Building the E-Service Society

Since 1994, when started the commercial use of the Internet, several manners of doing business emerged around the world. Following this trend, governments started using new tools from the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), giving raise to the e-government area. In this paper, recent evaluation reports about government portals from all over the world are summarized. They show that there are still much work to be done to attain a high-level of integration and quality of services. Then, a new approach is proposed to e-government initiatives, introducing the concept of Governmental Key Business Processes (G-KBP) that is based on process modeling techniques and modern public administration concepts. This proposal may be used as a guideline to the construction and maintenance of highly integrated e-government environments.

The paper describes the Olimpo System, a knowledge-based system that enables the user to access textual files and to retrieve information that is similar to the search context described by the user in natural language. The paper is focused on the innovation recently implemented on the system and its new features. It is included an explanation about the UN Security Council itself and how it works, as well as a detailed analysis of the format of the resolutions and its main characteristics. A detailed description is presented about the search level and the similarity metrics used by the system. The methodology applied to the Olimpo system emphasises the use of information retrieval methods combined with the Artificial Intelligence technique named SCS (Structured Contextual Search).

With the emergence of e-government and a novel concept of governance the role of knowledge has become dominant. Building a modern administration with new patterns of cooperation means that the redistribution of knowledge has to be designed and orchestrated carefully. This corresponds to the concept of “knowledge enhanced Government”. In the public realm there is cosmos of knowledge repositories and a plenitude of diverse processes. Thus, understanding the knowledge part in administrative processes is a must. This contribution investigates knowledge aspects in e-government and gives a survey on relevant knowledge issues in the public sector. Based on the comprehension of public sector knowledge, examples are considered where administrative work is enhanced with knowledge. Examples of such intelligent e-government processes are given in the second part of the paper: data interchange in routine processes, policy making and citizen advice. Next step of knowledge enhancement in e-government is to seamlessly interweave human and software expertise.

This article describes Electronic Democracy as an emergent statecraft model. Electronic Democracy is analyzed from a theoretical perspective that proposes edemocracy as the new millennium democratic system. In order to achieve this goal, an e-government concept was required. It is proposed that Electronic Government is presented as the appropriate environment to originate a new role model for managing the public engine: e-democracy. In this particular case, the analyzes focuses on the most important democracy theories - Classic Democracy and Radical Democracy - intending to demonstrate that Electronic Government contains the democracy ideals from both of these theories. Although E-democracy is shown to provide solutions to many social problems, some drawbacks are also discussed. Finally, as a result of this analysis, the ways in which Electronic Government can help the Information Society to become more and more democratic is described.

This paper describes the role of usability evaluation as quality assurance of e-government services. Usability evaluation intends to identify difficulties experienced by a user when interacting with a computer interface. Usability evaluation is a key issue in assessing the return from investment in government sites, as it can measure how the services impact the citizen and is a significant source of requirements for design reviews of present services. This paper describes the creation of a Laboratory for Human-Computer Interaction (LabIHC) devoted to assess Sao Paulo State, Brazil, government services usability. This Laboratory evaluates about 250 users per day using different e-government services and can produce accurate reports on usability problems. The paper describes LabIHC’s pluralistic evaluation methodology, composed of four different techniques, as well as the set of recommendations that were derived from LabIHC results for e-government services.

In this paper, we shall discuss the meaning and the relevance of trust for e-government. First, we shall identify trust concepts from philosophy, which might be important for trust engineering in e-government. Then we shall look at trust models for e-commerce, and we shall discuss how they may be transferred to e-government. Afterwards, we shall present the results of two empirical studies among young people. The theoretical and the empirical results will be used to derive recommendations for trust engineering in practice. Finally, we shall have a second look at philosophy, discussing the implications of postmodern reality for the design requirements for e-government solutions, and we shall derive a research agenda based on recent results in applied cryptography.

