Managing e‐Government: value positions and relationships

Public sector managers take much of the responsibility for selecting, commissioning, implementing and realising benefits from information technology (IT) projects. However, e‐Government initiatives often suffer from complexity, vision failure, lack of goal clarity and insufficient commitment. These problems may stem from value traditions that are deeply ingrained in managers' cultural environments but not always in harmony with each other. A first step towards working with value complexity is to understand it; we synthesise a model of value positions for e‐Government derived from major traditions in the public administration literature. Four value positions relevant to e‐Government together with their IT assumptions are identified; they reflect the ideals of professionalism, efficiency, service and engagement. A qualitative investigation of Danish local authority managers displays both value congruence and value divergence. The interpretive study results in a theoretical model that combines value positions and relationships, and the model's implications for researchers and practitioners in focusing successful e‐Government initiatives are outlined.     

The role of e‐learning coaches in Australian secondary schools

The purpose of this study was to explore the personal experiences of e‐learning coaches working in secondary schools in order to provide information about the role of an e‐learning coach. Seven secondary schools in the outer‐eastern region of Melbourne, Australia, were involved in a 3‐year e‐learning project. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted by an independent researcher with an e‐learning coach from each of the seven schools involved in the research. A number of themes emerged from the interviews, including role confusion, changes in the role over time, the importance of establishing relationships, barriers to the uptake of information and communication technology (ICT) and ICT usage. To facilitate the integration of ICT with teaching practices in the secondary school setting, we recommend that a full‐time position for an on‐site e‐learning coach receiving the total support of school leaders is needed to provide relevant professional development and ongoing support to classroom teachers.     

Antecedents and consequences of e‐learning acceptance

Based on the technology acceptance model (TAM), this study uses the framework of the extended TAM to examine the antecedents and consequences for employees' acceptance of the e‐learning system within financial services organizations. The total of 328 useable responses collected from eight international or domestic financial services companies in Taiwan were tested against the model using structural equation modelling (SEM). The main research results are summarized as follows in terms of the antecedents of e‐learning acceptance and its impact on employees' perceived performance. Four types of determinants are demonstrated: individual factors, system factors, social factors and network externality factor. Finally, this study proposes relevant suggestions for practitioners and future researchers.     

Poverty alleviation through government‐led e‐commerce development in rural China: An activity theory perspective

This paper uses activity theoretic analyses to investigate the role of governments in developing rural e‐commerce ecosystems and the effects of such ecosystems on poverty alleviation. On the basis of a case study of Longnan, one of the poorest regions in China, this paper reports and analyses the various actions taken by local governments in nurturing, supporting, and regulating the development of a local rural e‐commerce ecosystem and using this ecosystem to transform poverty alleviation. Our study articulates a model of poverty alleviation through e‐commerce. By documenting and theorizing the mechanisms underlying rural e‐commerce development and poverty alleviation through e‐commerce as well as governments' role in developing and sustaining them, this paper contributes to establishing a “theory of the solution” to the grand challenge of poverty alleviation both in China and globally.     

Developing community capability for e‐commerce development in rural China: A resource orchestration perspective

Community capability enables a large number of rural citizens to cooperatively engage in e‐commerce as an e‐commerce cluster, and it thus plays a critical role in e‐commerce development in the rural regions of developing countries. Taking the resource orchestration perspective as the theoretical lens, this study investigates the process for developing community capability. Two cases of community capability development in rural Chinese villages are studied. The findings reveal two settings for community capability development—government supported and self‐orchestrated—and show that community capability is developed through the individual capabilities of lead users and the resource orchestration interactions of stakeholders. This study has theoretical implications because it reveals the importance of developing community capability by orchestrating resources beyond merely providing training and education to rural community members and because it identifies the processes for developing community capability in the two respective settings. It also extends the resource orchestration perspective from a single‐firm context to a community context by revealing the resource orchestration interactions.     

