Managing Information Exchange in E-Government Initiatives

PurposeDrawing on normal accident and high-reliability organizational theories, this study examines the impact of magnitude and likelihood of disruptions on surgical procedure performance. More importantly, the authors investigate the moderating role played by information exchange and risk management infrastructure in mitigating the negative effect of disruption on performance.Design/methodology/approachA nationwide multi-respondent survey was administered to operating room personnel to collect information on their experiences with disruptions experienced in surgeries. The survey data are analyzed to examine the relationship between operational disruptions and procedure performance. Additionally, the moderating roles of risk management infrastructure and information exchange on the relationship between disruptions and performance are investigated. The results obtained from the empirical analysis are validated using data from an ethnographic investigation of surgeries at a major hospital.FindingsThe results show that both the magnitude and the likelihood of a disruption adversely impact procedure performance. Interestingly, the authors find that risk management infrastructure and information exchange play different roles in mitigating the effect of disruptions on performance. The authors find that while risk management infrastructure helps mitigate the effect of magnitude of service disruptions, information exchange helps reduce the effects of likelihood of disruptions. The findings lend strong support to the theoretical assertions. By means of the participant–observer data collected from over 100 surgeries as part of the ethnographic investigation, the authors validate the key findings. The findings suggest that disruptions are common occurrences in surgical settings, but their performance impact may be lessened or altogether avoided with the proper information and risk management mechanisms in place.Originality/valueThis survey research extends the understanding of risk management by considering a context that is highly prone to disruptions. The authors adopt existing constructs pertaining to supply chain disruptions within this context and find new insights. The findings of the study show differential roles played by information exchange and risk management infrastructure in mitigating disruptions. This nuanced understanding provides directions for aligning efforts towards risk mitigation in surgical settings in a more focused way. This study supplements findings from survey data analysis with an examination of data collected by means of ethnographic investigation.

Digital transformation affects the back offices of incumbent insurance companies. Digital innovations are implemented to be able to offer customers new products and services. We conduct multiple case studies with four German insurance companies. We analyze the impact of digital transformations on company-internal stakeholders with the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework. We derive 12 influencing factors and corresponding practical implications. Back-office systems are updated using standard software, if available. The goal is to stay flexible for future developments, too. State-of-the-art technologies are tested and only carefully implemented. Necessary reorganizations have significant impacts and are accomplished best with a trusting company culture, good internal communication, and well-trained employees. Efficiency gains from automating routine functions can and are intended to counter labor shortages. After the implementations, skilled employees must handle more specialized and demanding tasks, which cannot be automated easily. Impulses for digital transformation mainly result from continuously changing customer requirements and respective competitive pressure, while regulatory requirements often complicate implementations.

The deregulation of electricity market in Nigeria has opened up the requirement for information exchange among the market players in order to guarantee the reliability and security of the interconnected power system. Information and data exchange in heterogeneous data environment of the diverse market players are difficult due different data model and organization. This paper presents a bottom-up modeling approach of information exchange system for Nigerian deregulated electric power market using Multi-Agents System (MAS). To construct the MAS system, the functionalities of the agents, the interactions among the agents, and agent architecture are designed. A MAS for data communication based on the proposed architecture is an effective way of integrating heterogeneous data sources from the diverse players in the electricity market in Nigeria. MAS is well suitable for considering different scenarios of information exchange among market players as well as testing different requirements of information exchange in the electricity market.

It is known that the operators in the restaurant industry are currently operating with server systems, custom-made manually installed software and hard configuration support, with high installation and operating costs. With the system developed in this study, without major information technology investment and servers, etc. for small and medium-sized enterprises. It has been ensured that a basic restaurant point of sale, back office and kitchen operations can be achieved quickly and reliably with tablets or computers directly connected to the Internet without installing the device. A structure that is resistant to multi-tenant subscription system, network interruption, stable and at the same time can work in integration with external order systems has been developed. It has been seen that the virtual chef module, which monitors the operation in the restaurant in the upper perspective, enables more accurate decisions to be made by providing a systematic and sensor-based information flow to both the kitchen and the service personnel and the manager in the system. In the measurements made after the development, productivity increase and satisfaction were determined in various fields.

