Editorial

Citation

Irani, Z. (2013), "Editorial", Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, Vol. 7 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/tg.2013.32607caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, Volume 7, Issue 3

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the third issue of the seventh volume of Transforming Government: People, Process, and Policy. This issue is dedicated to the publication of papers researching in e-government, local government authorities (specifically) and the public sector domain. Over the years, the constant update of the journal’s scope to advocate theoretical as well as empirical research has led to an increase in quality of submissions (in regular and special issues). The research presented in this issue of TGPPP is exploratory in nature and provides a rich contextual background into the e-government arena. In particular, these papers provide TGPPP readers a flavour of e-government by recording different e-government efforts and initiatives from five different regions (i.e. India, Thailand, Malaysia, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Denmark) across the world. These papers outline up-to-date innovative ideas in the field of e-government and offer our readers a detailed insight into pragmatic ideas in e-government adoption and implementation. This issue of TGPPP offers an exciting insight into the latest thinking in this fast moving area of research. These papers aim to capture these experiences and I encourage more researchers and practitioners to submit similar research from other regions of the developing world, to future TGPPP issues.

This issue commences with a research paper by Rakhi Tripathi, M.P. Gupta and Jaijit Bhattacharya, entitled “Effect of organizational factors on interoperability adoption for Indian portals”. In this paper the authors analysed the relationship of organisational factors and interoperability adoption for Indian portals. This research provides three main benefits, such as:

1. 1.

   it identifies the relevant organisational factors in Indian context;

2. 2.

   this research computes the impact of organisational factors on interoperability adoption; and

3. 3.

   provides a 2 by 2 matrix framework that may support government officials in their decision-making process on organisational factors that require improvement and have impact on interoperability adoption for Indian portals.

The authors report that there are several methods of assessing proposed e-government stage models, e.g. statistical methods, best practices, historical analyses, and questionnaires. However, to validate their conceptual findings, survey based questionnaires were utilised – this is following the successful investigation of the research objectives being dependent upon the analysis of a large number of responses. Consequently, surveys are the most suitable form of data collection. Out of the 400 survey questionnaires sent out to Indian officials, 273 responses were received with a 68 per cent turnout rate. The 273 responses received from government organisations (93), Indian public sector undertakings (90) and Indian corporations (90). Two regression techniques, i.e. linear regression and logistic regression were applied to observe the effect of the proposed organisational factors on interoperability adoption. The results indicate that the two factors, i.e. financial resources and promotion efforts were identified as the prominent factors that have high impact on interoperability adoption but their current position in government portals in India are low. Based on the empirical findings, the authors argue that more focus is required for these two factors, which will lead to higher level of interoperability for achieving one-stop government portal in India.

Following is a paper on e-government procurement by Siriluck Rotchanakitumnuai, entitled “The governance evidence of e-government procurement”. This research proposes an integrated model that presents three influential human factors (i.e. public managers, vendors and politicians) to assess the effectiveness of e-government procurement governance. The author reports that e-government procurement implementation supports a reduction of corruption and enhancing the conventional government procurement processes. This study also identifies the relationship of e-government procurement governance best practices on good governance. The focus is on the e-government auction approach business procurement. To validate the proposed integrated model, a survey was conducted with Thai public managers (169 professionals from 67 government agencies) – who were involved in e-government procurement. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to evaluate the dimensionality of e-government procurement governance – with all its constructs having a high levels of reliability with Cronbach’s α ranging from 0.640 to 0.938. The empirical findings indicate that the three human factors of committed public managers, honest vendor and less politicians interfering play a vital role in e-government. The findings also specify that strong and better governance procurement practices need to be supported by the Thai Government, particularly eliminating the involvement of politicians. However, this requires strong enforcement and penalties to achieve the required benefits from the successful implementation of e-government procurement. The author asserts that by using a wide array of government agencies, this research addressed the best practices e-government procurement governance and the benefits of good governance in terms of cost effectiveness, accountability, collusion reduction, and stringent law enforcement.

Thereafter, a research paper is presented by Hanne Sørum, Kim Normann Andersen and Torkil Clemmensen, entitled “Website quality in government: exploring the webmaster’s perception and explanation of website quality”. As reflected from the title of this paper, the authors aim to explore how webmasters within the government organisations perceive and or interpret quality of web sites including its information/contents. The authors argue that even though webmasters are in a vital position in the digital transformation of the public sector, the current knowledge of how the webmasters recognise web site quality is insufficient and unclear. For example, some studies have pointed to the need for more knowledge of monitoring the service quality output of e-government and the external users’ assessment of quality, whereas, this paper only focuses on webmasters’ explanations – not on those of designers, users/consumers, managers or shareholders. The extant limited research that has analysed the webmaster’s/web designer’s perspective on web site quality recommend that webmasters may harbor individual explanations of web site quality that only partially concern what webmasters/designers consider and hope that users will welcome, but the justifications also includes other web site quality dimensions. Based on these conceptions, the authors argue that it is thus of particular interest to explore webmasters’ perceptions on web site quality. The unit of analysis in this paper is on eight webmasters (from four types of web sites) from Norwegian web-award winning organisations. The web sites were purposefully sampled, using the strategy of maximal variation sampling to maximise difference between the four types of web sites. The findings demonstrate that usability is a vital dimension of a broader concept of web site quality. Their analysis of how webmasters explain web site quality also illustrates 15 different explanations or aspects of web site quality. The authors assert that this research offers detailed insights to web site practitioners (i.e. webmasters) perception and explanation of quality aspects in web sites. Webmasters are a vital contributor to the quality of web sites, thus, it is of particular benefit to find out and understand their suggestions.