Adoption of mobile data services may be analyzed within the framework of two-sided markets. Service or content providers should adopt platforms for developing, integrating and distributing mobile services and end-users should adopt the offered services as well as the user platform offered. These two markets are often analyzed separately using different theoretical perspectives and models. In this article, we propose a model for integrating the two sides of the mobile data services market. The model is used to propose relationships between dominant actors’ choice of business models for individual services and the end-users’ perceived value of these services.

The expected boom in wireless networking and the rapidly increasing number of private and public access points prepare the ground for additional - initially unintended - usage possibilities of this fast growing infrastructure.

A first example is ‘Location Based Services’. Since access points constantly broadcast unique, identifiable information like the MAC address, this data could be exploited for additional services. Because of the narrow broadcasting range of a WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) cell, precise location information can be obtained at low cost. This could be used i.e. as a basis for LBS (push), or navigational services (pull).

Since WLAN chips are integrated into more and more devices like PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) and mobile telephones, WLANs could be used for access to simple classic internet services like WWW or email as well as more sophisticated services like VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol).

This paper describes four exemplary possibilities of exploiting the WLAN infrastructure for additional services, provided that WLAN is almost ubiquitous in a coherent area.

The paper aims at assessing how mobile location applications and services can support salespersons, for greater performance when they are operating within a mobile work environment. After briefly discussing the state of the art issues associated with mobile location technologies, the paper conceptualises key dimensions of location-based mobile support. The paper then suggests a categorization of salespersons tasks based on both properties of location-based mobile support and the areas of salespersons tasks that may be affected by mobile location technologies. A third section suggests potential mobile location services and applications that can support salespersons in performing effectively their everyday tasks and links such applications to the determinant of salespersons’ performance. The paper concludes with a discussion of a number of critical issues such as salespersons privacy, risk of information overload, autonomy and some core areas of further research.

In this paper, we analyse Application Service Provisioning (ASP) by means of a framework derived from the strategic network approach presented in the management strategy literature. Our ex-post analysis focuses on a failed ASP project, in which a small software company and a large telecommunications operator formed an alliance in order to launch an innovative ASP software offering in the market. The objective of the paper is to operationalize the new strategic network oriented concepts in order to better understand and manage problems in developing integrated ASP offerings.

Our results from both conceptual and empirical work indicate that several important new issues can be raised if the ASP integration is examined as a strategic network (a kind of software ecosystem). We propose a framework that identifies these factors and test its power to predict success or failure in our case. On the basis of our analyses, we propose practical guidelines to be followed when moving from the management of products and services to the management of an ASP partnership network.

This paper reflects on the evaluation of three different technical models of ETP piloted in England in 2002. ETP architectures, message sets, message content, message volume, security and privacy issues, functionality, integration with local legacy systems, and usability were examined. The authors conclude that the technical implementation may be the lesser of the problems confronting successful adoption of such systems, with the critical success factors more closely related to the ways in which ETP models are instantiated in local systems used by prescribers and pharmacists, and their consequent impact on the business practices of those users. Other barriers to successful adoption of ETP were observed, including the requirement for changes in legislation to facilitate electronic communication with digital signatures, and the need to gain patient consent to use of ETP.

Call centres are a key business form in the modern information society. Call centres, based on e-work, allow flexibility in space concerning organisational locations. The long-term aim of our study is to understand factors behind establishments, locations and continued existence of call centres, and this paper is one step in this process. The paper illustrates call centre locations in two rural regions, Ljusdal in Sweden and Kuusamo in Finland. In the analysis we use a model for call centre location, based on our earlier studies in the field. The model consists of five factors that affect call centre location, or relocation, in a specific region; Business Environment and Community Related Factors, Communications and Organisation Related Considerations, Market Existence and Access, Resource Availability and Entrepreneurship. The paper illustrates how two regions give different prerequisites for call centre location.

