Big data in the public sector: Uncertainties and readiness

Big data is being implemented with success in the private sector and science. Yet the public sector seems to be falling behind, despite the potential value of big data for government. Government organizations do recognize the opportunities of big data but seem uncertain about whether they are ready for the introduction of big data, and if they are adequately equipped to use big data. This paper addresses those uncertainties. It presents an assessment framework for evaluating public organizations’ big data readiness. Doing so demystifies the concept of big data, as it is expressed in terms of specific and measureable organizational characteristics. The framework was tested by applying it to organizations in the Dutch public sector. The results suggest that organizations may be technically capable of using big data, but they will not significantly gain from these activities if the applications do not fit their organizations and main statutory tasks. The framework proved helpful in pointing out areas where public sector organizations could improve, providing guidance on how government can become more big data ready in the future.     

Evaluating e-government: learning from the experiences of two UK local authorities

Abstract. Part of the remit of public sector management includes planning and reflecting on capital expenditure on new technology. With this in mind, the role that information systems play in supporting improvements in e-government service delivery to stakeholder groups continues to attract much attention. The authors of this paper seek to define the scope and role that information systems evaluation plays within the public sector. In particular, the authors assess whether public sector organizations might benefit from the use of established ex-ante evaluation techniques, when applied to analyse the impact of e-government information systems. Following a comprehensive review of the normative literature, an initial conceptual framework for public sector information systems evaluation is proposed, which is then empirically explored within two local government authorities. The conceptual framework is then revised by using the structured case approach, which is dependent on an iterative research cycle where triangulated data are elicited. This then supports the emergence of new concepts during each research cycle that leads to the view that information systems evaluation in the public sector is a process of experiential and subjective judgement, which is grounded in opinion and world views. This leads the authors to challenge the appropriateness of traditional modes of investment appraisal when applied in the public sector. The finalized framework embraces investment decisions, evaluation methods, culture and structure, as well as post hoc evaluation. It emphasizes the importance of situated, interpretive user assessments in evaluating e-government investments.     

Outsourcing in the private and public sectors: an unpredictable IT strategy

IT outsourcing has grown considerably in the private sector, with IT software and service suppliers reporting increased revenues. Similarly in the public sector, the introduction of market testing and compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) will inevitably lead to the contracting-out of significant levels of IT work. This may lead to the demise of some public sector IT departments where external bids are favoured over those offered by the in-house team. This paper is divided into two sections. First, it considers some of the relevant literature on IT outsourcing in both private and public sector British and American organizations. It draws together important themes which explain the attraction of IT outsourcing to senior executives. Second, it introduces the results from a questionnaire survey of nearly 200 UK private and public sector organizations on IT outsourcing. In particular it looks at the proportion of organizations that claims to use outsourcing, how contracts are negotiated and the type of IT solutions preferred by IT managers. The central argument is that IT outsourcing poses significant challenges to both private and public sector organizations and is not simply a quick-fix panacea. Moreover, public sector IT managers would do well to analyse some of the less favourable reports from private sector outsourcing as they gear themselves up for CCT in the months ahead.     

Big data and smart cities: a public sector organizational learning perspective

Public sector organizations (city authorities) have begun to explore ways to exploit big data to provide smarter solutions for cities. The way organizations learn to use new forms of technology has been widely researched. However, many public sector organisations have found themselves in new territory in trying to deploy and integrate this new form of technology (big data) to another fast moving and relatively new concept (smart city). This paper is a cross-sectional scoping study—from two UK smart city initiatives—on the learning processes experienced by elite (top management) stakeholders in the advent and adoption of these two novel concepts. The findings are an experiential narrative account on learning to exploit big data to address issues by developing solutions through smart city initiatives. The findings revealed a set of moves in relation to the exploration and exploitation of big data through smart city initiatives: (a) knowledge finding; (b) knowledge reframing; (c) inter-organization collaborations and (d) ex-post evaluations. Even though this is a time-sensitive scoping study it gives an account on a current state-of-play on the use of big data in public sector organizations for creating smarter cities. This study has implications for practitioners in the smart city domain and contributes to academia by operationalizing and adapting Crossan et al’s (Acad Manag Rev 24(3): 522–537, 1999) 4I model on organizational learning.     

Global Positioning Systems: an analysis of applications,current development and future implementations

The commercial sector is constantly looking for new ways to become more efficient and effective in their business. Researchers are always busy looking for the new technology that will create a boom in the industry. Around for a few years, Global Positioning Systems (GPS) may be the next technology that will push companies into higher productivity. We are seeing these systems become more prevalent with the passing of time. Companies are adopting this technology and merging it with their current infrastructures to improve their efficiency and create better customer service. This technology has the potential to change the way that all companies do business. As more and more companies adopt GPS to create a competitive advantage, it will become a standard for the rest to follow.     

