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The growth of the public Internet and enterprise intranets as a digital distribution mechanism for information has exploded and today one of the most promising developments is the so‐called push technology. Current push technology‐based packages deliver customised news to users’ desktops, reducing the burden of acquiring and integrating data from multiple and dynamic sources. Aims to discuss the potential of push technology in integrating current techniques for evaluating IS/IT investments.

The purpose of this paper is to assess, from an organisational perspective, the internal efficacy of public policies designed to stimulate voluntary inter‐municipal partnerships. In particular, it sets out to assess the capacity of such incentive‐based policies to push the councils in the direction desired by the legislator, i.e. service sharing and joint policymaking.

A qualitative approach (exploratory case study) has been adopted. Primary data from semi‐structured interviews with administrators and public managers were collected and analysed along with secondary data on the inter‐municipal partnerships established in the important Italian region of Lombardy. The critical contingencies and conditions that shape local voluntary collaborations are compared with the assumptions of a model developed by Montjoy and O'Toole.

The paper questions the assumption that access to additional resources is enough to induce the councils to collaborate in service sharing and joint policymaking. While, on the one side, the councils' organisational and managerial limitations condition their willingness and capacity to forge long‐term relationships, on the other, the pressure on councils tasked with partnership implementation (especially the aggregation leaders) and the effort to ensure the orchestration of the activities and joint decision making lead them to opt for the less structured forms of cooperation (e.g. bilateral agreements). The most binding and ambitious collaborative forms are also those exposed to risks, including stagnation and goal displacement.

Unlike the mainstream studies on local partnerships, this paper addresses the policies that incentivise the setting up and development of such initiatives. The paper further develops the use of a model that policymakers will find a valuable aid in predicting agency responses to external mandates and in identifying the different types of potential implementation pitfalls.

Understanding how value is actually generated in e‐government projects is one of the most challenging, and relevant, issues in e‐government research. This paper aims to investigate the contribution of service‐based information technology (IT) integration for generating value in the public sector, proposing a theoretical framework based on the theory of IT conversion effectiveness.

The paper illustrates this novel approach to electronic government evaluation with an exploratory case study of a service‐based IT integration project developed by the City of Genoa, showing how and why IT integration can substantially contribute to value generation in the public sector.

Contrarily to what one would expect according to the original theory of IT conversion effectiveness, value generation may happen even with no substantial growth in the pre‐existing IT asset portfolio. In fact, what is truly important is not only the availability of IT assets (policy output), but also their proper use (policy outcome) and their final effects on policy takers (policy impact). The case study shows how a low‐cost and small IT integration project based on agile information system development practices can significantly leverage the legacy systems, enhancing the overall degree of IT conversion effectiveness (first stage), with expected positive effects on policy outcomes (second stage) and policy impacts (third stage). The enabling effect of the web services technology has a central role in the overall value generation process.

While addressing a literature void in the context of public sector, this theoretical approach is substantial as it can be used to evaluate and maximize the value generated by e‐government projects, with a special focus on service‐based IT integration projects.

The purpose of this paper is to assess, from an organisational perspective, the internal efficacy of public policies designed to stimulate voluntary inter‐municipal partnerships. In particular, it sets out to assess the capacity of such incentive‐based policies to push the councils in the direction desired by the legislator, i.e. service sharing and joint policymaking.

A qualitative approach (exploratory case study) has been adopted. Primary data from semi‐structured interviews with administrators and public managers were collected and analysed along with secondary data on the inter‐municipal partnerships established in the important Italian region of Lombardy. The critical contingencies and conditions that shape local voluntary collaborations are compared with the assumptions of a model developed by Montjoy and O'Toole.

The paper questions the assumption that access to additional resources is enough to induce the councils to collaborate in service sharing and joint policymaking. While, on the one side, the councils' organisational and managerial limitations condition their willingness and capacity to forge long‐term relationships, on the other, the pressure on councils tasked with partnership implementation (especially the aggregation leaders) and the effort to ensure the orchestration of the activities and joint decision making lead them to opt for the less structured forms of cooperation (e.g. bilateral agreements). The most binding and ambitious collaborative forms are also those exposed to risks, including stagnation and goal displacement.

Unlike the mainstream studies on local partnerships, the paper addresses the policies that incentivise the setting up and development of such initiatives. The paper further develops the use of a model that policymakers will find a valuable aid in predicting agency responses to external mandates and in identifying the different types of potential implementation pitfalls.

Banks in emerging markets such as Brazil provide a wide range of services to companies to facilitate the export process. The objective of the present study was to analyze, from the perspective of Brazilian export companies, the relationships between banking intellectual capital (human and organizational), banking agility, banking technologies and company size in banking service provision.

A sample of 318 Brazilian export companies was surveyed with questionnaires. The research model was tested using structural equation modeling, namely the partial least squares (PLS-SEM) technique and SmartPLS.

Banking intellectual capital affects banking service provision, banking agility mediates the relationship between intellectual capitals and banking service provision and technology does not moderate the relationship between agility and banking service provision. The size of the company does not moderate the relationship between intellectual capital and banking service provision.

This work indicates that intellectual capital and the banking agility strategy are critical in the provision of banking service provision for exports.

This work illustrates the effect of banks' intangible resources on the provision of banking services from the perspective of Brazilian export companies.

Since the 1980s, New public management has fostered the introduction of managerial approaches similar to those of the private sector in public administrations. Recently, the advantages of performing risk management in the public sector have been recognized; however, to the best of our knowledge, research on risk management in public administrations is underdeveloped, and there is a need to understand how risk management is performed. This paper addresses these issues and investigates whether and how risk management is performed in Italian public administration.

This study focused on a sample of 503 Italian municipalities and used a mixed research method. Through a qualitative content analysis of documents published on municipalities’ websites, data and information were collected and elaborated using quantitative indicators.

The main results are that a high percentage of large Italian municipalities perform risk management and comply with theoretical provisions on risk management, sometimes displaying isomorphic behavior in risk management practices.

This study provides a new perspective on risk management in Italian municipalities, contributes to filling a gap in the literature and suggests a theoretical perspective on municipalities’ approaches when introducing new managerial practices.