It has been widely accepted that fairness is a critical property for electronic commerce. Fair payment protocol is designed to guarantee fairness in a payment process over asynchronous network. Fairness means that when the protocol terminates, either both parties get their expected items, or neither does. In this paper we first present a new generic offline fair payment protocol with fairness, timeliness and invisibility of TTP. Then we introduce the property of abuse-freeness into electronic payment and implement a fair abuse-free payment protocol.

The growth of mobile commerce is directly related to the increase of ownership and use of mobile personal, programmable communication devices, including mobile phones and PDAs. These devices provide effective authorisation and management of payment and banking transactions since they are capable of offering security and convenience advantages compared with existing methods, such as credit/debit card transactions and online payments through a PC. Some of these advantages are part of the existing devices’ functionality while others require modest, inexpensive enhancements likely to be incorporated in the mobile devices to come. It is expected that the use of secure and convenient mobile personal devices can revolutionise the payment, banking and investment industries worldwide. This paper presents SEMOPS, a secure mobile payment service implemented on innovative technological solutions and introducing a competitive business enabler of mobile commerce. SEMOPS intends to exploit the business opportunities inherent in the billing, customer-service, technical relationships and banking services among mobile customers, mobile operators and banks in order to offer a competitive solution to existing payment services.

The notion of service is closely coupled with the notion of process in general and of workflow in particular. Processes capture the coordination logic for the various resources involved in the realisation of the service content. Moreover, processes drive the actual delivery of a service. Internal processes underpin the capabilities of a service provider. Delivery processes underpin contractual agreements between service providers and consumers. In both cases, the ability to adapt service processes in response to changing environmental conditions is fundamental. Change must be rapid but at the same time accurate and consistent. In this paper, we present the framework for automated process transformation developed within the context of the FRESCO (Foundational Research on Service Composition) initiative. The conceptual part of the framework builds on the standard workflow meta-model proposed by the WfMC (Workflow Management Coalition). The change logic is expressed by transformation rules that can be automatically applied to the processes underpinning a service. The technical part of the framework specifically targets Web service platforms and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language).

One of the public administration big challenges is the need to integrate services in order to offer a wide variety of new services, more suitable and better designed, that can be electronically accessed in a uniform way. Recently, the Web Service technology appeared with the promise to compose services through the Internet in a simple way. Despite the Web Services advantages, minimal technology independence is desirable at the design of such compositions in order to guarantee and preserve all the efforts invested in the development of services. In this article a Service Composition Management Framework is proposed, that focuses in a technology-independent description. The referred framework is part of a more complete platform, developed for the electronic delivery of Government services.

The Internet has become an important part in every day life for many users. It has changed from an instrument to exchange and link scientific data to an economical and social place, where people spend their working and spare time. But the underlying technology has not adapted to the newly risen demands of communication and collaboration. The user is almost isolated and anonymous when using the web, while still leaving traces threatening their data security and privacy. There is no global concept of “digital citizens” modern collaboration applications could base on. To overcome this lack, this paper introduces an approach of identity enriched session management. It offers the possibility to integrate different (and distinguishable!) users into meaningful relationships. This paper presents the essential concepts of identity enriched sessions and a prototypical realisation which have been developed in the “open net environment for Citizens” (onefC) project.

This paper reviews the concepts of virtual communities and electronic marketplaces and, in particular, their relevance for SMEs. A specific example of a Regional Electronic Marketplace (REM) using a Community Web model is examined within this context. The author reviews the underlying philosophy for the project and the planning which preceded implementation. A review of the case highlights the issues which are critical for successful implementation and provides a framework to guide future REM developments. The case is analysed within an e-community context and recommendations made for future portal developments. Finally the author questions the readiness of SMEs to adopt a virtual organisation model.

