Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective

Customers are no longer passive consumer of products and services and engaged in a more active role in which they influence the organizations, develop and improve products and change the consuming experience [1]. This new role and collaborative trend is often defined as co-production. The present article had as it main objective to survey the models, frameworks, methods, recommendations, evaluations, definitions, concepts, challenges, required conditions, difficulties and learned lessons related to co-production of digital services. We performed a systematic review to identify the literature produced dealing with these questions from 1998 to 2016. Our systematic review followed the protocol recommended by [12]. After the definition of six research questions, we defined the scope of the survey and the related keywords. The search query produced 94 references. Two thematic axis emerged from the data: models and definitions of co-production (57%) and cases, challenges and implementation details (43%). Most articles were published in conferences (26), followed by journals (17). The selected articles were read and the main findings presented. Findings are presented along implications. Suggestions for future research agenda are presented.

Many governments have implemented software agents – virtual civil servants (VCSs) – in order to offer citizens better experiences when they choose the service they require. However, VCSs have not created as many benefits as was originally expected of them, leaving citizens frustrated and dissatisfied. Consequently, effective VCS design has become a critical issue. Grounded on previous research into co-creation, we suggest that citizens would perceive VCSs to be more effective if the agents were to engage them in the co-creation process by interacting directly with them; this would also enable the VCSs to provide services that are more closely aligned with citizens’ preferences. Hence, this study will contribute to e-Government literature by explaining how a co-creation policy regarding VCSs’ might impact on both citizens’ behavior and on their subsequent acceptance of what they have to offer. A key practical implication of our findings, therefore, is that governments may benefit substantially from collating citizens’ preferences, while citizens would receive the required services more effectively, thereby engendering a sense of satisfaction toward their governments.

Process management used as a managerial strategy can allow organizations to improve performance. Hence the need to understand the factors that may cause interference when adopting this strategy in an organization. Based on academic literature, a research tool was developed contemplating six critical factors that potentially impact the implementation of Process Management strategies. The research was divided into two phases: the first phase confirmed the conceptual model by means of 141 observations obtained from the State Audit Court of the state of Mato Grosso (Tribunal de Contas do Mato Grosso - TCE-MT); the second phase conducted an analysis of structural equations using the partial least squares regression method. The results reveal that Governance, Performance and People factors positively impact the process-oriented organizational culture of the TCE-MT.

This work addresses the problem of Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC) on an electronic voting scenario. Electoral datasets containing voting choices linked to voters demographic profile information, can be used to perform fine-grained analysis of citizen opinion. However, it is strongly required to protect voters’ privacy. Traditional SDC techniques study methods to met some predefined privacy criteria, assuming a trustworthy owner that knows the values of the confidential attributes. Unfortunately, this assumption cannot be made in our scenario, since its dataset contains secret voting choices, which are unknown until they are properly anonymized and decrypted. We propose a protocol and a system architecture to perform SDC in datasets with encrypted attributes, while minimizing the amount of information an attacker can learn about the secret data. The protocol enables the release of electoral datasets, which allow governments and third parties to gain more insight into citizen opinion, and improve decision making processes and public services.

In 2017, the encryption vulnerability of a widespread chip led to major, nation-wide eID card incidents in several EU countries. In this paper, we investigate the Estonian case. We start with an analysis of the Estonian eID field in terms of stakeholders and their responsibilities. Then, we describe the incident management from the inside perspective of the crisis management team, covering the whole incident timeline (including issues in response, continuity and recovery). From this, we are able to derive key factors in coping with large-scale security vulnerabilities in the eID field (public-private partnership, technical factors, crisis management, documentation), which encourages further research and systematization.

Strategic alignment is a key challenge in many organizations, even in the public sector. This paper concentrates on the formal aspects of alignment (organisational design), the method is based on a strategic alignment perspective-driven approach, by integrating alignment concepts to enterprise architecture management models. Misalignment symptoms were translated into architecture models providing testable rules for analysis. The empirical investigation focuses on a road management authority, and rule testing approaches were used to identify formally described misalignment symptoms in the EA models. Several misalignment symptoms were discovered and assessed with the framework. The proposed approach can be an efficient method to analyse alignment problems and facilitate strategic harmonization in public sector organizations.