Collaborative recommendation of e‐learning resources: an experimental investigation

Repositories with educational resources can support the formation of online learning communities by providing a platform for collaboration. Users (e.g. teachers, tutors and learners) access repositories, search for interesting resources to access and use, and in many cases, also exchange experiences and opinions. A particular class of online services that take advantage of the collected knowledge and experience of users are collaborative filtering ones. The successful operation of such services in the context of real‐life applications requires careful testing and parameterization before their actual deployment. In this paper, the case of developing a learning resources' collaborative filtering service for an online community of teachers in Europe was examined. More specifically, a data set of evaluations of learning resources was collected from the teachers that use the European Schoolnet's learning resource portal. These evaluations were then used to support the experimental investigation of design choices for an online collaborative filtering service for the portal's learning resources. A candidate multi‐attribute utility collaborative filtering algorithm was appropriately parameterized and tested for this purpose. Results indicated that the development of such systems should be taking place considering the particularities of the actual communities that are to be served.     

Specification and testing of autonomous agents in e‐commerce systems

This paper presents a generic formal framework to specify and test autonomous e‐commerce agents. First, the formalism to represent the behaviour of agents is introduced. The corresponding machinery to define how implementations can be tested follows. Two testing approaches are considered. The first of them, which can be called active, is based on stimulating the implementation under test (IUT) with a test. The peculiarity is that tests will be defined as a special case of autonomous e‐commerce agent. The second approach, which can be called passive, consists of observing the behaviour of the tested agent in an environment containing other agents. As a case study the framework is applied to the e‐commerce system Kasbah. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Quality in e‐learning: a framework for promoting and assuring quality in virtual institutions

With the growing demand for e‐learning along with striving for excellence associated with globalization, there are worldwide calls for enhancing and assuring quality in e‐learning, specifically in the context of the developing countries. Such calls for quality enhancement, accountability, added value, value for money, self‐evaluation, and role players' satisfaction in higher education settings cannot go unheeded. Addressing the concerns regarding enhancing and assuring quality in e‐learning, a comprehensive e‐quality framework is developed by taking into account the pros and cons of the previous models, frameworks, and studies of e‐quality. This e‐quality framework offers a structured set of factors and benchmarks as a tool for practical quality work with e‐learning in virtual institutions.     

Improving the quality of e‐learning: lessons from the eMM

The quality of e‐learning can be defined in many different ways, reflecting different stakeholders and the complexity of the systems and processes used in higher education. These different conceptions of quality can be mutually contradictory and, while politically significant, may also be beyond the direct control or influence of institutional leaders. The e‐learning maturity model (eMM) provides a framework for e‐learning quality improvement that measures the capability of institutions to sustainably engage in e‐learning and visualizes that capability in a way that assists leaders and managers using that information to undertake systematic and targeted improvements in their institution's e‐learning activities. This paper synthesizes the outcomes of multiple international eMM assessments to extract a set of starting points for institutions intending to improve the quality of e‐learning experienced by their students.     

Belief‐rule‐based expert systems for evaluation of e‐government: a case study

Little knowledge exists on the impact and results associated with e‐government projects in many specific‐use domains. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of e‐government systems. Because the development of e‐government is a continuous process of improvement, it requires continuous evaluation of the overall e‐government system as well as evaluation of its various dimensions such as determinants, characteristics and results. E‐government development is often complex, with multiple stakeholders, large user bases and complex goals. Consequently, even experts have difficulties in evaluating these systems, especially in an integrated and comprehensive way, as well as on an aggregate level. Expert systems are a candidate solution to evaluate such complex e‐government systems. However, it is difficult for expert systems to cope with uncertain evaluation data that are vague, inconsistent, highly subjective or in other ways, challenging to formalize. This paper presents an approach that can handle uncertainty in e‐government evaluation: the combination of Belief Rule Base knowledge representation and Evidential Reasoning. This approach is illustrated with a concrete prototype, known as the Belief Rule Based Expert System (BRBES) and implemented in the local e‐government of Bangladesh. The results have been compared with a recently developed method of evaluating e‐government, and it is demonstrated that the results of the BRBES are more accurate and reliable. The BRBES can be used to identify the factors that need to be improved to achieve the overall aim of an e‐government project. In addition, various ‘what if’ scenarios can be generated, and developers and managers can obtain a foretaste of the outcomes. Thus, the system can be used to facilitate decision‐making processes under uncertainty.     

