Editorial

Citation

Irani, Z. (2009), "Editorial", Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, Vol. 3 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/tg.2009.32603aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, Volume 3, Issue 1

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

We start this issue with a viewpoint by Yogesh K. Dwivedi who analyses the first two years of e-Government research published in this journal Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy (TGPPP) from 2007 to 2008. Our expectation is that this paper will help summarise past research and act as a signpost for the future. The primary value of this paper lies in extending the understanding of evolution and patterns of e-Government research. Yogesh employs a profiling approach to analyze the 41 e-Government publications. The process includes examining variables such as the most productive authors, universities associated with the most publications from TGPPP, geographic diversity, authors’ backgrounds, co-author analysis, and research methods. By analysing and synthesising existing TGPPP publications, the papers’ conclusions suggest that the analytical, descriptive, theoretical and conceptual methods were the most dominant research approaches utilized by TGPPP authors within the last two years. Another fact that emerged is that the largest number of contributions comes from those with an information systems background, followed by business and computer science and IT. It is anticipated that this paper will form an initial and useful source of information for TGPPP readers who wish to learn more about the various facets pertaining to the existing body of published e-Government research in TGPPP.

Suree Funilkul and Wichian Chutimaskul stress the fact that most existing approaches of e-Democracy development emphasize different e-Democracy development aspects, which are dependent on their interests and constraints. No approaches support all issues related in the fundamental aspects of e-Democracy development. With this gap highlighted, the aim of the paper is to create a framework for sustainable e-Democracy development that could be used as a guideline for building tools to support the development of a new system. To consolidate this framework, the quality model of an e-Democracy system is constructed in order to support the efficient and effective e-Democracy process. To build the quality model of an e-Democracy system, Funikul and Chutimaskul integrate the concepts of Technology Acceptance Model: TAM and the e-Government Web Quality Assessment Model: e-Government WebQAM. Based on the findings, the 4 + 1 main constructs of an e-Democracy development framework are introduced. These constructs are namely; stakeholder and policy, ICT, development methodology containing process management and project management, environment, and lastly e-Democracy components. Furthermore, the five basic e-Democracy applications that support democratic principles are illustrated. They are e-Information, e-Service, e-Voting, e-Complaint, and e-Forum. The quality aspects, i.e. knowledge quality, process quality, communication quality and technology acceptance model are embedded to consolidate the framework. The paper concludes by highlighting the need for more research in the area of e-Democracy systems design that can be used by all citizens in the country, including those who live in rural areas or those with disabilities.

User engagement proves to be pivotal in IS projects’ successful implementation. Christopher Folkerd and Gabriella Spinelli seek to investigate the causes of and problems resulting from the exclusion of end-users from the requirements capture phases of IS development. As opposed to previous studies, the case study presented (the development of a police portal) in this paper provides a unique insight into an active project, where most previous studies have been conducted post failure and into the unique political and organisational challenges presented by such an organisation. Following an extensive literature review a taxonomy of project failure is developed. Such a taxonomy is used as the basis for the thematic analysis of a case study into the failure of a large-scale governmental IS project, utilizing, interview, observation and document capture as its primary sources of data.

In addition, this taxonomy allows the identification and mitigation of user exclusion at an early stage in IS development. Folkerd and Spinelli illustrate the critical nature of end-user consultation in the development of IS, defining six key areas of concern when examining the issue of end-user exclusion namely; project overrun, illogical and poorly structured UI, inaccurate mental models, unexpected effects to business processes, lack of systems integration and lastly lack of user ownership and acceptance. The developed taxonomy provides a means to recognize user exclusion problems and measure user engagement early on in the development cycle of a project, allowing the root cause to be addressed and the appropriate user base to be consulted thus, allowing for a more complete requirements capture and a reduction in the number of problems that may be encountered later in the development cycle – where they are more costly to repair.

Federico Iannacci presents the outcome of his research that sought to analyze the socio-technical consequences deriving from the digitisation of crown prosecutors’ work in relation to data standards and cross-organisational governance structures. Iannacci based his research on an in-depth, qualitative case study of the use of technologies by crown prosecutors; relying on observations, focus groups and semi-structured interviews conducted in London and Humberside over a 15-month time-span. The overarching methodological approach interweaves the empirical data with the theory of information growth, which postulates that information is a difference that makes a difference. The main findings show that the digitisation of prosecutors’ work has produced an increasingly-larger, interlocked domain of digital information by triggering the need for new data standards which, in turn, have created the need for new information-handling capabilities, thus prompting a ubiquitous infrastructure of self-propelling differences.

The results suggest that rather than steering the information-growth process, public sector managers should attempt to control the premises of such a process by setting out a structured information quality management procedure, both for domain-specific and generic data standards. Furthermore, plans are argued to being makeshift accomplishments that are bound to succumb to the overarching process of information growing out of information. Once viewed from this vantage point, cross-organisational governance structures are no longer the outcome of pre-defined plans but rather the side effect of a self-reinforcing process of information growth. Iannacci concludes by stressing that ultimately, the sheer awareness of the dynamics of information growth and their socio-technical consequences should help create a more structured information quality management process in relation to the growing need for new data standards deriving from the digitisation of information.

Governments today are under an increasing pressure to improve the delivery of public services in cost effective ways. To meet this challenge, the public sector is turning to e-Government led solutions. Amitabh Ojha, G.P. Sahu and M.P. Gupta report a quality tax payer service as a key area identified by the Indian Income Tax Department Vision Document. More specifically, the e-delivery of taxpayer services (e-filing of income tax return) was noted as a high priority in the reform agenda set out by the Government. However, citizens’ uptake of this service has been rather slow. The challenge of securing citizens’ patronage of e-filing service could prove daunting, where the functioning style of the tax-collector is inherently considered coercive. With an aim to explore this managerial challenge, Ojha, Sahu and Gupta investigate the likely antecedents of young Indian professionals’ behavioural intention to use the income-tax e-filing service. Prior to data collection, for which a self-administered survey was conducted, lecture-demonstrations were arranged to familiarize the potential respondents with the income-tax e-filing service. These data were then analyzed for reliability and construct validity of the measures, and thereafter a regression analysis carried out. The regression analysis results show that antecedents of young Indian professionals’ behavioural intention to use the income-tax e-filing service are: perceived ease of use, personal innovativeness in information technology, relative advantage, performance of e-filing service, and compatibility. The paper offers several implications that should be considered by the tax authorities, which include offering cash incentives to salaried e-filers, making the e-filing helpline a toll-free number, targeting the adopters of other online services, inducing favourable user perceptions about e-filing system performance, simplifying the usage procedure, and taking steps to make the feel of using e-filing similar to other popular online services.

We hope you will find this issue interesting and thought 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 – web site: www.emcis.org

Zahir Irani