Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administration: Innovations from Developed Countries

342 Pages·2015·11.08 MB·English

by  Christopher G. Reddick

Public Administration & Public Policy
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND PUBLIC POLICY/196
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An examination of how information technology (IT) can be used in public admin- R
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istration, Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administra- he Information and
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tion: Innovations from Developed Countries examines global perspectives on pub- pd
lic administration and IT innovations. This book illustrates the theoretical context ouic
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of current policies, issues, and implementation. It highlights e-government success lo Communication
stories from developed regions such as the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australia then s
presents future trends and innovation. It explores innovative solutions with added
value and impact to your organization.
Technologies in
The book covers important issues such as open government, best practices, social
media, democracy, and management challenges as well as topical issues such as sys-
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Public Administration
tems failures, innovations in inter-organizational e-government projects, virtual cur-
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rencies, and a cross-domain open data ecosystem. The authors outline four strategies c
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to achieve success in e-governance: upgrading ICT infrastructure, improving human hn
resource management, creating a corresponding political environment, and promot- nf
ing administrative performance that you can put to immediate use. oo Innovations from Developed Countries
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• Evaluates best practices in websites of the largest municipalities in the et
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100 most-wired nations o

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• Includes strategies and methods for IT innovation that add value to any n

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• Explores innovative solutions and illustrates future trends
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• Outlines technology and implementation aspects of e-government b
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• Examines how information technology (IT) can be used to promote i
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innovations in public administration
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Governments have used information and communications technologies (ICT) to dras- dm
tically change how the public sector interacts with citizens and businesses. It can im- mu
prove government performance in delivering effective or highly sophisticated public in
services, reengineering or improving internal organization and processes, engaging ni
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social participation and dialogue, enabling transparency in procedures and outcomes i
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to the public, and improving public sector’s efficiency in general. This book provides tt
a roadmap that leads you from problem definitions to problem-solving methods and ri
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innovations for future progress. n
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K23266 Edited by
ISBN: 978-1-4822-3929-4
Christopher G. Reddick • Leonidas Anthopoulos
90000
www.crcpress.com
9 781482 239294
w w w. c r c p r e s s . c o m
K23266 cvr mech.indd 1 2/23/15 9:52 AM