基于最大F距离码的McEliece公钥密码体制

基于F度量,构造了最大F距离码,提出了基于最大F距离码的新McEliece公钥密码系统。合法接收者通过引入一个随机矩阵X作为附加私钥,并把X加入到原始公钥中,从而产生了一个新的公钥,使该密码系统能够有效抗击敌手通过已知的公钥获得私钥的攻击。同时F度量的引入,提高了攻击密钥体积较小的公钥密码系统的复杂度和难度。通过对现有可行攻击方法的分析,说明了基于最大F距离码的新McEliece公钥密码系统是安全可行的。     

The Integrity of the Managerial State

Corruption is back on the public agenda in many European countries. After years of neglect and diffidence, politicians, administrators and scholars have voiced serious concern about the moral integrity of the public sector. However, there is something peculiar about these debates in The Netherlands. As yet, there is no empirical data available that confirms this generally accepted picture of a public service tainted by corruption. This paper tries to explain this huge discrepancy between public concern and empirical data. The public concern, it is argued, is not just a matter of symbolics or bureau-politics, it is also a case of institutional insecurity, caused by the transformation that the public sector is going through. Never before has government in The Netherlands, as in many other Western countries, engaged in commercial or market-oriented activities as it has in the last decade. Step by step, the managerial state is replacing the administrative state. The present public debate about integrity in government is at least partially a reflection of the struggle in the public sector to cope with the issues that are raised by the managerial shift in Western governments. Some of the issues are probably transitional in character; they can be designed away. Some important parts of the managerial shift might cause permanent perplexities. The reason for this could be the institutional instability, both normatively and practically, of mixed arrangements.     

In the hands of machines? The future of aged care

It is remarkable how much robotics research is promoted by appealing to the idea that the only way to deal with a looming demographic crisis is to develop robots to look after older persons. This paper surveys and assesses the claims made on behalf of robots in relation to their capacity to meet the needs of older persons. We consider each of the roles that has been suggested for robots in aged care and attempt to evaluate how successful robots might be in these roles. We do so from the perspective of writers concerned primarily with the quality of aged care, paying particular attention to the social and ethical implications of the introduction of robots, rather than from the perspective of robotics, engineering, or computer science. We emphasis the importance of the social and emotional needs of older persons—which, we argue, robots are incapable of meeting—in almost any task involved in their care. Even if robots were to become capable of filling some service roles in the aged-care sector, economic pressures on the sector would most likely ensure that the result was a decrease in the amount of human contact experienced by older persons being cared for, which itself would be detrimental to their well-being. This means that the prospects for the ethical use of robots in the aged-care sector are far fewer than first appears. More controversially, we believe that it is not only misguided, but actually unethical, to attempt to substitute robot simulacra for genuine social interaction. A subsidiary goal of this paper is to draw attention to the discourse about aged care and robotics and locate it in the context of broader social attitudes towards older persons. We conclude by proposing a deliberative process involving older persons as a test for the ethics of the use of robots in aged care.We dedicate this paper to the memory of Jean Woodroffe, whose strength and courage at the end of her life journey inspired the authors’ interest in aged-care issues.     

Following the cognitive work analysis train of thought: exploring the constraints of modal shift to rail transport

Environmental concerns show that transport is responsible for almost a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, and it is also the fastest growing sector. Modal shift towards public transport could help slow down, or even reverse, this trend. There appear to be a number of constraints that are preventing this from happening. This paper explores the constraints to modal shift to rail transport from the perspective of cognitive work analysis, specifically the abstraction hierarchy, the contextual activity template and social organisational and cooperation analyses. Whilst these analyses may not present any new barriers, they do show how the constraints are interlinked in an explicit manner. These interrelations are important for two reasons. First, in consideration of constraint removal, one must anticipate the likely effects on the remainder of the system. Second, by linking functions and situations, new concepts of travel may be identified and explored.

Practitioner Summary: The purpose of this study was to use a semi-structured approach to identifying constraints to modal shift from a variety of perspectives. It is argued that cognitive work analysis offers a new way of thinking about the modal shift problem and helps to generate new insights into potential solutions.     

Central banking in a transitory economy: an adaptive control model for India

The purpose of this paper is to formulate a policy model for the Indian economy, incorporating an expectation generating mechanism in a formal way. The aim is to see how policies will change over time when the expectation of the private sector is changing. In a mixed economy planning has to take into account how the private sector formulates and revises its expectation regarding various government policies and their possible impacts on the endogenous variables (or target variables) in the economy. Normally in an economy like India's the government formulates its plan for the public sector over the next five years. The government can regulate the private sector by various means, such as licences, investment quotas, tax-subsidy rates, bank interest rates and by various monetary controls. The private sector, knowing the targets of the government, formulates its own expectations regarding the fulfulments of the targets (because it never expects that the government can fulfil its targets exactly) and possible movements of various policies. It behaves according to its expectations and realization of past expectations and thus allocates its resources. So the optimum design of public policies should be to direct the private sectors towards the desired goals defined by the planners, taking into account the reactions of the private sector. The purpose of public policy in such an environment should be to formulate different central bank policies regarding money stock, credit expansion and components of the money multiplier along with government discount rate, and the exchange rate so that the private sector would react in the desired way, given the goals set by the planners regarding national income, balance of payments, domestic absorptions and prices.     

