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The purpose of this paper is to consider recent field evidence to analyse what online public services citizens need, explores potential citizen subsidy of these specific services and investigates where resources should be invested in terms of media accessibility. The authors explore these from a citizen-centric affordability perspective within three exemplar developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The World Bank and United Nations in particular promote initiatives under the “Information and Communication Technologies for Development” (ICT4D) to stress the relevance of e-Government as a way to ensure development and reduce poverty. The authors adopt a contingency value approach to determine directly reported citizens willingness to pay for digital public services. Hence, our focus is mainly upon an empirical investigation through extensive fieldwork in the context of sub-Sahara Africa. A substantive survey was conducted in the respective cities of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Lagos (Nigeria) and Johannesburg (South Africa). The sample of citizens was drawn from each respective Chamber of Commerce database for Ethiopia and South Africa, and for Nigeria a purchased database of businesses, based on stratified random sampling. These were randomly identified from both sectors ensuring all locations were covered with a total sample size of 1,297 respondents. It was found, in particular, that citizens were willing to pay to be able to access digital public services and that amounts of fees they were willing to pay varied depending on what services they wish to access and what devices they use (PCs or mobile phones).

The authors adopt a contingency value approach to determine directly reported citizens willingness to pay for digital public services. A survey was conducted in the respective cities of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Lagos (Nigeria) and Johannesburg (South Africa). The sample of citizens was drawn from each respective Chamber of Commerce database for Ethiopia and South Africa, and for Nigeria a purchased database of businesses, based on stratified random sampling. These were randomly identified from both sectors ensuring all locations were covered with a total sample size of 1,297 respondents.

The findings suggest that by understanding citizen needs, demands and how they can benefit from online public services could drive decisions related to what public services need to be prioritised for economically active citizens, potentially explore citizen subsidy of these specific public services which will have a trickle-down benefit to poorer citizens by reducing the pressures on traditional channels of public service delivery and investigate where resources should be invested in terms of media to access online services. Willingness to pay between the top online public services showed no statistically significant difference among all respondents.

The research focused on economically active digitally savvy citizens in the major capital cities in each of our selected countries. While these are not representative of the population at large, our intention was to understand what citizen-led government services would look like from the perspective of this group, with an insight into the value they place on these online services and their ability to access them. Technology diffusion starts with the early adopters (Rogers, 2010), and here the authors have focused on those that are likely to be early adopters.

Poor fiscal capacity, namely, the amount and type of resources a state has at its disposal, not only has an impact on economic wellbeing, but particularly relevant in this case, also has an impact on the quality of government (Baskaran and Bigsten, 2013). Thus, e-government is one way in which developing countries can focus on developing good governance and strengthening civil society to improve the quality of government and motivate citizens to participate in the political process.

The economic performance of African countries has been viewed with pessimism, consistently considered to be the poorest continent (Harrison et al., 2014). Recent studies have empirically shown that new information technologies have contributed to longer term economic growth in African countries and stress the need for government to further invest in developing telecommunications infrastructures and internet access (Donou-Adonsou et al., 2016). However one of the major constraints and challenges for developing countries is the limited fiscal capacity and ability to mobilise fiscal resources to finance the provision of public services, which is essential for economic development (Ali et al., 2015).

The authors contribute to the World Bank and United Nations initiatives to promote ICT for Development’ (ICT4D) the relevance of e-government as a way to ensure development and reduce poverty. If online services are of no benefit, even if they are more convenient and lower cost, they are unlikely to be used. Accessing digital public services directly addresses the needs of economically active citizens and can also facilitate the steps towards an improved quality of government and interaction with civil society. The study has contributed to an insightful understanding of the value, cost and benefits of citizen-led e-Government in this respect.

In interpreting the role of disruptive technologies in the relative success and failure of firms, this paper uses Christensen’s principles to review the strategies of Amazon.com and Barnes & Nobel. The core argument of the paper is based on the assertion that firms that fail to recognize the uniqueness of a disruptive technology fall short of succeeding in their line of business. The argument is conducted by reviewing the various aspects of disruptive technology, as they relate to the business of selling books online. In a final synthesis, insights based on occurrences within the US e‐business context are presented.

Every business can be described in terms of flows – both of materials and of information. Materials flow into the company, between activities within it, and in the form of finished goods and services from the company to its customers. Simultaneously, there are flows of information in the reverse direction that provide valuable data for the system: feedback from the marketplace in the form of customers’ orders, customer reaction, and information on needs and wants; flows of information within the company that provide data in the form of inventory schedules, production schedules, etc., and orders from the company to outside suppliers. In one sense the whole company and the market in which it operates can be regarded as a series of linkages and relationships, and the company’s operating efficiency can be seen to depend on how well these connections work. If the system can be made to flow smoothly, at minimum cost, then the chances are that the overall company performance, measured by any criteria, will be high. In practice, however, it is very common to find bottlenecks and poor integration between different parts of this system, with consequent unsatisfactory performance.

Outlines the experience of participating in the first mission organized by the British Council (South China Office) to mainland China. The area visited, Guangdong province, has enjoyed substantial economic growth in recent years. Opportunities for both UK and Chinese higher education are apparent, particularly given the observed changing political environment.

With the emergence of enabling internet technologies and increased competition between UK supermarkets has led the “big four” – Tesco, J Sainsbury, ASDA and Safeway/Morrisons – to develop grocery operations online. The objective of this paper is to evaluate and present best practice strategies employed by major retail organisations concerning these deployments. The paper argues that Tesco's superior performance can be identified through five critical factors. However, continued success using existing models and thinking is problematic and that future advantages will rely on taking a complex adaptive systems view of the deployment of E‐Grocery systems.

The methodology employed is a conceptual synthesis of current knowledge, based on theoretical constructs and empirical observations.

There is evidence of varying degrees of progress and lessons learnt, from adopting strategies and internet technologies, with new ways of conceptualizing and managing virtual retail operations. The research challenges existing thinking and makes sense of the plexus between this technology and the market place.

The essential contribution of the paper is the identification of five key elements for online retail success and the development of a proposed “online sustainability” model which is perceived to offer contemporary insights into competitive virtual environments.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the key factors that facilitate or inhibit knowledge transfer success from vendors to clients in information systems (IS) outsourcing.

The collection of data rested on semi‐structured interviews with IS/IT managers at various levels of the subject organizations and careful documents analysis.

The findings suggest that knowledge transfer success in IS outsourcing is affected by four sets of factors: knowledge‐related, client‐related, vendor‐related and relationship‐related.

This study may provide some useful insights for IS managers on how to manage knowledge transfer in IS outsourcing projects and better understand the key factors that impact its success.

This study investigated the client's perceptive only which is one side of the knowledge transfer process. A balanced understanding of the research questions (i.e. from both sides: client and vendor) permits a fuller examination and comparison between the perceptions of the two sides of the relationship.

The value and the originality of this study come from the fact that knowledge transfer in IS outsourcing has not been comprehensively explored. Previous research fails to provide a complete understanding of the factors that impact knowledge transfer success as most are focused on the type of knowledge transferred, the client, the vendor or the relationship between the client and the vendor.

Argues that by interpreting the semantic content of different actions, it will be possible to draw boundaries between those aspects of a system that can be computerized and those that will best serve the purpose if left alone. This will dissuade systems developers from being caught in the technology trap. The argument is conducted in the context of developing IT‐based medical thesauri for drug use management.