government). He has published in several leading international journals such as the JEIM, International Journal of Information Management (IJIM), TG: PPP and International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR). He also has several publications in international conferences such as Americas Conference in Information Systems (AMCIS), European and Mediterranean Conference in Information Systems (EMCIS) and Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) and book chapters. He is currently working on a book in the area of Business Technology – Managing Information for Value Creation for postgraduate MBA students. This book shall be published early next year. He also acts as an International Assessor for leading international journals (such as JEIM, IJIM, TG: PPP, IJEGR, EJIS, ISJ, IM, International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, etc.) and conferences (such as HICSS, AMCIS, EMCIS, ECIS, ICIS, etc.). Currently, he is an active Editorial Review Board Member for IJEGR and TG: PPP at the Brunel Business School.

It gives us an immense pleasure to welcome you to the first issue of the fourth volume of TG: PPP journal. This issue incorporates selected research papers from the Proceedings of the European and Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems 2009 (www.emcis.org).

The research presented in these papers is exploratory in nature and deal with contemporary e-government issues from multiplicity of perspectives, providing an assortment of theoretical and practical contributions.

We start this issue with a viewpoint by Lemuria Carter and Anastasia McBride, where the potential for future research on information privacy and e-government is explored. They propose a model that posits seven factors, which provides a timely perspective of the concerns surrounding information privacy when disclosing information to or completing a transaction.

The viewpoint is followed by a case study based research conducted by Faris Al-Sobhi, Vishanth Weerakkody and Muhammad Mustafa Kamal. Their research contributes to providing a better understanding of the use of intermediaries in business contexts with a number of significant added-value benefits to suppliers and consumers. In their paper, the authors have explored the concept of intermediaries in local government in Saudi Arabia in the context of e-government services delivery. Although intermediaries offer the opportunity to leverage citizens’ adoption of e-government services and diffusion of e-services from the governments’ perspective, electronic intermediaries (i.e. e-offices) have not been widely investigated in e-government adoption and diffusion context. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of the intermediaries in delivering public services from government departments to different stakeholders (e.g. business and citizens) and to highlight the challenges that impede the development of e-government services in Madinah city, Saudi Arabia. This research uses a broad literature review to identify significant factors that contribute to e-government adoption and diffusion success. These factors are then used as a basis for analysing the findings from a case study that focus on the concept of intermediaries for e-government service delivery. To investigate a less(er) recognised phenomenon of intermediaries, the authors adopted a qualitative case study approach to gain in-depth understating of this phenomenon in a natural setting. The results of this research indicate that digital divide and poor infrastructure to conduct payments (secure transactions) for e-government services was hindering citizens’ adoption of e-services in Madinah city. Whereas, the intermediary concept was facilitating citizens’ access to e-government services and helping to reduce the digital divide. The findings also illustrate that intermediaries helped in increasing the availability of e-government services. Additionally, this study found that trust between the service provider (government) and service requester (citizens and businesses) is an important factor that influences not only e-government adoption and diffusion, but also the role of e-offices in facilitating the adoption process.

Ibrahim Arpaci on the other hand attempted to investigate the technological innovation process, stakeholders of the process, sources of innovation, driving forces of innovation, and obstacles of innovation for Turkish public sector. In this study, interviews are used as data collection methods. For the purpose of this study, Ibrahim Arpaci conducted a series of semi-structured or open interviews. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. In addition, information related to the technological innovation projects performed in the public organisations was collected from documents, books, and governmental reports. A total of 20 organisations were contacted to participate in the study, however only 14 of them were retained after consideration of the selection criteria. In addition, in this study 28 e-government projects that lead innovation are analysed. Results of the study indicate that external relations with stakeholders enhance the innovation process. Innovation emerges as a result of interaction between the stakeholders. The innovation process is explained as having four main stages and six steps. Stages of the innovation process are idea generation, project development, production and innovation. Six steps of the innovation process are idea, project study, project approval, project implementation, new services and innovation. Innovation starts with idea generation in the first stage. New ideas can be generated by the personnel of the organization, legislation, citizens and other firms. After idea generation, the new ideas should be conceptualized projects to reach innovation. The main obstacles in the public sector can be listed as legislation, lack of qualified staff, approval authority, and bureaucracy. Production as the third stage can only start after overcoming the mentioned obstacles. Project implementation is performed in the fourth step and a new service is acquired in the fifth step. Innovation is the last stage of the technological innovation process where diffusion of the new service is performed to innovate in the organization. The significant findings presented in this study may help managers for long-term planning of innovation activities and they may pave the way of managers for their innovation projects by means of determining unclear innovation process and identifying the inputs and outputs of the process. Moreover, this paper acts as a guide for managers in public organizations; finding out possible obstacles, identifying driving forces to accelerate the innovation process, emphasizing the importance of interaction between the stakeholders.