The present paper investigates public sector websites in Norway by focusing on municipalities. Norway consists of 422 municipalities each of which has its own website. To help inform the increasing investments and use of technologies within eGovernment, this study focuses on young people’s perceptions of municipality websites. Today’s young people constitute a key user group in the coming years. The following research questions are investigated: (1) How frequently do young people visit municipality websites and for what reasons? (2) Do young people prefer physical meetings or online communication when interacting with municipalities? (3) How do young people perceive the quality of municipality websites, when evaluating content, design, and usability? An online survey was conducted with undergraduate students (n = 200) in Norway. Findings suggest that young adults do not widely use municipality websites and that they visit primarily to search for specific information or use digital services. Results also suggest that young adults prefer digital interaction over face-to-face communication, and email and chat are their most favored ways to interact with the public sector. They consider paper-based communication undesirable. Participants ranked the quality of municipality websites as moderate to good but were not overwhelmingly positive. The paper ends with concluding remarks and suggestions for future research.

Digitalization is the main driver aiming at the integration of digital technologies into everyday life. The motto is making digital everything that can be digitized and converting information into digital format. One core element for growth is the avid gathering of data via automatic devices. Extensive data collections lead to the realm usually labelled with the notion Big Data. This is a term for data sets so large/complex that traditional data processing application software is inadequate to deal with them. Under the label “Big Data” convincing promises are stated yet also threats and difficulties occur underlining the dark side of development (Big Brother).

In order for a participatory democracy to exist, the population must participate in public affairs. However, exercising citizenship requires preparation, which is a top concern of Brazilian public policy management councils. The focus of this research is the articulation between the State Audit Court of the state of Mato Grosso (Tribunal de Contas do Mato Grosso – TCE-MT) and public policy management councils. This article presents the results of a combined effort of different government institutions in adopting innovative digital technology as a tool used in Distance Education to integrate and empower the community, encourage citizen control and thus generate public value. This tool allowed access to and engagement of citizens from different backgrounds and led to the construction of new concepts and ideas that are engrained in these environments.

Universities have been considered as potential sources of scientific development; therefore, they are involved in processes of Technology Commercialization (TC), associated with licensing and transfer to the market and/or society. The goal of this work is to develop and validate an instrument for the identification and analysis of the Critical Success Factors (CSF) in the commercialization of technologies in public Universities – radar framework. A bibliometric and systematic review, and interviews with specialists, provided a theoretical and empirical foundation that consider the process, mechanisms, ways, and means of commercialization, as well as the promotion and management of marketing policies. A Radar framework was built with four dimensions and explicit indicators to evaluate the CSF in public Universities. A framework contains enough elements to be used as an instrument to identify and analyze the CSF in the TC in Public Universities. The framework characteristics are especially useful for universities monitoring the factors for the improvement of the Technology Commercialization (TC) process, setting the groundwork for future studies related to this subject.

The GDPR (GDPR, REGULATION (EU) 2016/679 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation)) introduces the self-assessment of digital risks and the modulation of duties on the basis of the impact assessment analysis, including specific measures that intend to safeguard the data subject’s human dignity and fundamental rights. Semantic web technologies and legal reasoning tools can support privacy-by-default and legal compliance. In this light, this paper presents a first draft of a legal ontology on the GDPR, called PrOnto, that has the goal of providing a legal knowledge modelling of the privacy agents, data types, types of processing operations, rights and obligations. The methodology used here is based on legal theory analysis joined with ontological patterns.

The PMKI project is an European Commission action aiming to create a public multilingual knowledge management infrastructure to support e-commerce solutions in a multilingual environment. Such infrastructure will consist in a set of tools able to create interoperability between multilingual classification systems (like thesauri) and other language resources, so that they can be easily accessible through a Web dissemination platform and reusable by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as well as by public administrations. In this paper the standards used to represent language resources and a methodology for automatic mapping between thesauri, based on an information retrieval framework, are presented.

In this paper we take the vantage point of the law as a prism through which to observe the new relation that has taken shape between public sector bodies and the citizenry in view of the knowledge enabled by digital technologies. More to the point, we analyse the right to know vis-à-vis the government and its institutions, assessing the way the changes brought about by technology in the digital space are reshaping digital rights, entrusted with striking a new and complex balance between citizens and the government.

We will specifically address the right to access government data. To this end we will consider the way the law has evolved in Italy, with a focus on Legislative Decree 97/2016 and the deep changes it has made to Legislative Decree 33/2013, providing tools for greater transparency and knowledge of government activity and administration. We highlight the deep transformation that has resulted from these changes, affecting the legal relationship between public sector bodies and citizens.

