Editorial

Citation

Irani, Z. (2012), "Editorial", Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, Vol. 6 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/tg.2012.32606caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, Volume 6, Issue 3

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the third issue of the sixth volume of Transforming Government: People, Process, and Policy. The research presented in the papers are exploratory in nature, deal with contemporary public and private sector services’ themes from a multiplicity of perspectives and provide a mixture of hypothetical and practical contributions to the literature. Over the years, the constant update of the journal’s scope to advocate theory and practice has led to an increase in quality of submissions. For example, the topics covered within this issue focus on collaborative academic and practitioner efforts to address remote-access voting methods; relationships between constructs of information system (IS) success in the public sector, as perceived by webmaster intermediaries, and investigate how user testing affects these relationships; identification of critical factors that enable citizens to adopt e-Government services in Pakistan, evaluating the impact of alternative socially innovative public sector service initiatives on social cohesion and evaluating government e-Tax web sites. These topics are specifically devoted to address the challenges and issues of public service delivery.

This issue commences with a viewpoint by Robert E. Rosacker and Kirsten Rosacker. In this viewpoint paper, the authors call for collaborative academic and practitioner efforts to address remote-access voting methods. The authors consider the most vital issue of remote-access voting as a channel for supporting the development and enhancement of self-governing processes across the world through increased participation from the citizens. However, in order to improve the democratic process it is firmly indispensable to address the issue of participation. In addition, the authors emphasise on exploring appropriate methods to encourage more voters to vote and to exercise their right to participate in the collective governance process. This discussion has the lead the authors to anticipate providing insights on encouraging process towards addressing and solving the issues that are considered as impediments in the development of this critical application. Therefore, to appropriately solve the significant issues associated with remote voting, it is essential for a combined effort to be undertaken utilising the best, most current, and evolving theoretical models in concurrence with comprehensive understanding of the complexities and realities of the world in which we live.

The latter viewpoint is followed by research presented by Hanne Sørum Rony Medaglia, Kim Normann Andersen, Murray Scott and William H. DeLone. The authors in this paper explore the relationships between constructs of IS success in the public sector, as perceived by webmaster intermediaries, and investigate how user testing affects these relationships. With regards to webmasters’ perceptions, this research explores what webmasters of public sector web sites know about their users and how they link improvement in technology artifacts, information, and services with possible associated benefits for the users. Basing this research on DeLone and McLean model of IS success, the authors investigate how webmasters identify the impact of information, system, and service quality on user satisfaction and user benefits in a sample of public agency web sites. To test their conceptual findings, the authors developed a questionnaire and conducted an online survey with webmasters in Denmark and Norway. The overall findings suggest that there is a large potential for involving users to a greater extent to enhance the quality of interaction with public web sites.

Then, we have Mariam Rehman, Vatcharaporn Esichaikul and Muhammad Kamal who attempt to identify critical factors that enable citizens to adopt e-Government services in a society which is at rudimentary stage of e-Government adoption. Developing countries such as Pakistan are facing many challenges like lack of proper ICT infrastructure, lack of awareness about available e-Government services and lack of citizens’ trust in government and the internet, which are considered as the basis for e-Government projects failure in any society. The e-Government services adoption rate in Pakistan is very low. In Pakistan, an e-Government project was launched in 2005 but still there is no major progress seen, which is quite obvious from e-Government development index value, i.e. 0.2755 as of 2010 ratings. Therefore, there is a need to foster the adoption of e-Government services in Pakistan. Thus, to accomplish the objective of this research study, the authors propose and justify an integrated conceptual model which is based on rigorous conjectural background keeping in view the Pakistani culture.

Subsequently, Ramzi El-Haddadeh and Vishanth Weerakkody present a research note on evaluating the impact of alternative socially innovative public sector service initiatives on social cohesion (ALLIANCE). The authors argue that for several years, proponents of New Public Management (NPM) have been presenting it as a formula for improving the public sector through making the public sector more professional and businesslike. Such enhancements were accomplished by replicating private sector management concepts such as business process re-engineering, lean management and total quality management with a view of improving key public services such as healthcare, transportation and local government. However, research has shown that several initiatives have not met the expectations of stakeholders and delivered policy outcomes which have resulted in services that facilitate social cohesion. Rather, the NPM influenced transformations have resulted in the tax payers’ money being wasted and creating social exclusions. Therefore, based on the latter conceptions, the authors through the ALLIANCE project aim to measure the impact of pre and post NPM initiatives on improving social cohesion and evaluate the effect that alternative socially innovative service initiatives have in facilitating social cohesion.

Finally, we have Parmita Saha, Atanu K. Nath and Esmail Salehi-Sangari who evaluated a government e-Tax web site by focusing on an information quality and system quality approach. This evaluation was based on the research question formulated for this study, i.e. what are system and information quality characteristics of government service delivery web sites? Online tax filing systems are a type of government to customer (G2C) electronic service, which provides an opportunity of availing online tax services to taxpayers. Thus, this research is limited to evaluating G2C e-service as a part of e-Government domain. Based on the conceptual findings, the authors argue that in spite of increasing use of technology by governments, the evaluation of quality in electronic public service delivery has been comparatively deficient. This research focused on a Swedish online tax system and evaluated Swedish tax information related web sites to find out the system and information quality criteria which are important to have in place for such web sites.

We hope you will find this issue interesting and thought provoking, and hope to receive your valuable contributions for the forthcoming issue.

Zahir IraniEditor

Yogesh DwivediEditorial Assistant