Online grocery shopping is a specialised subset of online shopping with difficulties all of its own. Most of these occur, not at the front end of customer ordering, but during the last mile: the home delivery process. A study of third party fulfilment in Australia has demonstrated the existence of an optimal seven-step model for linking the lowest possible delivery costs to a given customer density. Developed from a national case example, our model shows that as volume of deliveries increases, cost characteristics and activities fall within seven clearly bounded stages as business volumes increase. Where competition is centred around this component of grocery sales, e-grocers wishing to compete using a cost leadership strategy are likely to reduce their prices (to customers) to such levels. However, a survey of Australian e-Grocers indicates that some may be immune to this pressure, and therefore continue to pocket very significant profits derived from e-fulfilment.

e-Business evolution is generally presented as a highly dynamic process where organisations focus on business transformation and the creation of the agile extended enterprise. What is not well understood however is how organisations can plan for this process and whether standard business strategy formulation approaches can apply in such a dynamic environment. The research presented in this paper resulted from a longitudinal analysis of e-business governance and implementation involving eleven international organisations over a four-year period using multiple interviews and extensive secondary data collection. Three separate research models were used to analyse different stages of e-business growth and the results of this multi-stage analysis consolidated into a staged model of e-business governance. This model identifies three different orientations of the business during the transformation process as Integration, Differentiation and Virtualisation and associated with these three different strategic formulation approaches which will align with e-business governance. These together provide for a co-evolutionary approach to e-governance

This paper presents a model for describing inter-organizational collaborations for e-commerce, e-government and e-business applications. The model, referred to as a community model, takes into account internal organizational rules and business policies as typically stated in business contracts that govern cross-collaborations. The model can support the development of a new generation of contract management systems that provide true inter-organizational collaboration capabilities to all parties involved in contract management. This includes contract monitoring features and dynamic updates to the processes and policies associated with contracts. We present a blueprint architecture for inter-organizational contract management and a contract language based on the community model. This language can be used to specialize this architecture for concrete collaborative structures and business processes.

Changing competitive environment forces companies to innovate and renew their business models towards a more value-adding and customer-centric direction. Often, a prerequisite for this is that the companies are willing to combine their capabilities by co-operating and creating long-term strategic networks with each other. The formation of networks is a cyclical learning process, along which the infrastructure and strategies emerge incrementally through mutual adjustment.

We analyze such network formation process among three companies that are operating in separate but complementary industries. They are seeking to expand their service offering through the use of ICT. We reflect upon this development with the state-of-the-art research on the networked organizations and business models. It seems that business models are necessary and useful in depicting the areas of adjustments within and between the organizations in the networked setting.

The ups and downs of e-business investments are related to a hype cycle. This hype cycle strengthened the statement that companies are too willing to believe in the promises of the new Internet economy without really thinking about internet-ability. According to the data in this practice-oriented survey work, SMEs are more eager to follow the e-business hype cycle. We try to give some explanations for these differences in e-business between SMEs and large companies. This requires an examination of the planning, the drivers and the barriers for conducting business processes over a computer-mediated network. We found that larger companies are mainly driven by cost-cutting to implement e-business, while SMEs attach, next to cost-savings, high importance to cooperation between their suppliers and clients. Furthermore, we can observe that larger companies see more opportunities in translating their ebusiness strategy into a formal long-term plan. This explains perhaps why larger companies are less trend sensitive for investing in e-business than SMEs.

The standard perceived usefulness and ease-of-use items of technology acceptance model were developed for organizational contexts, but they are also used in studies of consumer acceptance of electronic commerce. However, the terms used in the items are to some extent ambiguous. It is difficult to evaluate improvement in productivity, performance or effectiveness in purchasing products online. In this paper, items from a few recent electronic commerce studies applying technology acceptance model are summarised. Web-based qualitative data is analysed and the emerged features of electronic commerce that are important to consumers are compared with the measurement items from prior research. Finally, a combination of items based on the comparison is proposed. Consumers perceive the 24/7 accessibility of Web shopping site as useful, but this feature has not been measured in the prior studies reviewed here.