Level of intrinsic motivation of distance education students in e‐learning environments

According to researches, motivation that initiates and sustains behaviour is one of the most significant components of learning in any environment. Accordingly, level of intrinsic motivation triggers and sustains the interest of the open and distance education students when it comes to learning on their own in e‐learning environments. Despite a comprehensive literature regarding the motivation of those learning in traditional learning environments, the number of studies addressing the motivation of open and distance education students in e‐learning environments is not sufficient. In this context, this study aims at determining the level of intrinsic motivation of open and distance education students. Thus, data were collected from 1,639 distance education students in 22 programmes, through Intrinsic Motivation in e‐Learning Questionnaire developed and validated to that end. Analyses carried out indicate that the level of intrinsic motivation of open and distance education students is high in e‐learning environments, but there is not a statistically significant difference by gender, programme structure (graduate/undergraduate), instruction type (distance–blended), and academic disciplines.     

Extending the two‐stage information systems continuance model: incorporating UTAUT predictors and the role of context

This study presents two extensions to the two‐stage expectation‐confirmation theory of information systems (IS) continuance. First, we expand the belief set from perceived usefulness in the original IS continuance model to include three additional predictors identified in the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology, namely effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions. Second, we ground the IS continuance model in the context of transactional systems that involve transmission of personal and sensitive information and include trust as a key contextual belief in the model. To test the expanded IS continuance model, we conducted a longitudinal field study of 3159 Hong Kong citizens across two electronic government (e‐government) technologies that enable citizens' access to government services. In general, the results support the expanded model that provides a rich understanding of the changes in the pre‐usage beliefs and attitudes through the emergent constructs of disconfirmation and satisfaction, ultimately influencing IS continuance intention. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the expanded model.     

An e‐Science data infrastructure for simulations within Grid computing environment: methods,approaches and practice

Grid‐based simulation usually involves large quantities of data at each stage of the simulation process. These data include simulation input and output files, intermediate results files, log and error files, associated metadata, and information capturing the processes that generate the data. The question of how to effectively store and manage data files within a Grid computing environment is increasingly becoming an important issue. This paper illustrates how we built a lightweight e‐Science infrastructure for data management within a Grid computing environment, including the integration of data curation activities into the entire Grid‐based simulation process. Rather than focusing on specific implementation details, we aim to identify the key issues and research challenges, describing how various existing technologies and tools can be best integrated to address these requirements and challenges. Although the case of quantum mechanical simulation of materials properties is used in the paper, much of the discussion is as generic as possible so that approaches, methods and practice (e.g. integrated approach, workflow taxonomy and development approach, simple but useful semantic annotation approach) can be applied to wider domains and disciplines to facilitat the digital research. A comparison between our approach and Cloud computing, and lessons learned in data management within the Grid computing environment, are also presented. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Comparison of national e‐health implementation in the United States and South Korea

With the development of the health care industry, there has been growing recognition that e‐health implementation is needed to improve the efficiency, quality, and safety of care. In addition, a review of previous studies suggests that much can be learned by investigating the difference in national e‐health implementation in the United States and in South Korea. To this end, the main objective of this article is to compare the national e‐health implementation in the case of the United States and South Korea. The results show that in the United States a decentralized e‐health implementation is being followed by individual‐level e‐health. South Korea is pursuing ubiquitous health (u‐health) after a hospital information system and electronic health were implemented. The United States still lags behind many other countries in the implementation of e‐health, possibly due to its low uncertainty avoidance culture. South Korea has been among the frontrunner groups in e‐health implementation as a consequence of its highly developed telecommunication infrastructures and high uncertainty avoidance culture. On the basis of these results, we recommend that establishing health care policies be done on a national scale that takes into account the countries’ cultures.     

M‐payment service: Interplay of perceived risk,benefit, and trust in service adoption

This study aimed to examine the effects of perceived risk, perceived benefits, and trust on consumers’ intention to use mobile payment, or m‐payment. In addition, different effects of some demographic factors (e.g., income, age, education) on m‐payment usage were examined. The sample of 457 respondents was used to analyze the causal relationships between the variables and the mean differences of demographic factors in consumer intention to use m‐payment. The results supported the negative relationship between perceived risk, trust, and consumer intention to use m‐payment. A positive relationship between perceived benefits and trust was found. This study revealed that trust mediated consumer intention to use m‐payment. In individual differences of m‐payment adoption, education influenced the relationship between perceived risk and intention to use m‐payments as well as the relationship between trust and intention to use m‐payment. This study provided insights into consumer differences regarding m‐payment adoption and the mediating role of trust between perceived benefits, perceived risk, and intention to use m‐payment.     