CIOs: the only competent university administrators

Some interesting differences between the folks who become college and university vice presidents and the CIO equivalents who run IT infrastructures at universities. It is probably worth noting that higher-education institutions, especially public ones, have greatly different goals than private-sector organizations: Simply stated, private companies are in business to make money, and public education institutions are in business to spend it. Clearly, the skill sets required to accomplish these goals are different. Performance-based promotions are more common in industry. In successful companies, middle- and upper-level managers are mostly competent and competitive survivors who have proven themselves through quantifiable successes. This is so unlike higher education, where promotions often take place on the basis of meeting government quotas, being someone's good friend, being collegial, or just applying persistently for administrative positions somewhere, anywhere, until hired. Expecting a professor to become an effective administrator is like expecting an orange to become an apple. Higher education teaches people who become professors to be individual contributors. Graduate work and dissertations are a personal endeavor. Promotion within the ranks results exclusively from individual effort. Even teaching is an individual effort; as long as no student complains, instructors can do whatever they like in the classroom. So what exactly qualifies an ex-professor to take on personnel and budgetary responsibility in large, complex organizations? Unfortunately, the answer is nothing. In our 21st century IT-dependent world, failures in the IT department are highly visible to everyone, with very real consequences to the entire user community. It's no surprise that the only real insight of university administrators has been to hire CIOs who have real-world experience; someone has to.     

Halley's method for the matrix sector function

The matrix n-sector function is a generalization of the matrix sign function; it can be used to determine the number of eigenvalues of a matrix in a specific sector of the complex plane and to extract the eigenpairs belonging to this sector without explicitly computing the eigenvalues. It is known that Newton's method, which can be used for computing the matrix sign function, is not globally convergent for the matrix sector function. The only existing algorithm for computing the matrix sector function is based on the continued fraction expansion approximation to the principal nth root of an arbitrary complex matrix. In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm based on Halley's generalized iteration formula for solving nonlinear equations. It is shown that the iteration has good error propagation properties and high accuracy. Finally, we give two application examples and summarize the results of our numerical experiments comparing Newton's, the continued fraction, and Halley's method     

The application of artificial intelligence in auditing: Looking back to the future

ICT-based decision aids are currently making waves in the modern business world simultaneously with increased pressure on auditors to play a more effective role in the governance and control of corporate entities. This paper aims to review the main research efforts and current debates on auditors’ use of artificial intelligent systems, with a view to predicting future directions of research and software development in the area. The paper maps the development process of artificial intelligent systems in auditing in the light of their identified benefits and drawbacks. It also reviews previous research efforts on the use of expert systems and neural networks in auditing and the implications thereof. The synthesis of these previous studies revealed certain research vacuum which future studies in the area could fill. Such areas include matching the benefits of adopting these intelligent agents with their costs, assessing the impact of artificial intelligence on internal control systems’ design and monitoring as well as audit committees’ effectiveness, and implications of using such systems for small and medium audit firms’ operations and survival, audit education, public sector organisations’ audit, auditor independence and audit expectations-performance gap.     

Hellenic cadastre: state of the art experience,proposals and future strategies

In 1994, the Hellenic government, with the support of the European Union, started a project for the establishment of the Hellenic Cadastre (HC), which will be a title registration information system in fully digital form. It is estimated, that this project will last 20 years and it will cover the whole country. So far, digital photogrammetric Cadastral Surveys (CSs), named Pilot Phase and Main Program, of a total area of 893,000 ha have been commissioned and executed in various areas of Greece; 250,000 ha more were commissioned within the year 2000. Through this work, a surprisingly high level of cooperation between the private and public sector has been achieved. This paper focuses on the research and the progress that has been made in all scientific fields, such as the definition of the content of this project, the implementation of the responsible institutions/agencies for the HC, their administrative structure, the proposed regional structure, the development of the National Legal Framework for the compilation of the CSs, the adjudication procedure and maintenance issues. An emphasis is given to the experience so far gained in the legal and technical aspects, and especially to the proposals for an improvement of the methods, and to the attempt to create a cost recovery business culture for maximizing the products and services, which can be supported by the HC. This project requires major international and local experience and a high level of research in all the above mentioned issues, which has to be applied successfully.     