The offshore oil and gas upstream supply chain operations are part of a complex system with many stakeholders and intricate relationships. Traditionally, these operations are managed manually, which leads to inefficiencies. Despite the innovative and engineering‐orientated approaches adopted in other technical operations of the industry, the supply chain activities remain unchanged, relying heavily on legacy systems. However, cutting‐edge technology opportunities are available for adoption in supply chain management systems in the oil and gas industry. Such a transformative upgrade relies on first understanding the operational inefficiencies and preparing an accurate picture for how these operations should be performed. This study adopts a systemic approach to examine the oil and gas offshore supply chain operations of a case company to identify areas for improvement. The objective is to address the following research questions: (1) what is the current “AS‐IS” supply chain operations support; and (2) what is the desired “TO‐BE” state for these operations. This research adopts a soft systems lenses applied in an action research project to capture and analyze existing operations. The research revealed that information exchange is a major barrier, and that technology and organizational gaps are the primary hindrance for a digital transformation. The conclusion is that there is a need for a higher level of data exchange and increased data quality in any proposed transformation.

Purpose- To examine how e-Government practices have grown in Punjab and compare its performance to that of other states and union territories. Method - Descriptive research was made to understand the trend and patterns of growth of e-governance practices in terms of e-Services, e-Transactions and across the counter e-Transactions. Results - In this study, growth and development in the form of new projects, an increase in e-Transactions, e- Services, and across-the-counter e-Transactions has been seen. However, compared to other states, this increase is far slower as According to e-transactions, Punjab state is rated 20th out of all states and union territories, despite having the 15th largest population. It offers fewer than 50 e-services whereas, more than 200 e-services are offered by the neighbouring state of Haryana. Conclusion- This study shows that the Punjab government is making slow but gradual progress toward its goal of "Digital Punjab," as evidenced by the rise in e-services, e-transactions, and e-transactions that take place across the counter.

Over the last several decades, there has been considerable research conducted on the adoption and technology acceptance of new information systems by users. However, most of this research had focused mainly on the impact on citizens in a bid to measure improvements in the quality and speed of the services provided. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of internal users' reactions to new information systems and, in particular, new e-government practices. Briefly, this research study draws on the Coping Model of User Adaption “CMUA” in order to make a qualitative examination of the adaptation strategies of middle managers in public bodies when new e-government initiatives are implemented in their workplace, and unlike previous studies, this work focuses particularly on Saudi Arabia. There were nine semi-structured interviews conducted with two public bodies with each interview analyzed separately (individual level), then within-case analysis for each case study (group level). The findings revealed a strong relationship between the adaptation strategies and the success (or otherwise) of the adoption of the new e-government systems in all of the cases. The study also contributes to theory as there were several new outcomes discovered that can be added to improve the original CMUA framework.

In their contribution, Maja Apelt and Jana Hunnius ask how the physical proximity of organizations in a network impacts the creation of organizational boundaries. They assume that against a background of shared experiences, members of organizations can develop a community and cooperate on a basis of trust, but that this is not tantamount to organizational boundaries becoming permeable. Here, Apelt and Hunnius draw on Lefebvre’s (2006) concept of space and adapt this to the practice of organizations by drawing a distinction between three dimensions of spatial practice: spatial practice in the narrow sense, in other words, how the organizations structure the space; organizational practice or, in other words, which formal and informal structures they establish; and representative practice, that is, how they speak about space, legitimize their actions, and thus give them meaning. Empirically, the chapter is based on case studies at two German airports. Using the evidence provided by these studies, Apelt and Hunnius are able to show that the organizations develop different practices. While at one of the airports the community is strengthened, but the organizational boundaries are protected at the same time, the other airport establishes cooperative structures through which the organizational boundaries are weakened. The airport community plays a less important role here.

Recent crises have implicated organizational networks, rather than individual, unitary organizations, suggesting that the network rather than the single organization is the appropriate unit of analysis for understanding risk. It is the division of labour across organizational boundaries that appear to be especially threatening. This study investigated how sense is made of the risk that arises from this division of labour, analysing journalistic commentary on two iconic cases in the UK: the Hatfield derailment and the Sudan 1 food contamination scandal. In both cases it was the nature of networks that was central to most explanations of the events that took place, and in both cases it was the societal perception of risk that was more consequential than the objective physical harm. The main conclusion from the analysis was that this sensemaking was ambivalent about organizational networks – seeing advantages as well as drawbacks, and indicating that the main problem was not the choice of how to divide labour but to ensure that the chosen division was rigorously developed and maintained.