The previous decade has witnessed numerous open data initiatives by various levels of government around the globe to promote transparency and accountability. One crucial area is government spending or public procurement. This paper reports on an attempt to utilize purchasing data published under the international open data program of the European Union aimed at making available all expenditure data over certain thresholds from 33 European countries. The data had been planned to be used in research aimed at investigating spending and contract awarding patterns within the EU. However, the structure and quality of the data as it has been published in CSV format leave questions about accountability, and this paper serves as a functional primer warning beginner-users of the experientially-based issues of utilizing this and other open data. Key messages include that given its size and complexity this dataset is not for the faint of heart and that no current quality frameworks appear readily able to help.

Although the concept of ‘open data’ has been around for some time, it has gained more attention in the public sphere over the last decade. This momentum has attracted the interest of ‘mainstream’ e-Government researchers as well, what is well indicated by the increased number of papers addressing the topic. Even though this interest seemed to be declining two-three years ago, the idea of reusing public sector data provided new ammunition to do research into this phenomenon. This paper relies on the latest literature and relevant studies to review the research area of open government data and to offer recommendations regarding potential research directions that could advance our understanding of the challenges facing the reuse of public sector information.

In the current globalized scenario, open innovation applied to the public sector is becoming increasingly prominent. This model allows organizations to achieve greater breadth of ideas, which, coupled with internal practices, expand the field of solutions to problems in society. Therefore, glimpses the adoption and use of technological platforms for the management of ideas and open innovation, in order to promote greater relationship and collaboration between governments and citizens. In this context, considering the potential contributions of technological platforms and crowdstorm processes in promoting innovations and improvements in organizations, the present work tries to understand the processes of adoption, implantation and use of a technological platform of ideas management associated with crowdstorm processes, applied to a public university in Brazil. The main objective is to describe the project, here called “Open University: Innovative Solutions”, involving all the processes related to the implantation and use of the PremioIdeia® Technology Platform associated with the crowdstorm approach in a Public University in Brazil. The numbers associated with the project and the themes challenges evidence that crowdstorming brought benefits to the university, such as a greater appreciation of collaborations, the commitment of participants and also a greater interaction among students, teachers and university management. Based on this, it is suggested that projects of this nature can be carried out in other public universities in order to meet a specific demand for academic and administrative improvements and, in this way, promote the growth and evolution of the country’s public universities.

The food industry and food safety authorities show an increasing interest in Big Data applications. On the one hand, Big Data strengthens data storage, data mashup, and methodology of risk assessment; on the other hand, the presence of risks and challenges linked to Big Data demands for future-proof solutions. While business practices and academic literature have already identified ways of exploiting the value of large collections of data, emerging governance issues including data sovereignty, competition, privacy and data donations, call for further analysis.

In public health services, business intelligence (BI) is used by medical secretaries, nurses, doctors and economists. Although some research has investigated the use of information systems in this regard, the results have been inconclusive. One explanation could be unobserved heterogeneity. This paper aims to apply use and task characteristics as well as perceptions of BI quality and user characteristics to characterize BI usage based on end-user segments. The finite mixture partial least squares (FINMIX-PLS), Kruskal-Wallis test and Bonferroni post-hoc test are used to provide a clear picture of the characteristics affecting the use of BI. The user segments are estimated using a sample of 746 BI users from 12 public hospitals and their administrations. The results highlight three segments that are primarily characterized by differences in task compatibility, BI experience and education. Only 16.5% of the respondents fit the definition of a BI user found in the extant literature. The remaining 83.5% represents new user types. This research in progress contributes to the extant BI literature by identifying new types of BI users and by showing how critical success factors differ by user types. As user types are identified using a quantitative method, qualitative studies could be applied to extend the understanding of the various types.

Migration is a hot topic all over Europe these years mainly due to the wars in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraqi creating large flows of refugees. In addition, people in Africa migrate towards Europe as a consequence of unemployment, poverty, and climate changes. Also, within Europe, there has been challenges related to the free movement of people within the European Union, and the immigration of mainly Eastern European into UK has been mentioned as one of the main reasons to Brexit. Thus, in order to be prepared to meet the challenges related to migration, a decision-support tools is needed to handle immigration in an efficient but also human way. The current research describes how detailed population projections – dividing immigrants into different groups depending on their origin, can provide a sound foundation for decision making in the municipalities, which is the end destinations for the immigrants.