Information and
Communication
Technologies in
Public Administration
Innovations from Developed Countries
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND PUBLIC POLICY
A Comprehensive Publication Program
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
DAVID H. ROSENBLOOM
Distinguished Professor of Public Administration
American University, Washington, DC
Founding Editor
JACK RABIN
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Available Electronically
PublicADMINISTRATIONnetBASE
http://www.crcnetbase.com/page/public_administration_ebooks
Information and
Communication
Technologies in
Public Administration
Innovations from Developed Countries
Edited by
Christopher G. Reddick
University of Texas at San Antonio, USA
Leonidas Anthopoulos
Technological Education Institute (TEI)
of Thessaly, Greece
CRC Press
Taylor & Francis Group
6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300
Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742
© 2015 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
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No claim to original U.S. Government works
Version Date: 20150223
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Contents
Foreword .......................................................................................................vii
Preface ............................................................................................................xi
Contributors ..................................................................................................xv
SeCtion i GLoBAL PeRSPeCtiVeS on PUBLiC
ADMiniStRAtion AnD inFoRMAtion
teCHnoLoGY innoVAtionS
1 Open Government Data: A European Perspective .................................3
ALEJANDRO SÁEZ MARTÍN, ARTURO HARO DE ROSARIO, AND
CARMEN CABA PÉREZ
2 Best Practices in E-Governance: A Comparative Study Based on
the Rutgers University Worldwide Digital Governance Survey ...........29
MARC HOLZER AND YUEPING ZHENG
3 Does External Environment Affect E-Government?
A Cross-C ountry Analysis ....................................................................61
YUEPING ZHENG AND AROON MANOHARAN
4 Web-Based Participatory Democracy: Findings from Italy .................77
GIANLUCA SGUEO
5 Comparative Scientometric Analysis in Social Media: What Can
We Learn? And What Is Next? ..............................................................97
MANUEL PEDRO RODRÍGUEZ BOLÍVAR AND
LAURA ALCAIDE MUÑOZ
6 E-Government as an Innovative Product: Theories and Case Study ......125
LEONIDAS ANTHOPOULOS, CHRISTOPHER G. REDDICK,
IRENE GIANNAKIDOU, AND NIKOLAOS MAVRIDIS
v
vi ◾ Contents
7 Aligning Strategy and Information and Communication
Technology in Public Organizations: A Critical Management
Challenge ............................................................................................141
EAMONN CAFFREY AND JOE MCDONAGH
SeCtion ii toPiCAL iSSUeS in PUBLiC
ADMiniStRAtion AnD inFoRMAtion
teCHnoLoGY innoVAtion
8 An Analysis of Failure in a Government-to-Government
E-Government Context via the Updated Delone and McLean Model ...167
LIES VAN CAUTER, MONIQUE SNOECK, AND JOEP CROMPVOETS
9 The Discretionary Space of Geo-Information and Communication
Technology Professionals in Public Sector Cooperation Programs ...191
WALTER TIMO DE VRIES
10 The Evolution of Virtual Currencies: Analyzing the Case of Bitcoin .....213
CECILIA G. MANRIQUE AND GABRIEL MANRIQUE
11 Gov 2.0, Mobility and Inclusion: A Critical Examination of
Social Assistance Reform in Ontario, Canada....................................235
JEFFREY ROY
12 SPCData: The Italian Public Administration Data Cloud .................255
GIORGIA LODI, ANTONIO MACCIONI, AND
FRANCESCO TORTORELLI
13 Coupling Public Sector Information and Public-Funded Research
Data in Europe: A Vision of an Open Data Ecosystem ......................275
SVEN SCHADE, CARLOS GRANELL, AND ANDREA PEREGO
14 How Public Administration Restructuring Can Contribute to
Greek Educational Reform .................................................................299
KONSTANTINOS ZACHARIS, PANDELIS IPSILANDIS, AND
JAMES O’KANE
Foreword
Government and information and
Communications technology innovation:
A Cliché Relation or a Universal Purpose?
Today, more and more government leaders are discussing innovation, and they
recognize its contribution to economic growth, to enhancement of national
competitiveness, to increment of local knowledge-based society, and so forth
(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2005; Porter &
Schwab, 2008). Many could question that although governments talk about
innovation, they do not transform themselves to more innovative forms. For
instance, do governments update the ways they interact with their people? Do
they utilize innovation to enhance their potential to deliver goods and services
to their local societies?
To this end, information and communications technologies (ICTs) were seen
as an innovative tool and were adopted quite early by governments as a means to
become more efficient and effective in delivering their jobs. Internet-based govern-
ment, for instance, was such an innovation in the early 1990s. Since then, many
deliverables have been observed around the world: one-stop e-government por-
tals that offer sophisticated public services, dashboards that illustrate government
performance, online public procurement systems, maps and geo-data, publicly
available information and documents (named open data), back-office information
systems, online consultations, and others. All these products could be easily named
“innovative” products for the governments, or maybe not?
Let us define the terms: Innovation concerns the practical refinement and devel-
opment of an original invention into a usable technique or product, or a process,
in which creativity is applied to every facet of an organization’s value chain, from
beginning to end, to develop new and better ways of creating value for customers
(Fagerberg, 2004; Howells, 2005; Maital & Seshadri, 2007). According to this def-
inition, all the above products concerned—in their initial appearance—ICT inno-
vation; they are updated incrementally, while governments fund their development
with extensive programs as open innovation (Anthopoulos & Fitsilis, 2014). Each
vii
viii ◾ Foreword
of the above products concerns technological innovation, whereas all together, they
are expected to perform extensive change to the ways that people interact with their
governments and to become a social innovation. And we can say that “it is expected
to deliver such a radical change” because despite its ambitious vision, e-government
appears to become rather a single channel for citizens to access their governments,
instead of performing an enormous change with regard to transactions between
governments and citizens (Reddick & Anthopoulos, 2014).
The previous discussion validates that ICT innovation is something trivial for
governments, but they have not achieved a radical change yet. On the other hand,
little has happened and even less can be observed in improving the ways that gov-
ernments perform their mission. Wars and poverty are still a reality, public spend-
ing is not absolutely transparent, citizens still prefer traditional channels to access
their governments for custom services, and yet other myths still exist (Bekkers &
Homburg, 2007). To this end, the value that the ICT innovative products deliver
to citizens can be questioned, and it remains an unestablished objective.
All these justify the significant contribution of this book: This book views
government ICT innovation from the lens of corresponding theoretical analysis
and practical implementations in the developed world, which lead the innovation
arena. To this end, chapter contributors examine various underlying theories and
perspectives in the first section of this book. Moreover, exemplars and their added
value have to be monitored and illustrated properly, and to this end, enough cor-
responding practices are examined in this first section. On the other hand, existing
challenges and unaccomplished investments probably depict the future of ICT for
governments. In this context, the second section of this book addresses various cor-
responding topical issues and demonstrates perhaps what governments can expect
from ICTs or from changes that they trigger inside the public sector.
References
Anthopoulos, L., & Fitsilis, P. (2014). Trends in e-strategic management: How do govern-
ments transform their policies? International Journal of Public Administration in the
Digital Age, 1(1), 15–38.
Bekkers, V., & Homburg, V. (2007). The myths of e-government: Looking beyond the
assumptions of a new and better government. The Information Society, 23(5), 373–382.
Fagerberg, J. (2004). Innovation: A Guide to the literature. In Fagerberg, J., Mowery, D. C., &
Nelson, R. R. (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Innovation. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Howells, J. (2005). The Management of Innovation and Technology: The Shaping of Technology
and Institutions of the Market Economy. London: Sage Publications.
Maital, S., & Seshadri, D. V. R. (2007). Innovation Management: Strategies, Concepts and
Tools for Growth and Profit. New Delhi, India: Response Books, Sage Publications.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2005). Oslo Manual: Guidelines
for Collecting and Interpreting Innovation Data, 3rd Edition. Paris: OECD Publishing.