Perhaps you are a doctoral student, mapping out how to parcel your dissertation; perhaps you are a junior scholar, strategizing your research plan; perhaps you are a senior scholar, who is thinking about what you want to say to the field. No matter what stage you are at as a management researcher, you might be looking to the Academy of Management (AOM) journals as a natural home for any and all of these creative research pursuits. However, it might not always be crystal clear how you should craft your work for the AOM journals, what contribution you might make at each journal, and consequently to which journal you should target your intellectual contributions.
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This paper will contain insights and experiences from automating, monitoring, and optimizing over 7500 oil and gas wells in North America. The material will be presented in the form of a brief PowerPoint presentation and narration. There will be keen insight to the field/operations benefits. More importantly, it will outline other enterprise wide results associated with delivering field data directly to relevant back office systems for near time decision making. The paper will delve into where these projects begin in the field and where they end with the consumers and users of the production data. There will also be key insights about how powerful the data can be once it is characterized, normalized and prepared for roll up views and management reports for quicker decision making, resource play management and production surveillance. There will be specific descriptions of the field benefits like increased production and reduced downtime. There will also be descriptions of the back office benefits, for instance, enhancing the value of production engineers by giving him/her the tools they need to monitor and examine existing production, real time. The conclusions will show that the oil and gas industry spends millions of dollars drilling wells and very little automating, monitoring and optimizing those same wells on a relative basis. It will also point out the grave shortage of personnel in the industry and how technology is the key to battling that issue. The benefits of monitoring and surveillance of production are infinite (if used correctly) in the life cycle of an oil and gas asset. The examination of that data and the decisions based on that data is the key to receiving full value for the exploitation and operation of the oil and gas asset.

This paper explores how the needs to exchange information across organizational boundaries in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction, and Facilities Management industry in Finland have been satisfied by means of stakeholder integration at the technical, business and socio-organizational levels. We interviewed practitioners about their motivations and goals for inter-organizational integration and observed different discourses. The information exchange needs in the context of individual building projects were often described as “addressed”. These needs focused mainly on managing complex stakeholder relations or handling the variable conditions with other building projects. In the scope of the whole built environment lifecycle, the needs were rather portrayed as ongoing problems still “unaddressed”. Existing information sources remained inadequate when the benefits of inter-organizational integration had not yet been clarified. The process workflow discontinuities demanded better understanding of the value of information beyond design as well as better coordination. The uncertainty of how much data to collect and for what purposes can be mitigated by defining “useful minimum” information exchange between stakeholders.

Collaborative Scheduling over the Internet

We examine institutional and organizational influences upon information exchange and governance structures within R&D consortia in the United States and Japan. We hypothesized that national differences in institutional environments would lead to less active governance and information-exchange activities within Japanese R&D consortia relative to their US counterparts. At the consortium level, we expected that internal consortium diversity would increase information exchange and governance requirements, and that structures stabilizing relations between consortium members would reduce information exchange and governance requirements. We tested these hypotheses on 39 US and 54 Japanese multifirm R&D consortia, involving, respectively, 1801 US member organizations and 1647 Japanese member organizations. Controlling for organizational age, size, and strategic focus, we found that internal diversity and interorganizational relations are both associated with information-exchange and governance mechanisms. Our model has much greater explanatory power for the United States than for Japan.

The modern business environment is characterized by rapid changes, significant diversity and increased interconnection between its elements. These factors require new approaches to the reconfiguration of existing business models. Using the concept of entrepreneurial activity on the ecosystem base, enterprises can significantly increase the social and economic efficiency of their activities. The article describes three main archetypes of business models, each of which has a different content. The first type of business models is based on long-term partnerships with customers. The strategy of mutually beneficial relations with clients is formed in the front office. The basis of the second type of business models is operational efficiency, which involves improving of back-office operations. The third type involves creating value through the coordination of the front office and back office. Thus, the prerequisites for creating innovative business models, namely digital platforms, are being formed. Progressive changes in the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of business models require appropriate conditions to ensure the effective implementation. A mechanism for constructing actions and an outlined sequential phasing of changes are necessary. Without business models modifying, it is impossible to achieve the goals of sustainable social, economic and environmental development of enterprises. The business models priorities will be determined by the level of economic development, scientific, technical, social and environmental needs of enterprises. The directions of the business models transformation are outlined: digital and ecosystemic. It is determined that the business model transformation is a synthesis of various aspects of social, economic and ecological convergence. It is emphasized that special attention during the business models transformation towards ecosystems is paid to shaping a relative management system, organizational structure and corporate culture. The mechanism of the business model transformation is developed. The mechanism provides the growth of the enterprise’s ecosystem development as a result of consolidation of ecosystem components, increase of resource efficiency, modernization and greening of business process management.