Natural,practical and social contexts of e‐learning: a critical realist account for learning and technology

Much of the research in educational technology with a primary concern over how technology enhances learning has been criticized as privileging the immediate learning settings over the other dimensions of learners’ social life and the wider social and economic contexts in which learning and technology are located. The ability to develop a rich understanding of learning and technology in various contexts requires careful use of theory that might enable ‘looking beyond learning’. To meet this need, this paper proposes the use of a critical realistic account of learning and technology, in particular Margaret Archer's ‘three orders of reality’ and ‘personal Identity’. Drawing on an empirical case study for illustration, the paper argues that such an approach offers a ‘way out’ to unpack the relationship between learning and technology through a deep exploration of the interrelationship between individual practices of learning, with or without technology, and the bigger picture of how learning intervenes in other dimensions of social life and how other contexts come into play in learning settings.     

The effect of e‐commerce on the integration of IT structure and brand architecture

Abstract. A company's information technology (IT) structure and its brand architecture are intended to minimize transaction costs both within the organization and between the organization and its customers. Business‐to‐Consumer (B2C) e‐commerce fundamentally alters the structure of those transaction costs relevant to the IT structure and the brand architecture. We conducted a survey among 102 chief information officers and chief marketing officers in 67 of the 100 most important B2C enterprises in Austria. The results show that companies typically implement a certain set of changes in the IT structure and the brand architecture if B2C e‐commerce is highly important to them and that these changes result in a stronger integration within and between the IT structure and the brand architecture. B2C e‐commerce projects thus require closely aligned conceptual, organizational and financial measures in both areas.     

Understanding the online information‐seeking behaviours of young people: the role of networks of support

Information seeking is one of the most popular online activities for young people and can provide an additional information channel, which may enhance learning. In this study, we propose and test a model that adds to the existing literature by examining the ways in which parents, schools, and friends (what we call networks of support) effect young people's online information behaviours, while at the same time taking into account young people's individual characteristics, confidence, and skills to use the Internet. Using path analysis, we demonstrate the significance of networks of support in understanding the uptake of online information seeking both directly and indirectly (through enhancing self‐concept for learning and online skills). Young people who have better networks of support, particularly friends who are engaged in technology, are more likely to engage in online information seeking. While quantitative models of this nature cannot capture the complexity of individual online search practices, these findings may assist in the development of policy and practice to support young people to make the most effective use of the Internet for information seeking.     

A highly modular and extensible architecture for an integrated IMS‐based authoring system: the <e‐Aula> experience

The <e‐Aula> platform is a new experimental e‐learning environment that adheres closely to IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. e‐learning standards in order to facilitate their applicability in different learning scenarios. <e‐Aula> is equipped with an integrated modular and extensible architecture for the authoring of IMS‐compliant learning materials focused on the IMS manifest. This manifest‐driven architecture facilitates maintenance and promotes the evolution of the authoring system in <e‐Aula>, both of which are mandatory requirements in the successful production and maintenance of content for many different specialized learning domains. In this paper, we describe this authoring system, its manifest‐driven architecture and its implementation using well‐known and robust Java‐based Web technologies. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The utilization of e‐government services: citizen trust,innovation and acceptance factors*

Abstract. Electronic government, or e‐government, increases the convenience and accessibility of government services and information to citizens. Despite the benefits of e‐government – increased government accountability to citizens, greater public access to information and a more efficient, cost‐effective government – the success and acceptance of e‐government initiatives, such as online voting and licence renewal, are contingent upon citizens’ willingness to adopt this innovation. In order to develop ‘citizen‐centred’ e‐government services that provide participants with accessible, relevant information and quality services that are more expedient than traditional ‘brick and mortar’ transactions, government agencies must first understand the factors that influence citizen adoption of this innovation. This study integrates constructs from the Technology Acceptance Model, Diffusions of Innovation theory and web trust models to form a parsimonious yet comprehensive model of factors that influence citizen adoption of e‐government initiatives. The study was conducted by surveying a broad diversity of citizens at a community event. The findings indicate that perceived ease of use, compatibility and trustworthiness are significant predictors of citizens’ intention to use an e‐government service. Implications of this study for research and practice are presented.