Transformational government has been on the European agenda for several years. However, the research presented by Senaka Fernando, Arthur Money, Tony Elliman and Lorna Lines indicate that the progress towards transforming public services for older adults with age-related cognitive impairments has been very limited. While there are socioeconomic factors associated with the older adult community which can hinder their usage of governments’ online services, the paper argues that the inability of current web-based technologies and services to adequately cater for specific cognitive impairments of older adults plays a major part in presenting such obstacles. In highlighting such limitations, this paper presents the results from a research project currently being undertaken in the UK, Norway and Italy, to demonstrate how assistive web-based technologies can be developed to assist the transformation of governments’ services for older adults with age-related cognitive impairments. The research approach includes three phases. The aim of Phase 1 was to develop a comprehensive list of requirements for the development of the first version of the DIADEM application. In Phase 2, a usability evaluation was carried out from the perspective of the older adult target user group. These two phases include the literature, the focus group interviews and the user trials. Currently, DIADEM project activities are about to go into Phase 3. The key findings of the study indicate that the users of the DIADEM assisted online form filling, reports comparatively high levels of satisfaction. Furthermore, the innovative use of experts systems has brought significant benefits to the older adults with cognitive decline as the DIADEM technology appears to be sensitive to the users who present high level of cognitive decline, and provides increased levels of assistance accordingly. The paper shows how such benefits can transform the governments’ services to older adults with age-related cognitive impairments when the DIADEM technology is commercialised and diffused. The DIADEM enabled transformations is not simply about technology. It is an organisational change too. As a result, further research needs to be carried out on the challenges around change management, and the level of commitment to change which will be required to achieve the DIADEM enabled transformation in governments.

Shauneen Furlong and Wafi Al-Karaghouli highlight that due to inadequate implementations of project management procedures and processes, many large information technology systems projects failed to deliver their promises. Also, many of the failures in the implementation of large information technology systems projects around the world have been attributed to inadequate project management action. This criticism encompasses e-government project initiatives which have attempted ambitious program change, major innovations, large transformations, enterprise wide solutions, collaboration across organisations, governments and private sectors, and the implementation of unprecedented (or ambitious) solutions. This paper forms part of an ongoing research to describe, critically evaluate and examine the underlying barriers and challenges in large e-government initiatives. Also, this paper examines change in organisations due to the change in the global economy and global information society as new technology is changing the nature of work. It identifies and examines the current and foreseeing problems with large e-government projects and describes how a socio-technical approach which takes into account, technical, business, citizen, economic needs in the creation of a socio-technical ITS for future citizens. In addition, the paper offers a technology-enabled enhancement to the project initiation phase, the area identified as being particularly weak and inadequate in addressing initial requirements of e-government initiatives. The authors propose that technology can be incorporated into the professional practice of project management. It can also be a part of a possible solution as opposed to being distinct and separate from it. The project management supporting tools, as opposed to merely reporting actual versus plans have to increase the novelty (art and science) of project management through human interaction, empower the project manager and in aiding his capacity in delivering the expected outcomes. This research paper contributes to the existing literature of project management of large e-government transformational processes. The paper addresses a number of e-government challenges by critically analyses and summarises a list of e-government challenges and barriers arising from an e-government survey administered on behalf of the World Information Technology and Services Association which represents the national technology associations in 70 countries. It compares these challenges to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), which is the North American standard in project management methodology. Also, it highlights the weaknesses in PMBOK to address these challenges and offers a technology-enabled enhancement to the project initiation phase. This is the strength of the current paper.

Finally, Spyros Angelopoulos, Fotis Kitsios and Thanos Papadopoulos proposing a model that incorporates critical factors contributing to the success in new service development projects in e-government. After providing a brief introduction to e-government and new service development in respect to models for successful implementation, the authors justify and build on the existing literature that advocates the use of critical success factors to study the implementation of these projects. They suggest a model that incorporates the determinants of success or failure of a new service through a set of variables. This study proposes a framework, which is believed to help with the empirical research of critical success factors in new service development. The suggested framework attempts to bring experience in leadership and coordination of work theory and practice together by synthesising the existing literature with real-life experience. The research aims at providing a better understanding of the underlying factors and dimensions that describe new service development in e-government through the suggestion of a model that takes under consideration important critical success factors for implementing new service development. Therefore, it expands the scope of new service development research in e-government context, stating the need for more research to be conducted regarding the new service development in e-government using critical success factors. By identifying the potential success and failures of future projects, a number of implications for public sector scholars as well as administrators come to light.

We hope you will find this issue interesting and though provoking, and hope to receive your valuable contributions for the coming issue. We also look forward to seeing you at the European Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems (EMCIS) in 2010, 2011, 2012, etc. where the best papers will be considered to be included in TG: PPP – www.emcis.org

Zahir IraniEditorMuhammad KamalGuest Editor