A systematic approach to analysis for assessing the security level of cyber-physical systems in the electricity sector

In a context of digitalization and technological evolution in all aspects of our lives, the electricity sector could not be left behind. This opens up a new range of possibilities until now unthinkable, which will facilitate the progress and services that we will be able to enjoy thanks to the development of the smart grid. But it also poses new challenges, both technological and in terms of cybersecurity, as the electricity sector takes on an increasingly important role in our lives. Therefore, after an analysis of the main incidents that have affected the energy sector, a general study is made of the standards that affect it, especially the IEEE 1686 and IEC 62,351 standards, in order to develop a simple and practical methodology to assess the level of security of the cyber-physical systems and equipment that makes up an electrical installation. The aforementioned methodology is developed based on a selection of specific requirements from the aforementioned standards that will serve as a starting point for the development of a series of specific compliance tests to assess the equipment to be installed or modified in a smart grid. This is because every measure is too little to put a stop to the successes achieved so far by cybercriminals. To this end, it is necessary to set out one of the many routes initiated by the many standards, norms, and laws, and thus define an effective and efficient path that will allow us to establish secure pillars on which to build the future.     

Dismantling the silos: extracting new value from IT investments in public administration

The drive for information technology‐led organizational and operational change in public administration has lagged behind that in the private sector. For good reasons, central public administrations are conservative by nature. Most public administrations are bureaucracies and bureaucracies tend to resist change. Nevertheless the pressure to obtain better value from public administration information technology investments is growing and the debate as to how to achieve this is increasingly important. Part of this debate is concerned with how best to confront the formidable and specific challenges faced by the sector. These include cultural, structural, resource and technical problems as well as a legacy of isolated developments which do not interrelate. The difficulties are compounded by the problems of evaluation generally in public administration – problems which are reflected in the evaluation of public sector information systems. This drive for change is reviewed and discussed in the context of the Irish civil service, in which there is a growing awareness of the strategic importance of breaking down specialized vertical systems and providing an integrated service to the citizen. A new approach to the problem, based on adapting the concept of business objects, is suggested.     

A Reference Architecture for the Certification of E-Services in a Digital Government Infrastructure

Certifying the execution of a service is a critical issue for an e-government infrastructure. In fact being able to document that an e-service was actually carried out, given the legal value that is often attached to data managed and exchanged by public administrations, is of the utmost importance. This is made more complex in cases, like it often happens in the public administration sector, where e-services are based on legacy systems managed by autonomous and independent organizations. In this paper we discuss the introduction, within the standard three tier architecture for e-services, of an architectural subsystem providing certification functions. This architecture features both physical and functional independence from the application level and is made up by new control components providing a highly efficient solution for certification requirements. Our solution has been successfully tested in real-world systems developed in Italy to support digital government functions.     

工程制图历史演变现状改革和未来发展的研究

一个有价值的学科,除了适应当前的发展需要外,还应对发展趋势有所预 见,并包含新的内容。虽然预计发展趋势有时是困难的,但作者仍在本文中作了些尝试。工 程制图的发展是历史的延续,工程制图的现状还不能适应科学技术、生产制造迅速发展的需 要,工程制图需要实验,以实验推动课程,形成实验发展理论,理论推动实验的良性循环, 是工程制图可持续发展的有效途径。     

Relating IT strategy and organizational culture: an empirical study of public sector units in India

This paper analyzes the relationships between selected aspects of organizational culture and IT-Strategy in public sector units (PSUs). Organization culture, which is treated as a shared set of norms and values, is analyzed with respect to IT-Strategies. Organizational culture is assessed in terms of innovative, supportive and bureaucratic cultures. IT strategy is viewed as comprising six generic strategies, namely, centrally planned, leading edge, scarce resource, necessary evil, monopoly and free market. The data on which conclusions were drawn arises from a nation-wide survey covering 72 public sector organizations in India. In addition to the survey research, we conducted an in-depth case study of State Bank of India. This yearlong study commenced in 1996. Statistically significant findings show that it is the innovative element of a PSUs organizational culture that is associated with a delineable IT strategy. Leading edge, free market, and monopoly IT-strategies are found to be related to innovative components of organizational culture. Monopoly and scarce resource strategies are associated with supportive and bureaucratic cultures, respectively. Our case study validates some of these findings in a large bank. Implications for practice as well as research are provided.     

Administrative evaluation and public sector reform: an analytic hierarchy process approach

The objective of this paper is to propose a rational approach to administrative evaluation, including one prospective way to delegate authorities from the public sector to alternative sectors in the process of public sector reform. Specifically, we show how to match projects of a local government with alternative sectors rationally by using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. The matching process consists of three steps: evaluating projects of a local government; characterizing alternative sectors; and deriving overall judgments. The results of this paper quantitatively clarify the evaluation of projects and the characteristic of sectors, and it is concluded that 35% of local government projects should be devolved from the public sector to alternative sectors.