Ahmad Fadzli Ahmad Tajuddin and Syed Zamberi Ahmad, present their work, entitled “Impact of environmental scanning on the organisational performance of local authorities in Malaysia”. This research attempts to extend the normative domain by environmental scanning and its relationship with organisational performance. In doing so, this paper examines the element of strategic management tools associated with the impact of environmental scanning on organisational performance in local authorities. It further investigates the above affiliation in the context of public sector organisations in Malaysia (notably considered as the first contribution in this paper). Second, managers in local authorities are only interested in obtaining results for achieving organisational performance rather than focusing on the impact that environmental scanning has on organisational efficiency. However, most scholars have various schools of thought in deliberating on environmental scanning. Thus, this research empirically tests (through quantitative method) this notion with the hope of bridging the gap between theory and practice. The empirical analysis used a mail survey questionnaire to all local authorities (n=75) in Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak. The questionnaire was methodically developed based on a review of the literature to identify the perceptions of the organisations concerning the external environment and information sources and scanning activities. The research employed factor analysis, reliability analysis and regression analysis for the research design. Moreover, this paper also uses the Cronbach’s α to focus on the consistency and stability of the measurement. The reliability measures for independent variables, i.e. environmental scanning operations is 0.88, whereas, for environmental scanning services turned out to be 0.90. The findings signify that the scope of general environmental scanning is seen as a prerequisite to the successful alignment of competitive strategies as a result of changing the needs and demands of the larger society, and the diverse nature of businesses.

A research paper is then presented by Gökhan İskender and Sevgi Özkan, entitled “E-government transformation success: an assessment methodology and the preliminary results”. The research presented in this study contains several key dimensions of the e-government transformation including technical, social, organisational and legal. It develops a quantitative methodology to analyse the potential effects of probable independent variables on e-government transformation success. It explains the development of the methodology presented in the previous study in detail but as an add-on to the previous one, it also applies the developed methodology on real data from eight Turkish public institutions to demonstrate the practical implementation of it and to evaluate the preliminary results (i.e. the initial part of methodology development entails nine steps, whereas, the second part, i.e. the first practical implementation and the preliminary results, is based on two steps). The key tool of the adopted methodology is a survey that provided a way of collecting comparable quantitative data from different types of stakeholders in society. The authors received 823 correct and complete responses in digital format (out of which 408 responses were from the internal stakeholders and 415 from the external ones). The preliminary results of the work done in this study indicates that there is a positive and significant relationship between the independent variables and dependent variable but this relationship is not a cause and effect relationship. Furthermore, to this, the results also highlight that trying to assess the effect of each single independent variable on the dependent variable separately is not a logical way as some of these variables are subject to reciprocal suppression with the other ones.

Following the above research, Amritesh, Subhas C. Misra and Jayanta Chatterjee present their work entitled “Positioning e-government services in the credence based setting: illustrating an Indian context”. This research identifies the types of elements of core service setting that differentiate the “credence based” e-government service environment from traditional ones and explores the critical nature of “information” under the “credence based” e-government service provisions. This paper identifies the likelihood of contextual shift in traditional notions of e-government service environment. In doing so, the authors propose the existence of a new institutional entity as core service providers in addition to the government and citizens in the existing G2C e-government service environments. Considering the nature of actors involved, the authors position the new e-government environment under “credence based” service setting that emphasizes on user’s perspective. This research work expands the scope of e-government to accommodate a much broader range of similar services. In order to support their standpoint and validate their arguments that emphasize credence factors in e-government setting, the authors applied multiple methods of data gathering that include systematic information search on the web site, and interviewing (using semi-structured interviews) five government officials to get further details of the participating entities and the range of practices involved in this online service. The overall findings in this paper highlight a notable contextual shift in orthodox notions of G2C e-government through exemplifying one of the extensively adopted e-government services – “online counseling” in India. In this new service context, the authors state that the role of e-government systems is to provide citizens with a systematic and regulated access to a large number of core service institutions through a standard procedure.

Finally, we have Abubakr Suliman and Bader Al Harethi presenting their research paper entitled “Perceived work climate and employee performance in public security organizations in the UAE”. This research reported in this paper aims to explore the links between perceived work climate and work performance in public security organisations. The authors claim to have examined these links for the first time in a public security organisation in the UAE. The importance of this study stems from a few studies that have targeted this important sector in general and that no research so far has attempted to examine climate-performance links specifically in the context of UAE’s public security organisations. To validate their conceptual findings, the authors collected their primary data by studying governmental security organisations in UAE. They utilised random a sampling method, with the questionnaires of the study administered in person. The sample size comprised of 600 participants full time employees selected from three managerial levels namely; top, middle and lower. The completed and collected instruments found to be 514 questionnaires representing a response rate of 86 per cent, all suitable for data analysis. The study tool used is a questionnaire that comprises of 34 items which evaluate the main variables contained in the study. The reliability test designed for the entire 34 items yielded a reliability coefficient of 0.98. The overall Cronbach’s α for work climate is 0.97 which is adequately high and does not necessitate further improvements and the overall Cronbach’s α for performance scale is 0.99 which is adequately high and does not necessitate further improvements. The findings illustrate that the way employees perceive their work atmosphere shapes their readiness and level to perform. The authors assert that substantial connections were established between work climate and its factors on one hand and work performance and its components on the other hand. Most importantly; “satisfaction with the appraisal” and “satisfaction with appraisal feedback” as two of work climate factors found to be positively and strongly linked to work enthusiasm component of work performance.

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

Zahir IraniEditor

Muhammad KamalEditorial Assistant